← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
The Tough Cats
00:28:15
Andrew Harding's in Zimbabwe where there are fears of a return to violence as the Ian...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC.
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This is from our own correspondent.
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You can hear the version of the programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition broadcast on
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BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, election season approaches in Zimbabwe, and with it mounting fears of violence and a return to instability. A meeting with the foreign fighters helping the Syrian rebels in their attempts to to overthrow President Assad. There's embarrassment for the authorities in Mexico as the body of the country's most notorious drug lord goes missing. And why our man in Jerusalem reckons the cats in his neighbourhood are tougher than the dogs in yours. The authorities in Zimbabwe have painted a rosy picture of the country's economic prospects. Growth of nearly 9%, they forecast so long as the government lives within its spending targets and so long as the political environment remains. After 10 years of sharp decline and hyperinflation, the Zimbabwean economy started to pick up when President Mugabe formed a unity government in 2009 with his political rival Morgan Tsangirai. But Andrew Harding, who's been in Zimbabwe this week, says concerns mounting that forthcoming elections will once again prove violent and the country's fragile economic gains will be lost.
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The jacaranda trees are in bloom here, bright purple smudges looming over the broad, hot, drowsy streets of Harare. It's four years now since this country was rescued from a failed election, violence and economic ruin by a power sharing deal that has somehow survived. Today, schools are open, the shops are full. Corruption may be rampant, but at least hyperinflation is a distant memory. In crowded markets, impossibly grubby American dollar bills, now the national currency, slide from hand to hand. After so much drama and misery, Zimbabwe is starting to feel like just another normal, slightly disappointing African nation. Picture a precociously gifted teenager who survived a car crash and a coma, but was never quite the same again. We're optimists, says Bettina Gapper, almost to a fault. She's a well known novelist who's come home full of energy and determination following years spent abroad. After the deaths and torture and beatings of 2008, she says, people feel like if we can survive that we can survive anything. But Zimbabwe's optimism and its resilience are about to be put to the test once more. Four years on, and election season is finally approaching again, like a menacing cloud above those jacaranda trees. Do unto others as you would others do unto you, said President Robert Mugabe. The other day urging people to vote freely and and in peace. He's 88 now and visibly frail, his health and longevity the subject of much speculation and some wishful thinking. He can still stand and speak in public for an hour and a half, but his usual venom is diluted these days by an almost priestly preoccupation with respect and tolerance. Does he mean it? Has age softened Mr. Mugabe? It seems unlikely, but perhaps it doesn't really matter anymore. His slight frame is almost eclipsed by the burly generals who crowd around him and who appear to act as if the state Mr. Mugabe's Zanu PF party, even the rule of law are their personal property. Right now, for instance, dozens of members of the MDC are in jail. The MDC is the former opposition party terrorized into pulling out of the 2008 elections and now part of the unity government. One group of 29 have been locked up for 17 months, all accused of murdering a policeman. On Wednesday, an MDC minister was arrested for allegedly insulting President Mugabe. The charges look to many here like a typical Zanu PF plot, part of a systematic campaign of intimidation, a beating here, a petrol bomb there that seems destined to intensify as next year's elections draw closer. You'd think the MDC's leader, now Prime Minister Morgan Tsangirai, would be up in arms about the arrests. But four years in a power sharing government with Zanu PF have taken their toll. Joining that government may have been a brave move, one that saved Zimbabwe from collapse. But the daily grind of politics and compromise has left the MDC looking diminished and unprepared. Credible allegations of corruption are circling. Mr. Tsangirai himself has been caught up in an undignified scandal about which of his many recent girlfriends is or should be his new wife. I am, says the novelist Bettina Gapper, extremely disappointed. He should have been more prudent. I'm not sure, she says, that Mr. Tsangirai is the best that the MDC has to offer. None of this will be remembered, of course, if Mr. Tsangirai rallies and wins the presidency next year in a free and Fair election and Mr. Magu Darby slips quietly into retirement. But how likely is that? Lots of time and foreign money is being spent right now trying to produce a new constitution to make sure there is a level political playing field and no repeat of the violence of 2008. But even if some version of that constitution is approved, there's no reason to expect that the security forces or the state media will abandon their furious loyalty to Mr. Mugabe. This may be a nation of optimists, but the word election scares people. I've spent some time on the streets here trying to talk to shoppers and commuters about politics. Life is a little better now, many will concede. But mention President Mugabe and eyes flicker and mouths close. You have to be brave to talk about that, one man said to me. People are watching.
