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From Our Own Correspondent
Walk Warily in Waziristan
00:28:21
Correspondents worldwide: Owen Bennett-Jones attends a Christian church service in is...
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Interviewer
Hello.
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Narrator/Reporter
From the.
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Kate Ady
From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Programme Presenter
Hello. We're short of money, but we have no problems with the Taliban, the Christians soldiering on in what was once the edge of the British Empire. India's new Prime Minister will be sworn in on Monday. But can he deliver the bright future he's promised? A momentous helicopter ride over the Amazon for tribesmen who've never before left the jungle. And these are hard times, we learn for the ski shop trying to do business in the Sahara Desert now walk warily in Waziristan. That was the advice from one British soldier posted a hundred years ago to what's viewed as Pakistan's wild border region. It's no more peaceful today. More than 30 Taliban militants were killed this week in airstrikes on targets in North Wazir, close to the border with Afghanistan. It's reckoned there are more than 20,000 Taliban in the country and the Pakistani army has lost 5,000 of its men confronting them. The military does now control parts of South Waziristan. Owen Bennett Jones was there recently and says it was a place of surprises.
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Kate Ady
I've never managed to take photographs whilst doing foreign reporting. Between trying to understand what's going on and. And recording everything for radio, I always reckon there's enough to worry about without getting some holiday snaps, which is generally fine. But when it comes to places as remote and alluring as Waziristan, it seems a shame to have no record, so no pictures, but instead three oral snapshots. Waziristan, I should explain, is right on the border with Afghanistan and was used by the British as a buffer zone at the edge of empire. But the tribes were famously difficult to control and the British had a number of clashes with them. It's now the heartland of the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan. So first, an image with a British connection. Near the fort at Jandola, where Lawrence of Arabia once stayed, there is a defile, meaning a place so narrow that only a single file of soldiers or column of vehicles can move along it. The Shahor Tangi, or narrow passage, is the perfect place for an ambush. By the time you get halfway through the four mile long pass, you're on a strip of road with a vertical cliff rising up above you to the left and a sheer drop down to a raging river on the right. And the defile is so narrow that tribesmen can sit on the other side of the valley, just A couple of hundred feet away, high up on the rocks, shooting down on their enemy. A Pakistani brigadier took me to see it and pointed out some bullet holes. Those date back to 1937. He said a British convoy was ambushed, 53 Britishers were killed. Then he pointed out some more recent bullet holes interspersed amongst the old ones. These come from 2004, he explained, when a Pakistani column was coming through here. We lost 11 men. So 60 to 70 years later, the Massoud tribesmen had remembered the precise place where they could best attack Incomers. In the British days they were called Mohammedan fanatics. Today their descendants are called the Taliban. I asked the brigadier the obvious as far as the tribesmen are concerned, are the Pakistani soldiers modern day colonialists? He was genuinely shocked. How can you say such a thing? These are our brothers. Snapshot 2 the main city in South Waziristan is wanna, and it has a cantonment, an area of military housing and facilities. Driving through, I was amazed to see a church, and not only that, a church with a service going on. Christians in the heart of Taliban land. The pastor said the Christian community was some 300 strong. Most Christians in Pakistan are cleaners and sanitary workers, and the Christians of Waziristan are no exception. As a Pakistani general explained, the tribesmen think cleaning is beneath them. They get others to do that. The congregation was sitting on the church floor with women and children on one side and men on the other. The altar, a rectangular table, had three roughly made wooden crosses and behind them, in white robes, a fairly ferocious preacher with no need for artificial amplification. An elderly woman broke away from the sermon to welcome me. Are you safe here? I asked. We have no problems with the Taliban, came the reply. We're short of money, but no problem with the Taliban. A final image. Colonel Zayed Nassim is the principal or headmaster of a cadet college. That's a military run school where at the age of 18, the boys might join the army or they might go into civilian life. The colonel, with a muscled, rigid posture, looked like the kind of man who worked hard and played hard. And he was so proud of his pupils. See that mountain over there? He pointed to a mass of brown, jagged rock. The quickest of my boys can get to the top in 55 minutes. I want to make my boys understand about life. I tell them, he said, that if they get straight alphas and flunked life, then they've gained nothing from us. I think you're happy in your job, aren't you? I am, he said. And it's because the boys respond, we're grateful to them. This may not be on the lines of Eton or Oxford, he said, but we try to have our own standards. And then with a smile, I Hope to be Mr. Chips. You've seen the film about the teacher I loved. The children loved Mr. Chips. Yes, he said, why not?
