From Our Own Correspondent

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How Argentines live through tango

August 29th, 2009 | No Comments

As Argentina deals with its latest economic crisis, Candace Piette admires the tango industry’s ability to survive through good times and bad.

"Tango is about national identity and every note of its music, every gesture of the dance, contains within it their history"

Young couple dancing the tango

All correspondents who come to Buenos Aires have to do a story about tango and this was going to be mine.

The reason for doing this one was the huge drop in income the tango business was experiencing, because of the global economic downturn.

Fewer tourists were coming to the city, and many of the tango shows were running at half their capacity. Some were closing.

We started off by going to meet one of tango’s top entrepreneurs, owner of several show houses.

Business was slow he said, but they were already developing a new line in tango shows for weddings and barmitzvahs to tide them over until the tourists came back. But then he said, this was not the first crisis Argentines had lived through.

"We know how to survive crisis, and it’s just by carrying on, not by giving up".

Tango therapy

And it was at that point my tango story transformed into something else.

"Punctuated by sadness and disappointment, tragedy and joy, the dance survives because of nostalgia for the past, disappointment in the present and hope for the future"

Dance hall

With the words "Argentine resilience" echoing in my head, we decided to find three sets of dancers, different generations at different milongas or tango dances.

The first was in a quiet tree-lined street of a suburban area of BA (as locals often call their city). There I met Silvia Sotto, a 55-year-old mother of grown-up girls. Going to her local milonga is a weekly ritual.

On every day of the week, at any time of the day or night, there is one open in Buenos Aires.

"Tango is a complex dance," she said. "There are many steps but there is also silence. When you wait, you sense your partner. It’s unpredictable.

Her teacher, Ernesto Bermudas was also a psychotherapist running tango therapy sessions for his patients.

"Tango," he told us, "has always been a kind of refuge from the hard times you go through personally, and from the bad times this country goes through. You get dressed up, dust yourself off, and go and dance tango."

And now times are particularly hard.

The economic crisis is hitting. The government has been accused by Church leaders of doing nothing to tackle growing poverty, and unemployment is rising. Argentines are once more feeling powerless and disillusioned.

Celebration and repression

At the Confiteria Ideal in the grimy old downtown area, office workers and professionals had been going to this cafe to dance for over 100 years.

It needs a lick of paint. The gilt mirrors and pastry display cases are mottled and grimy, the paint peeling off the stucco ceiling. Here in the 40s and 50s, a tango dance would have been a celebration of all the country had achieved in an economic boom built on agriculture.

Now it was three in the afternoon, the dance hall was filled mostly with pensioners, the women grandly dressed, the men dapper with clipped moustaches and freshly laundered shirts and jackets.

This generation had seen it all. From the 60s, the dark years of military interventions, economic recession, left-wing and state terrorism left their toll on the Argentines.

As the military and the left-wing guerrillas went about kidnapping and murdering, people like these would have danced tango underground, as government bans on public gatherings were introduced.

Rapt faces

Jose Maria (said he was 75, more like 85, I thought) told us at the time he had had to dance tango at home. He met his partner, Rosa, at the cafe five years ago. Both widowed, they had been dance partners and lovers ever since.

Anti-government protest in 2001 in Buenos Aires

As we filmed in the Confiteria Ideal, the rapt faces – the dancers cheek to cheek, the women’s eyes closed the better to sense their partners’ movements – a man came up and asked us where our TV story would be shown.

"If it goes out in Argentina and I’m seen, my wife will kill me," he said. It seems tango was not only making marriages but divorces too.

Our last couple, Manuel and Yanina, were in their 30s. They danced for us in an old circular bandstand in a park where open-air classes and dances are held every Sunday evening.

I can still see the image now, the two young dancers in the winter sunlight – every gesture a poetic, sensitive alignment to each other’s movements.

Economic riots

Like many young people, Manuel watched his country’s economy come crashing down in 2001 in the biggest bank default in the country’s history.

After the riots and protests subsided, foreigners started coming to the city for the cheap prices and the tango.