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And that was Andrew Harding. The conflict in Syria reached new heights of violence this week. The UK based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Thursday was the deadliest day of fighting since the revolt against the regime of President Bashar al Assad began in March last year. 240 people were killed on Thursday, it said 92 of them soldiers, 67 rebel fighters and 81 civilians. Ian Pannell's been reporting from Syria's second city, Aleppo, where the last few days have seen savage fighting and more and more people have been caught up in the horrors of warfare.
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The question shouldn't be were we tortured? It should be, when weren't we? Dr. Abdul Rauf used to be part of Aleppo's successful and wealthy business elite. But as the Syrian revolution started to grip the country, he turned his attention to politics, meeting secretly with others to call for change. That was when he was arrested. I met three members of his secret group on the outskirts of Aleppo this week. Syria's second city has gone from being a bystander in a growing protest movement to the key battleground in a vicious civil war. What drives these men is the six months they spent in the hands of the feared Air Force intelligence unit. Lets start with al Kazouk, says Dr. Rove. He went on to describe this particular form of torture, which involved having a stick forced up his rectum. The other men nodded. Every Syrian knows what Al Kazouk is, they agreed. He then demonstrated having electrical wires attached to his chest and penis. He talked about the beatings, having his ribs broken. These methods appear to be so frighteningly common that that the way they described them was almost casual. In fact, between swirls of smoke from the doctor's pipe, the men joked and chuckled while telling the most horrific stories. But at one point he lost his temper, jabbing the air with his finger, crying, wallachi, I swear to God. He was describing being forced to watch a woman prisoner being raped in front of him and being told by the guards, we'll do this to your wife unless you tell us what we want to know. Dr. Auve said that before they were arrested, the group had long discussions about whether they should get some sticks to defend themselves during protests. But when we were released, we decided to buy every weapon we could afford, he says. Today the civil protest movement has become a civil war in which as many as 30,000 people have been killed, according to opposition activists. And the violence has continued to escalate, with September being the bloodiest month so far. And desperate times have bred desperate men. We were sitting in front of one rebel base in the south when a fighter jet roared overhead. We went around the back of the building to try and film the plane. Several fighters were gathered there, and they eyed us suspiciously. Who are you? What are you doing here? They asked. This was a tight knit group that kept itself apart from the others. Some had long beards and flowing robes. A few appeared to be foreigners, and they were clearly unhappy to see foreign journalists. We were escorted back to the front of the building where we were told we shouldn't film the men, not even talk to them. We discovered later that this was Jabbat al Nusra, a radical group of armed jihadis suspected by some of having links to Al Qaeda. They claim to have carried out a number of large scale bombings across Syria. There are no reliable figures for how many members they have, nor how many extremists and foreign jihadists have entered Syria altogether. Some estimate they make up as much as 10% of rebel fighters in Aleppo. In reality, there are probably just a few hundred of them, but they operate in the most dangerous areas. They use the uncompromising tactics of militant groups elsewhere, and their numbers are growing. While we were in Aleppo, there was a series of massive, coordinated bomb attacks against government buildings that left dozens of people dead and many more injured. Jabhat Al Nusra said they did it. The Islamist groups are helping us get our rights while the west is just watching, says Dr. Rauf. He's made a pact with the militants and believes they'll accept a secular, democratic government and lay down their weapons when the conflict is over. Some may well be skeptical of that. The doctor then left to visit his men on the front lines. Commanders on both sides are now actively targeted for assassination. And what he didn't know was that someone was tracking his vehicle. Someone wanted him dead. As he drove onto an open stretch of road, a fighter jet moved in and opened fire on his car, leaving him badly wounded. The west chose not to arm the Syrian opposition for fear of the consequences. But in many ways, the worst of what it sought to avoid has come to pass anyway. Massive displacement of civilians, spiralling violence, a significant loss of life, a radicalized opposition and an influx of foreign fighters. Moderate voices face increased competition. And the longer it's gone on, the bloodier and more extreme the conflict has become and the greater the threat it poses to an already fragile region.