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Programme Presenter
Why not, indeed. Owen Bennett Jones on some of the unexpected wonders of Waziristan. The Brazilian authorities know all too well that the eyes of the world are upon them as they prepare to stage the World cup and in two years time, the Olympic Games. The stories circulating at the moment are hardly ones designed to burnish the country's reputation. They talk of public anger at the huge sums being spent on infrastructure which might not even be completed when the football kicks off early next month. Of riots even on the famed Copacabana beach, and of an ever widening gulf between Brazil's rich and poor. And what of the illegal farmers and loggers still said to be doing incalculable damage to the country's Amazon rainforest and to the lives of those living there? Justin Rolatt says the authorities recognise this is a problem they need to be seen to be tackling.
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Narrator/Reporter
It took Pirayi two small steps to get up into the helicopter. But Those steps bridged two completely different worlds. Pirai is a member of a 350 strong tribe called the Awa. They live in the last islands of rainforest in what is now the extreme eastern edge of the Amazon. He grew up in a tiny nomadic tribal group, completely separate from the rest of the world. Now, together with his friend Hamo, he was taking his first ever flight, leaving the jungle where they'd lived all their lives. They gave me a nervous smile through the window. Then the engine roared and their faces vanished in a great eddy of leaves and dust as the helicopter rose up into the air. This was a momentous trip for them and for the entire tribe. The AWA are one of very few hunter gatherer communities left in the entire Amazon basin. One pressure group that campaigns for the rights of indigenous people has described the AWA as the most endangered tribe on the planet. Over the last couple of decades, illegal loggers and farmers have invaded their ancestral lands, destroying the forest. I asked Pirai what it was like growing up there. We were always on the run, he told me. We would find a place to sleep. Then the loggers would arrive to cut down our trees and we would go on the run again. Pirayi and his family, like most of the awa, were forced to give up their traditional lifestyle and move into villages. Incredibly, though a few dozen AWA are holding out, they remain uncontacted, living in the last stands of jungle in this region. It's a miracle they're not dead, one of the officers of the Indigenous People's Department of the Brazilian government tells me. With his extravagant beard, Leonardo Lenin lives up to his dramatic name. He's dedicated his life to fighting on behalf of the tribal people of Brazil. This is a story of resistance, he says. For 514 years, our culture has been trying to dominate their culture. But they have survived. And thanks to the efforts of Leo Lenin and people like him, they are now much more likely to do so. I'd come to witness the Brazilian government's unprecedented and impressive effort to drive out the invaders and take back the tribes ancestral lands. The Brazilian army, air force and military police are working alongside the Indigenous People's Department and Brazil's Environmental Protection Service. Farmers who've illegally settled on the hours land have been served notice to leave, and they seem to be doing so. The government has offered them plots elsewhere in the state. I watched a family load up a truck with everything they own, including the tiles from the roof of the farm they'd lived in for 18 years. It raised a great cloud of pink dust as it rumbled off down the rough track, the family clinging to the jumble of wardrobes, tables, beds, even a satellite dish. Another day I watched as an illegal sawmill was raided by officers from Obama, the Brazilian environment Agency. The trunks of huge trees lay scattered around like so many matchsticks. The Obama agents took careful records of what they'd found, including the account books that carefully noted payments to the local police. Then agent Maria Luisa Goncalves, who'd led the raid, gave the order to set fire to the place. Great tongues of flame danced up into the night sky. But how would the government show the tribe that the invaders had been driven out? That is where the helicopter came in. It flew Pirai and Hammo, the two nervous AWA tribesmen, to the edge of the indigenous reserve, where they watched a bulldozer destroy the shells of the farmers homes. Finally, Pirayi relaxed, breaking into a big smile as the buildings collapsed. When they arrived back at the village, a crowd gathered. The destruction is huge, Pirai told them triumphantly. I saw it with my own eyes. They have sent the non Indians a long way away. They must have told them, go away, go away. Are you sure they're not hiding in the forest and will come back? Asked someone. No, there is no one left, Hamo replied with certainty. They don't have houses anymore. The non Indians have destroyed everything, even the school. They have a truck with a hand of iron that destroys everything. Hame was clearly very impressed. I felt privileged to be present on such a momentous day for the tribe. But the truth is once the troops have gone, the loggers and farmers will be back. The big question is whether Brazil is willing to invest the resources necessary to keep them out permanently. Only then will Pirayi, Hamo and the rest of the tribe be able to live in peace.