Young people like Manuel found a new way to earn money but also to reclaim their heritage.

Manuel is now a successful dancer, writes for a tango magazine online and Yanina is launching herself as a tango singer.

As we edited my tango story, I concluded that tango is about national identity, and every note of its music, every gesture of the dance contains within it their history.

Punctuated by sadness and disappointment, tragedy and joy, the dance survives because of nostalgia for the past, disappointment in the present and hope for the future.

But as the famous Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, said: "Tango can be discussed, but like everything genuine, it conceals a secret".

And that secret is what make Argentines and Argentina so resilient. At the heart of tango lies an enduring artistic spirit which helps make everyday survival possible.

How to listen to: From our own Correspondent

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This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Growing marginalisation of Hungary’s Roma

August 29th, 2009 | No Comments

Dominic Hughes investigates the rise of the far right anti-Roma Jobbik party in Hungary and finds parallels between the Roma and another impoverished community, Australia’s Aboriginals.

Relatives mourn the death of Gypsy woman Maria Balogh

On the far side of railway tracks, on the outskirts of the city of Ozd, in northern Hungary, is what must be one of the most deprived villages in Europe.

Home to around 400 Roma or Gypsy people, corralled on the edge of town, is what is essentially a slum.

They live in buildings that once provided homes for workers from the nearby steelworks, but conditions are truly dreadful.

Many windows have no glass; tiles are missing from the roofs; some buildings have collapsed altogether.

Just a handful of communal toilets and taps serve the whole community.

Under the hot summer sun children play barefoot in the dust, but it does not really lighten up the grim, and if I am honest, slightly threatening, atmosphere.

Perhaps that is not surprising given over recent months there have been a series of attacks on Roma communities – homes burnt, a father and son shot and killed, another man shot dead as he walked out of his house.

So far no-one has been arrested, but many Roma fear they are being targeted by extremists.

Difficult questions

But we are with Barna Budai, a local Roma man who grew up here, and so we are safe.

It could have been very different. Earlier in the day we met the mayor of Odz, Benedek Mihaly.

Jobbick party supporters

I was asking him about the rise of Jobbik, the far-right party that campaigns on a platform targeting what their leaders call Gypsy crime.

He was no fan of the party, or the Hungarian Guard, the civilian militia closely associated with them.

But he did say he thought the Roma were abusing their rights, living outside the rules of Hungarian society.

The mayor came across as a very reasonable man, trying to find solutions to difficult questions.

But when we stepped outside his office, things took a strange turn.

Waiting for us there was Lajos Berki, a Roma member of the local council.

White haired and smartly dressed, he stood up as we approached.

As he did so, the mayor started addressing him in Hungarian – not quite shouting, but clearly telling him to go away while he talked to us some more.

He sort of punched him on the arm and then cuffed him over the head – not aggressively, but as you might do with an irritating younger brother. Only Mr Berki looked some years older than the Mayor.

Mr Berki though did not seem bothered. He smiled meekly and retreated down the corridor.

Internal divisions

The mayor then turned to us and said: "I’m very proud of this one. He has worked for 40 years!"

Later, as we were interviewing Mr Berki, our guide to the Roma village, Barna Budai, turned up. Relations between the two Roma men were clearly frosty.

"Some of the old bigotries – racism, anti-Semitism – have resurfaced. The Roma in Hungary are not even regarded by many as true Hungarians "

Barna Budai told us if we had arrived at his village in the company of his fellow Roma Lajos Berki, we probably would not have left in one piece.

Given the angry response of some residents when we tried to film them, I believed him. Why would we have had trouble I asked – isn’t Mr Berki a respected member of the community

Barna Budai laughed. Mr Berki was hated by the Roma villagers, we were told – he was believed to have said some very uncomplimentary things about his fellow Roma to other reporters.

Who knows where the truth lies But the bitter internal divisions within the Roma community, the abject poverty they lived in, their apparent dislocation from mainstream life – it all reminded me of another story.

A story I covered nearly a decade ago – that of the Aboriginal community in Australia.