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It's been a rather embarrassing week for the authorities in Mexico, who've managed to mislay the body of Eriberto Lazcano, the leader of Los Zetas, one of the country's most feared and brutal drugs gangs. The gangster, also known as El Lazca, was killed this week in a shootout with the Mexican marines. But hours later, his body was taken, apparently by loyal members of his criminal organisation, from the funeral home where it was being held. Mexican newspapers have been quick to point up how the authorities are now hunting Lascarno in death, just as they did in life. And Will Grant has been reflecting how when it comes to Mexico's drug lords, it's hard to separate fiction from reality.
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The life of a drug lord is generally pretty short. Probably the world's most notorious was El Patron, the Colombian cocaine baron Pablo Escobar, who died aged 44, barefoot, bloated and riddled with bullets on a rooftop in Medellin. Most don't rise that high in the drugs trade, though, nor live that long. To tell the tale, we receive constant reports from the Mexican Attorney General's office of supposed lieutenants and middle ranking soldiers from gangs like the Sinaloa Cartel, the Gulf Cartel and Los Setas, who have been murdered by their enemies or killed in shootouts with the authorities. They are more often boys than men, 20, 22 years old, their hands tied behind their backs, a bullet to the head and dumped on the roadside. A final adios to an all too brief life which brought them fleeting riches, cars and women. By his industry standards then, Eriberto Lascano. Lascano was a veteran. He was my age, born in 1975 and over this past year, covering the twists and turns of his murderous and violent organisation. I've often thought of that fact and wondered what took a supposedly loyal Mexican soldier and turned him into the watchword for drug related terror in his homeland. The only photo we ever saw of Las Cano shows a young man in his military days, wearing a beige shirt, dark jacket and tie, staring impassively at the camera, revealing nothing of the murderer, the executioner, as he would later be nicknamed, that lay within. The photo we saw this week of El Lasca showed him lying dead on the slab, naked, with his eyes closed. His hairline had receded a little over the years and his mouth looked puffy and damaged. But it seemed to be him. Sure enough. Mind you, the Mexican authorities were slow in officially confirming the death. When the first reports started to come in late one night that perhaps the head of the Setters had been killed, it didn't come as any huge surprise. The organization has been tearing itself apart for months now, as one faction appears to be telling the authorities where to find their former comrades. The Marines said they were waiting for DNA evidence on Las Cano. Conscious perhaps of the last time, they made a song and dance about a big name, which quickly turned into a PR disaster. Earlier this year, the authorities said they'd detained the son of the world's most wanted man, Joaquin El Chapo Guzman. They brought out a stocky young man dressed in a bullet proof vest, paraded him in front of the world's media and said for sure he was El Chapo's son. Then his mother spoke up and said not only was he not the son of the biggest drug lord in Mexico, he was in fact a used car salesman from Guadalajara. That one took some speedy backpedalling. Still, by the following morning, it should have been clear whether this was El Lasca's body or not. Instead, the story got even more surreal. The reason for the delay soon became clear. The government no longer had the body. After El Lasca had been shot outside a baseball game on a dusty patch of land in the northern state of Coahuila, the Marines took his fingerprints without even realizing who they'd killed and passed his body on to a local funeral home. Later that night, on learning that their leader had fallen, the foot soldiers of Los Setas, imbued as they are with a misplaced sense of military fraternity, stormed the funeral home in balaclavas and with automatic rifles, and took back Lascano's body. Perhaps to give him their own send off, perhaps to stop word getting out that he was dead and they were weakened. Who knows? But the lack of a body does two things. It denies the government the trophy it so craves. After six years of fighting the gang, the hastily snapped images in the funeral home, the only evidence that the man so often seen as a monster in Mexico has gone. Secondly, it enters an element of doubt. In a country which thrives on rumor and counter rumor, that is an important weapon for the conspiracy theorists who plague the narco blogs and Internet message boards. More than once the comparison has been made to the infamous Senor de los Cielos, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, leader of the once all powerful Juarez cartel. The official version of events said he died under the plastic surgeon's scalpel while trying to change his identity. The surgeons later turned up dead, and rumors still abound that he faked his death. In the case of Herberto Lascano, responsible for some of the most gruesome crimes in Mexican history, he it seems pretty clear that he died face down in the mud in the previously unknown city of Progreso, meaning progress. One can only hope that that is what his death will bring.