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Programme Presenter
Justin Rolatt and you can see the film he's made in Brazil on this Evening's Newsnight on BBC2. India's new leader Narendra Modi will be sworn in as prime minister on Monday. The controversial politician who led his BJP party to a landslide election victory is also expected to form a government. On that day, Mr. Modi broke down when he addressed his party's newly elected MPs and promised his supporters that he would live up to their expectations. It's the first time any party other than the Nehru Gandhi family's Congress Party has won an absolute majority in 30 years. Mark Talley has been considering what this might mean for the future.
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Interviewer
One of the Congress Party's many blunders during the election campaign was committed by a Cambridge educated party MP who scorned the idea of a tea cellar governing India. The tea seller in question was the 64 year old Narendra Modi, who has risen from the obscurity of his job in a tea shop in the western state of Gujarat to rule India. Modi's campaigners immediately arranged for him to speak by multiple video links to tea drinkers in shops around the country. This was just one of many brilliant technological innovations the BJP used during the campaign. However, they weren't always successful. In a teashop in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, a young man told me casually, I had a call on my mobile from Modi and when I asked whether he would vote for Modi, he said no. Modi has been chief minister of his state of Gujarat for 12 years, although an investigation ordered by the Supreme Court has cleared Modi of acquiescing in savage anti Muslim riots which occurred during his regime. Congress has portrayed him as the man who would break India by undermining its secular tradition. One senior member of the party who disapproved of this tactic described the threat to secularism as a tired old issue. And tired and old it proved, when compared with the bright future Modi promised. Tired and old also proved Congress traditional reliance on The Nerugandi family when they put up Rahul, the son of the party president Sonia Gandhi and grandson of the legendary Indira Gandhi, to oppose Modi even in his own constituency. The response to Rahul was so poor that his charismatic sister Priyanka, who has Indra Gandhi's striking appearance, had to come center stage. She pushed Rahul off the front pages of the papers until he was restored by a picture of both of them leaning out of a vehicle covered with flower petals, waving and smiling happily, looking more like a honeymoon couple than two politicians. Threatened with disaster, the Congress seemed to have a death wish. Senior members of the party were unwilling to take part in the contest. The finance minister refused outright. In Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, I asked a Congress spokesman how the campaign was going, expecting him to reply with at least some sign of optimism. He replied, oh, we're not depressed. We've been badly defeated before, but we've always come back in the end. There's no sign of fresh thinking in Congress. The party has already refused to accept the resignation of Sonia and Rahul. So not surprisingly, there isn't going to be any change there. But if the Lucknow spokesman's forecast is to be fulfilled, the Gandhis will have to relax their control over the party and allow strong leaders to emerge in the States. Modi's promise of development and change has raised expectations so high that he will have to show results quickly or disappointment will set in. Corruption is one of the issues that did for Congress. In tackling that Modi will be handicapped by the corruption within his own party. Nearly one third of the new BJP MPs have criminal charges against them. A leading party member told me he was to be a candidate until someone else paid the equivalent of more than half a million pounds for the constituency. With Modi's background as a former worker of the Hindu nationalist organization known as the RSS and his party's links with that organization, there are inevitably fears that if he does disappoint, he will fall back on its agenda and that will undermine the secular tradition which maintains harmony between Hindus and Muslims, who are 15% of the population. Hinduism hasn't been entirely absent from this election. I have, for instance, seen a text message sent out on one of the voting days telling Hindus to come out and vote because there were long lines of Muslims at the poll booths. But many have argued that the institutions of India are strong enough to protect the secular tradition. And in his victory speeches, Modi has stressed that he wants to take all Indians along with him.