For four years I was the BBC’s correspondent in Sydney – and this was the one story that really left me feeling it was all a bit hopeless.

Convenient scapegoat

Problems of institutional and individual racism, compounded by a divided and weak leadership from within the community.

A seemingly unbridgeable cultural gulf. Generations left neglected, with high rates of unemployment and imprisonment.

A lower life expectancy and educational achievement, more crime and substance abuse.

Roma family in Hungary

These are all problems shared by Australian Aboriginal people and Hungarian Roma.

The big difference is in modern day Australia Aboriginal people are generally regarded very much as true Australians.

Aspects of their identity have been adopted into the broader Australian culture.

And even though reporting the story often left me feeling dispirited, at least the Australian government seems determined to try and help.

You do not get that feeling in Hungary. The smothering blanket of communism has been stripped away, exposing ugly fault lines in central and Eastern Europe.

Some of the old bigotries – racism, anti-Semitism – have resurfaced.

The Roma in Hungary are not even regarded by many as true Hungarians.

And as we drove away in a cloud of dust from the crumbling Roma village on the outskirts of Odz, it struck me that as Hungary struggles with the impact of economic downturn, the Roma seem to have become a convenient scapegoat.

And even though there are no easy answers to this complex story, precious few in Hungary seem to be looking for them.

How to listen to: From our own Correspondent

Radio 4: Saturdays, 1130. Second weekly edition on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only)

World Service: See programme schedules

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This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Long quest

August 15th, 2009 | No Comments

During the last century Poland endured both Nazi and Communist totalitarianism with atrocities on a colossal scale. Many decades later there are still those who remain determined to see compensation paid and in Krakow Nick Higham has been following a baroness’s quest for justice.

Eugeniusz Waniek

In September 1942 the Nazis arrived in the village of Ustrzyki Dolne in south-east Poland.

Eugeniusz Waniek remembered the day vividly. The Nazis rounded up all the Jews and ordered them to hand over their valuables. He saw two women who refused shot in the street.

Then his Jewish neighbour Hella came and thrust a small bundle into his hand. It contained some silver cutlery, wrapped up in a linen tablecloth.

Mr Waniek had grown up with Hella and her sister and brothers. They were the children of a prosperous local man, Moshe Fraenkel, who owned an oil refinery.

Mr Waniek went on to become an art teacher in Krakow, but in 1939, he caught pneumonia and went home to Ustrzyki to convalesce.

He was still there when the Nazi-Soviet pact divided Poland into two occupied zones. Eugeniusz and his wife found themselves trapped in their village.

After Hella was taken away, Eugeniusz wrapped her silver in newspaper and buried it in the garden. And there it stayed for the next three years.

And in 1946, when he returned to Krakow, the silver went too.

Symbolic return

That might have been the end of the story but last year, a neighbour read in the newspaper about an English Baroness, Ruth Deech, who was threatening to sue the Polish government to recover properties seized from her family – the Fraenkels – in a place called Ustrzyki Dolne.

Baroness Deech

Last September Baroness Deech paid a visit to Eugeniusz Waniek, now aged 101. Hella Fraenkel had been her aunt.

Mr Waniek told his story and the silver and the linen tablecloth were handed over.

Photographs taken at the time show him sitting, frail and shrunken, in an armchair in his apartment. An audio recording captures his voice, quavering with age and emotion.

Eugeniusz Waniek has since died, but earlier this month Baroness Deech went back to Krakow to collect the cutlery from the flat of a friend, the distinguished historian Norman Davis.

There were 16 items in all, mostly tiny knives and forks for eating cakes or fruit, plus a larger two-pronged fork and the detached handle of a knife.

They were, she said, the only thing she had ever touched which had also been touched by those she had lost, and so they had immense symbolic value.

But Baroness Deech’s campaign to recover her family’s other belongings – or secure compensation for their loss – looks less likely to have a happy outcome.

Draft laws

Poland still has no law covering the restitution of private property seized by the Nazis or nationalised by the communists.