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Will Grant in Mexico City When Angola's President Jose Eduardo de Santos won another five year term back in August, there were suggestions that the cash he'd thrown at a brand new seafront development in the capital, Luanda, hadn't done his electoral chancellors any harm. The glittering new promenade opened only days before the election. The president cut the ribbon himself, accompanied by his much photographed daughter Isabel and a selection of the great and the good, important party officials and senior generals. It's said to have cost more than £250 million. The palm trees were specially imported from Miami. The architects from Portugal and South Africa, Louise Redvers says some Angolans wander whether the cash might have been better spent in a country where many still live in poverty without running water or electricity.
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As the sticky afternoon heat starts to subside, young men congregate in open sided basketball courts, watched attentively by a shy group of giggling teenage girls. Joggers glistening with sweat pound the smooth concrete pavement, competing for space with spiky haired rollerbladers in neon sunglasses. You'll find every sort of person down at Luanda's Atlantic Bayside Promenade, known locally as the Marginal, from the expatriate oil worker trying to walk off his latest corporate lunch to the one legged war veteran who limps along with his wooden crutch taking a break from begging at the traffic lights. There are excited families carrying picnic bags, well heeled office workers clutching smartphones, young lovers holding hands and entrepreneurial photographers using battery operated printers to make instant sales. The 1.8 mile strip has always been a popular spot in this overcrowded, sprawling city where open space is at a premium and gardens and grass are a luxury only the super rich can afford. But now the marginal is more popular than ever, following a three year facelift which has transformed the dusty boardwalk extending it out into the Luanda Bay, more than doubling its width. The once clogged potholed road, which ran alongside one of the city's main arteries, has been turned into a smooth six lane carriageway and there are several wide open parking areas, a real novelty for Luanda, as are the street lights that actually work. There are benches, pedestrian bridges and coffee and ice cream kiosks, all tickled by a soft sea breeze, offering welcome respite from the dusty confusal of city life. It's beautiful, isn't it? Remarked Manuel, a primary school teacher who had brought his wife and three young daughters for a sunset stroll. The 34 year old told me that where he lived in a township or bairo some nine miles away across the other side of Luanda, it was all dust and mud and he was happy he now had somewhere clean to bring his children to play. Office worker Sara said the new marginal was proof her country was going places. You can see how much Luanda and Angola is developing, she said, adding, my children will be able to enjoy so many things that I couldn't, and I am happy for that. Angolans who have lived through so many years of chaos and disruption are proud of their new photogenic marginal, which offers a different vista of this country beyond oil, poverty, war and corruption. An Angolan friend agreed the marginal was impressive, but he joked it was a bit like a mobile phone advertising full of happy, smiling people, but somewhat detached from reality. Don't get me wrong, I like it, he said as we sat on one of the white seats under the shade of a large palm. I just don't know if a tree lined promenade is up there on Angola's list of priorities. Right now we have hospitals without medicines, schools without teachers. Do we really need these benches? He asked. My friend has a point. Angola has made enormous strides in the decades since the end of its long civil war. It is now one of the world's fastest growing economies thanks to oil, but half of its population still live in poverty without access to electricity or running water. It's easy to forget about that Angola when you're on the marginal with the view to one side of the skyscrapers and to the other of the sand peninsula known as the island or Ilia, famous for its overpriced beachside restaurants. But walk to the far end of the promenade and you'll see row after row of tin shacks and concrete huts. There are no palm trees or jogging tracks here, just the smell of sewage and clouds of black smoke coming from piles of burning rubbish. Skinny children with mottled hair play on a small strip of beach, squealing as they run in and out of the murky water that laps on the shore. These people won't benefit from the marginal even if they live right next to it, my friend said, and he pointed to the cruel irony of the well irrigated grass sitting so close to a neighborhood without water or sanitation. The extreme contrasts between Angola's haves and its have nots was a major theme during the election campaign, and dos Santos and the MPLA pledged to grow more, to distribute better. In many ways, winning the election was the easy part. Now the government needs to start delivering, and having set the bar so high with the new marginal, it could have a tough job on its hands.