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Programme Presenter
Mark Talley in the Indian capital, Delhi. Now, the winter sports season, at least in Europe, may be behind us for another year, but that doesn't stop skiers expressing their opinions on where the world's most memorable runs are to be found. Some sing the praises and the perils of the Hara Warakiri at Maarhofen. The extended joys of La Ventina in Cervinia are also mentioned in dispatches, as is the nerve required to negotiate the Tortin at Verbier. But talk of the joys of skiing in Niger in West Africa, is heard rather less frequently. And yet, as Thomafessi's been finding out, it's possible to ski and snowboard there, even if visitor numbers are not impressive.
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Tourmafesi
They are displayed on the porch of the shop just under a dozen pairs of skis and a handful of snowboards. There's also a yellow spoon shaped snow sledge and a bigger red one. If you'd rather be properly seated when sliding down a slope, don't expect the latest models. Most of these were brought here in the early 80s, only the snowboards came a bit later. The ski boots look so heavy. Thinking of wearing them in these heat is utterly discouraging. This is Agades, a dusty marketplace in Niger surrounded by the Sahara Desert, not Courchevel in the French Alps. The temperature here rises above 45 degrees Celsius, and when there is a bit of air, it feels like somebody is holding a blow dryer right in your face. But nobody has picked up any of these keys since 2007. Abdelkader Baba, the shop owner, hasn't used them himself since then either. He wouldn't go skiing without tourists, and they just don't venture around here anymore. Kidnappings and armed attacks have kept them away, but that's no reason to take down the ski shop sign. From the wooden facade with two red skis pointing in the air on either side of it, it's turbaned Twarag skier painted in black on a white sand dune, and a few Agades desert crosses mimicking snowflakes. This sign is what makes this shop famous, after all, right in the middle of a bustling crossroads. You can't really miss it. Mr. Baba used to take tourists to the sand dunes outside of town and deep in the desert. We'd have to climb up before 6 in the morning, he said, because the heat would make it impossible. Soon after, the sun rose. English, Australian, Swedish, Slovak and Japanese people were among the first to try sand dune skiing, but that was 30 years ago. It's not unusual to see A camel sliding down a dune, he explained. So when I saw Europeans skiing on television, I thought, we should try it out here. It was easy to convince friends who were participating in the Dachar mortar rally across the region to bring him pairs of skis. It was a lot more difficult to learn how to descend a sand dune on them. Abdelkader Baba is better known as danger here, or danger in French. It's hard to believe, looking at his charming face, but he was, he says, a troublemaker at a younger age. He also used to build small cars out of wire as a child, and that's how he grew a passion for all kind of objects. And so his key shop is filled with boxes and bags and piles of antiques, books, souvenirs and just things. He treasures collections of currencies from all countries of West Africa, but he has also amassed banknotes from Yugoslavia and coins from the Soviet Union. I suppose the art of a collector is to take as much pleasure in adding new pieces to a collection as in showing off their treasure to others. His complete disinterest in trying to sell me anything was quite unusual in this part of the world. He'd now opened another dusty bag and was displaying rocks and stones of all different shapes and colors, which had been brought to him by Tuareg guides who travelled deep in the desert and had found them during their journeys. Here is a sand rose, and this one is a piece of star that fell from the sky. He tells me it's a meteorite. I know it is, he said, because it's magnetic. The Sahara is an open museum, also containing some of the most ancient fossils on Earth. These were fish that became stone, Mr. Baba said, pointing at fossilized shells dating back millions of years to when the Sahara was still underwater. Mr. Baba then unfolded a sheepskin and put it on like a pair of shorts. He stood up and clapped, bending his knees and tiptoeing between the treasures he had laid out on the floor. These were traditional Fulani dance moves. I asked him whether he thought he would ever go to the dunes again until European embassies stop preventing their citizens from coming up here. I don't think I will get back on these keys, he answered. They blame it on Al Qaeda and other jihadi militants groups. But it's a shame, he said. Death will find you wherever you are. People die in Europe, too. You should be allowed to do whatever
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Programme Presenter
you want to do, including, of course, skiing in the Sahara desert. Tourmafesi in Niger. Tomorrow in France, it's la Fete de Voisin. Neighbors Day, an occasion, the government feels, when you can forget those bitter rows with the people next door, perhaps even invite them in to share a coffee and a croissant. Each year, town halls across the country are bombarded with complaints about the neighbours, particularly from those living in apartment blocks. They cite deafening all night parties, howling dogs, even dripping pot plants. Tomorrow, then, there's a chance to get better acquainted, to dump the usual hostility and suspicion. But Joanna Robertson in Paris is not convinced the goodwill will catch on.