Historian Norman Davies says tens of millions of people in Poland were killed, deported, displaced or resettled during those eras, and millions lost their property.

They include his own wife Maria. Her parents abandoned their home in what is now part of Ukraine in 1944, when they fled before the advancing Red Army.

They ended up in a small town outside Krakow where they took shelter in an empty house and where Maria was born. That house, she says, may well have belonged to Jews deported in the Holocaust.

A map of Poland showing Ustrzyki Dolne, Warsaw and Krakow

Norman Davies says the sheer scale of the problem and the cost of compensation – estimated a year ago at more than $8bn (£5bn) – has terrified successive Polish governments.

Several draft restitution laws have been published. None has been enacted. What is more, many younger Poles see no reason why their taxes should pay for the errors of previous generations.

But that argument does not wash with Baroness Deech.

To argue that all Poles were victims does not absolve the country of responsibilities others have embraced, she says.

If Germany, Austria, Hungary, Lithuania and many other countries can offer restitution, why not Poland No-one, she says, is asking for full compensation.

The latest draft law offers 20% of the value of an item over 15 years.

Twenty per cent, she says, may be reasonable.

But to offer to pay it over 15 years to men now in their 90s – that, she says, is an insult.

How to listen to: From our own Correspondent

Radio 4: Saturdays, 1130. Second weekly edition on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only)

World Service: See programme schedules

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Story by story at theprogramme website

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Prosperity promise of Bolivia’s salt flats

August 15th, 2009 | No Comments

Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia

As international carmakers scramble to find a suitable alternative to petrol vehicles, Bolivia hopes its lithium reserves could be harnessed to provide an energy source – and hold the key to new-found wealth and political influence. Peter Day has been to the Uyuni salt flats.

The sky is an infinite blue. The land is perfectly flat, and dazzlingly white, stretching to a line of distant volcanoes.

And here is the boss of a potentially huge project that Bolivia is pinning great hopes on, showing me his highly decorative chickens.

Twelve thousand feet (3,700m) up here in the high Andean plains of south western Bolivia, the subzero nights are bitingly cold, but the days are hot even in the middle of winter.

The unclouded sun is reflected upwards by the largest salt flats in the world, the Salar de Uyuni.

"They are drawn to the salt flats by what lies metres below the ice-like crust of salt and mud"

It is a spectacular desert. For decades now it has drawn young and hardy international backpackers to endure the dusty hours of jolting journeying by bus and train and 4×4 vehicles into a vast nowhere.

But now this arduous journey is being made by other people – engineers and businessmen from some of the world’s largest mining and chemical companies.

They are here every week. They are drawn to the salt flats by what lies metres below the ice-like crust of salt and mud.

Down there is a great reserve of brine, and contained in the salty liquid, the largest deposits in the world of the lightest metal, lithium.

Hole cut in salt flats to obtain brine

For years lithium has been used for specialist purposes such as ceramics, and pills for depression.

But suddenly there is a huge new potential demand.

Great expectations

Over the past few years I have driven or been driven in several rechargeable electric cars.

Vehicle manufacturers old and new are rushing to build substitutes for the internal combustion engine.

Great hopes are being placed on batteries with this very light lithium at their core, much quicker to charge and discharge power (so they say) than heavy conventional batteries.

So if plug-in cars catch on, lithium may be one of the vital raw materials for the auto revolution.

And here in the Solar de Uyuni the experts think that the difficult and poverty-stricken country of Bolivia holds 50% of the world’s total supplies of lithium, contained in these vast hidden lakes of brine.

That is why Marcello Castro, the man with the chickens (and rabbits too, he wants to be self-sufficient in this desolate place) is building a pilot plant to learn how to get the lithium out of these salt flats, and then how to evaporate the brine and separate the precious metal from the salt.

Bolivian President Evo Morales

All this is raising great expectations in landlocked Bolivia.

To outsiders it is a very curious country, the second poorest state in South America after Guyana, a society riven by fault lines – great gaps between rich and poor, big geographical differences between the lush east and the towering Andes in the west, and sharp racial differences between successful former Europeans and a majority of indigenous peoples.