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Louise Redvers in Luanda Historians will admit that they're not really sure when humans first domesticated the cat, or when cats first adopted human beings, if you prefer. But there's some evidence that we first learn to rub along together in the Middle east, where cat bones are often discovered among the architectural ruins. Clay pots decorated with pictures of cats found in Turkey and Syria suggests that we were always ready to romanticise the relationship, too. But our correspondent Kevin Connolly, who lives in the ancient city of Jerusalem, says there's nothing sentimental about his relationship with the cats who roam the streets near his home.
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No animals were hurt during the making of this part of the programme. A couple of bin bags got ripped open and I got a bit of a shock, but otherwise everyone's okay. I felt I had to establish that because this is a story about cats, and the cats around my way are probably tougher than the dogs around your way. I'm not talking about the kind of kittens who play with balls of darning wool and eat chicken pieces simmered in tarragon cream. Our cats are lary wary, rangy creatures, quick on their feet and short on lovability. They look as though if they rolled up the fur on their front paws to prepare for a fight, you'd find mussels below, bulging with tattoos of daggers and anchors. They are among Israel's 2 million or so feral cats, most of whom appear to live in the bin shed outside my apartment building. I first noticed them the very first time I went to take out the rubbish. From inside the shed, I heard a quietly determined tapping noise, not the sort of sound you'd expect from wild animals. It sounded more like the measured knocking you'd hear from inside a magician's cabinet when the glamorous assistant is asked to prove that all four walls are solid. I was briefly transported back to a time when I lived in Russia, where our bins were patrolled by rats the size of corgis. But when the shed door sprung open, three pairs of amber eyes glinted back from the depths, cats working to open the bins and the bags they were motionless, but not with the rigid panic of wrongdoers caught in the actual it was more the irritated hauteur of important officials interrupted in the middle of important work. They sloped off, their dignity, a reproach to my nerve in throwing my own rubbish into my own bin outside my own home. I hadn't quite realised till then how much cats are part of daily life here, so sometime later, throwing more rubbish away in the dark, I reached out to check there was room in the communal bins for my bags and was surprised to find a sinuous, stirring, slithering furriness over and under my hand. When I say surprised, I actually leapt, like one of those startled cartoon characters who leaves behind the cutout shape of his own body as he hurtles upward through the roof. I mentioned it to a neighbour who shrugged and said, just ignore them. Perhaps the most useless advice I've heard since Blame it on the boss. And over There are plenty of feral cats elsewhere in the Middle east too, but the great thing about being a citizen of a former colonial power is that almost any problem you ask about can be somehow traced back directly to your national door. So there is a theory that the feline population of Jerusalem began to expand when the city was under British rule between the wars and cats were introduced to control rats. As so often in government, yesterday's solution is now today's problem. My battle with the cats over access to our bin shed is hardly the most pressing territorial issue in these parts, of course, but it has proved just as intractable as the others. An organization called Myow Mitzvah is part of the search for a solution, which will almost certainly involve a mass program of spaying and neutralization. The midnight sounds of mating season at the moment suggest that the program still has some distance to run. It's not the keening and the caterwauling I mind so much, as the eerily human nature of the plangent cries, which can sound like anything from a baby crying to a couple of nightclub bouncers fighting in an alley. Let's just say those 2 million cats weren't produced with the aid of mood lighting and a box of chocolates. So I was surprised to find myself a little put out when I noticed that one of the more memorable cats who hangs around our bin shed went missing for a week or so recently. He is a little bigger than the others and is a sort of fluffy charcoal colour, like a dandelion puffball dipped in soot. In a city of erratic drivers, I feared the worst, and feral cats live and die anonymously the best they can hope for is to get shovelled to the side of the road. But eventually he turned up again, sporting a rather raffish torn ear in a sort of you should see the other cat kind of way. I am not sure if feral cats have leaders. I see no pattern to their comings and goings beyond a fixation with my rubbish. But the street hadn't seemed quite the same without him. We cohabit grudgingly, the cats and I. I've got them under my bin rather than under my skin and they are noisy neighbours, but they do make every trip to the bin closet a safari. And as British rulers here once discovered, they certainly keep the rats down.
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Kevin Connolly getting to know some of his tougher neighbours in Jerusalem and bringing this edition to a close. I'll be here again on Thursday and Saturday of next week with more from our own correspondence. Why don't you join us? Goodbye.