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Joanna Robertson
The people upstairs are having breakfast. I know because there's a particular scraping of chairs and the blunt thud of slippered feet crossing to and fro from kitchen to dining room. He talks, she hums. A pause. They must be pouring the coffee. Our apartment building, like many in Paris, dates from the late 19th century. The floors are echoing antique parquet and there's absolutely no sound insulation. A sneeze on the fourth floor can be heard on the second. My neighbour Madame Joliot, an unabashed television addict, is bemused. It's strange, she says, in all those American soaps, the neighbours are lovely, helpful, chatty, kind, romantic. But when I watch no Cher Voisin, well, that's France. Madame Joliot and several million other French tune in each evening to watch Our Dear Neighbours, the cult TV comedy series of everyday life in a fictional apartment block that gives the perfect front door spy hole view of what goes on amongst the neighbors. Brief encounters in the hallway, conversations in the lift, little incidents in the courtyard, and all the tensions, intrigues, scheming rivalries and absurd pettiness of communal French living are revealed. Madame Joliot herself is caught in the usual tangled web of inter neighbor dispute. There's the woman on the floor below who cannot abide Madame Joliot's flowering terraces because from time to time leaves blow onto her balcony. Complaints ensue. Formal letters by registered post threatening legal action should not the few leaves be personally vacuumed by Madame Joliot with her own vacuum cleaner whenever they might fall on the second floor, the daughter of the building's owner throws deafening all night parties with dismaying regularity. But no one dares complain, lest there be trouble with the lease. If, however, Madame Joliot's pet dog barks even once in the courtyard in the middle of a weekday, there's hell to pay. Just above, there's a lady with stilettos extraordinarily loud when heard through the ceiling. Madame Joliot duly complained. Fountain pen on elegant visiting card slipped under doorway. The reply type letter Registered post copy to solicitor. Madame, I have restored and polished my parquet and I have no intention of ruining the effect with rugs just for your benefit. Leaves, heels and parties are one thing, vandalism as revenge is quite another, and yet it's relatively common. Madame Grillois, she's 72, has lived in the same building in St. Germain for the last 50 years and raised her children and now her grandchildren there push chairs, prams. There's always a problem, she says. There are mountains of rules, but it makes no difference. The number of pushchairs that are vandalised deliberately ruined when they're left neatly and correctly in the hallway. My first baby's pram was slashed, so I had to lug it down the cellar steps each night and up again each morning. With much of Paris living between 19th century walls and floors, it's clear that disturbance between neighbours can't be anything new. The writer Marcel Proust had his bedroom lined with cork to deaden the noise. But it wasn't entirely successful, as a new volume of letters just published reveals. Lettres a Savoisine is a collection of notes written by Proust to his upstairs neighbour, Madame Williams, an accomplished harpist, and a few to her husband, an American dentist whose consulting room was directly above Proust's bedroom. The dental drill, with its rudimentary electric motor sent an unfortunate din through the corkline ceiling and into Proust's head, and which was trying to concentrate as he composed his complex masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. The letters are, of course, exquisitely written and elevate the form of notes between neighbors from the depths of the rude and banal to the heights of poetry, wit and grace. Proust and Madame Williams became intimate friends through their correspondence and Proust. Polite requests for silence on certain days and at certain times are put with a delicacy and charm that even the most heartless neighbor could not refuse. The letters have caused some reflection amongst residents of the more self consciously intellectual areas of the city. And if the local gossips are to be believed, neighbourly correspondence is once again aspiring to literary art amongst the streets of Montparnasse. Vel agrier, Madame. Ma reconnaissance pour votre charitable de mondrepos. Madame, with my grateful recognition of your charitable concern for my repose and and my greatest respectful gratitude, I am yours very faithfully, Marcel Proust. Ah, those were the days.
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Programme Presenter
Marcel Proust. Would he have been so polite on email? We'll never know. Joanna Robertson in Paris. There there'll be more stories, colour and insight from around the world. On Saturday morning at half past eleven. Do join us. Goodbye.