These last are the ones who voted the first indigenous president into office in 2006. Evo Morales has moved quickly to shift power in favour of the peoples he comes from.

State ambitions

He has nationalised the commanding heights of the economy including oil and natural gas. And he has moved to break up big land estates.

The president (with a kind of Beatles hairstyle) has also pronounced that the new windfall, raw material lithium, should not be exploited by predator overseas capitalist multinationals, but developed by the state for the benefit of Bolivia.

This brings great pride to a local campaigner I heard from in the town nearest the deposits.

Marcello Castro

Wearing her characteristic native hat, based on the British bowler imported more than 100 years ago, Domitila Machaca told me how the local people had marched hundreds of miles to the capital La Paz in the 1990s to block the foreign exploitation of the salt flats; and she grinned toothily when she praised the Morales tactics of homemade development of these riches.

Later, still slowed down by the altitude, I wheezed slightly breathlessly in La Paz as I put it to the mining minister Luis Echazu that Bolivia was taking a big risk if it really wants to be (as some have said) "the Saudi Arabia of lithium".

"Oh no," he replied, "we want to go further than that – we don’t want merely to process the metal, we want to make the batteries from it as well."

But that will take money and expertise, which Bolivia will have to import, and multinational companies are wary of socialist countries with big state ambitions.

map

Meanwhile, back at the salt flats, the plant construction manager Marcello Castro gave me lunch – a vast egg sandwich made from one of the eggs from his chickens – delicious.

Despite the hardships, he was very proud, he said, to be taking part in this great Bolivian project.

If the world takes to the electric car, and if lithium really is the metal that will power it, and if the Bolivians can deliver, we may soon be hearing quite a lot more about the great Uyuni salt flats.

To say nothing of those fancy chickens.

How to listen to: From our own Correspondent

Radio 4: Saturdays, 1130. Second weekly edition on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only)

World Service: See programme schedules

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Story by story at theprogramme website

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Cynicism and apathy mark Afghan polls

August 15th, 2009 | No Comments

After seven years of democracy, many Afghans now view their presidential elections with cynicism or apathy, as the BBC’s Kate Clark discovered.

Supporters of presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah

So, who is going to be the next president The question was put to me a year ago, by a friend who is more political than most Afghans.

He is a former mujahid – he fought the Soviet armies as a young man and is too honest for his own good.

Like many Afghans, he is completely disheartened by the corruption that has engulfed his country. But he was looking to the future, hence the question.

"I have no idea," I replied. "The elections are ages away."

"Ah," he said, "so the Americans haven’t decided yet."

It is a generally held belief here that foreigners in general and Americans in particular will decide next week’s election.

But despite this belief, electioneering has been very real although the focus has not been so much on getting the support of individual voters, as the backing of men who can supposedly deliver blocks of votes.

‘Big beasts’

Over the last few months, there has been a scramble by candidates to secure the backing of the big beasts of the Afghan political jungle.

"Even now, just days away from the election, many voters appear apathetic"

People walk past wall covered with election posters in Kabul

They are mainly the leaders and major commanders of those jihadi factions who, after years of warfare, ended up on the winning side in 2001 – in other words, with the US-led forces.

Added to their ranks are civilians who have come back from exile and some tribal leaders.

All are men who have done well since 2001, establishing themselves as important patrons who look after their networks. Many face continuing allegations of corruption, opium-trafficking and human rights abuses.

They promise to deliver voters – blocks of voters – for their chosen candidate. Then after the election, it will be payback time.

The next government, according to one joke I heard, will have 200 ministers to fulfil all the back-room deals made.

If you wanted to defend this type of politicking, you could say that Afghans tend to act communally – at the clan or village level, as tribes or ethnic groups, or as factional networks.

One friend told me, quite matter-of-factly, that 300 people were waiting for him to decide who to vote for (family members and former students who looked to him for guidance).

I wondered if in Britain I could actually contact 300 relatives or colleagues to even discuss an election.

Deal-makers

There is also a strong desire among Afghans to pick the winning side. There is no point getting promises from a candidate who is going to lose.

So it is important to create the impression of being the man who is going to win, with high-level endorsements and mass rallies which offer free lunches.

"For all their talk of wanting democracy in Afghanistan, what I saw in 2002 was an American administration more comfortable dealing with strong men and warlords than with delegates"

Posters are plastered everywhere and a tangle of new billboards have gone up.

Candidates stare misty-eyed from above the dusty streets, pose with pleasing-looking children and dress in turbans or ties, depending on which segment of the electorate they hope to attract.

So how successful will the deal-makers be, the men who have been wooed for their promises of block votes

Everything – from loyalty and arguments to money, to the use of state machinery, to violence and intimidation, to registering phantom voters – is already at work, and on-the-day vote rigging is expected.

This may be one reason why, even now just days away from the election, many voters appear apathetic.

Secret ballot

How different it all was in 2002 when Afghans met for a national gathering or loya jirga to choose an interim leader and a cabinet.

Delegates were selected across the country, partly by secret ballot.

The same leaders and commanders who are now so secure in their power had to face an electorate and they were nervous.

President Hamid Karzai

Many feared they would not gain votes if balloted in secret.

Afghanistan was then a country in flux where fear of the US military’s strength kept commanders in check.

There was intimidation and violence but there was also room for a nascent democracy, and hope gave ordinary civilians the courage to face down threats.

The winning delegates were a mix: commanders, teachers, tribal elders, poets, even women.

When they arrived in Kabul, there was real excitement that, after a quarter of a century of war, change was in the air.

Of course, once in the capital and after they had voted in Hamid Karzai as the interim president, the delegates were completely ignored.

The US and Mr Karzai concentrated on working the old – usually unelected – militia leaders and making back-room deals.

For all their talk of wanting democracy in Afghanistan, what I saw in 2002 was an American administration more comfortable dealing with strong men and warlords than with delegates who had much more reason to call themselves representatives of the nation.

Seven years on and every election has seemed a little less democratic.

This time – with an electorate assuming the elections will be decided by the Americans or the political elite’s deal-making, or that it will all be rigged anyway, there is little room for enthusiasm.

Although of course, the voters could still surprise everyone come polling day.

How to listen to: From our own Correspondent

Radio 4: Saturdays, 1130. Second weekly edition on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only)

World Service: See programme schedules

Download thepodcast

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Story by story at theprogramme website

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Ethiopia’s passion for bureaucracy

August 10th, 2009 | No Comments

As she prepares to leave Addis Ababa, the BBC’s Elizabeth Blunt reflects on the intense level of officialdom she has encountered in Ethiopia which she believes reveals much about the nature of power and responsibility in Ethiopian society.

"A rubber stamp conveys absolute authority, and without it no document is genuine"

A BBC rubber stamp

I had not been in Addis Ababa very long when one of my predecessors came to visit.

His first question took me by surprise.

It was not, "How was I getting on," or "What was going on in Ethiopia," but: "Did I still have the BBC rubber stamp"

Actually I did. Small, round, wooden handled, not particularly impressive.

"Good", he said. "Don’t lose it. You won’t believe how long it took me to get it."

At that point I had no idea what he was talking about.

My notion of rubber stamps came from countries like Nigeria, where every street corner boasted a small plywood booth where the local rubber-stamp maker plied his trade.

Getting a rubber stamp was just a matter of paying your money and coming back in the afternoon to collect it.

A good rubber stamping gave a letter a nice air of authority, but it was not something to be taken too seriously.

But not in Ethiopia. There a rubber stamp conveys absolute authority and without it no document is genuine.

This was brought home to me when I lost both my passport and residence permit. The immigration department offered me a temporary permit, to tide me over for a few days until my new passport arrived.

Satphone

I showed them the duplicated slip I had just been given by the British embassy, informing me that replacement passports were now printed in Kenya and the process took at least six weeks.

The official peered at it very doubtfully.

"How do I know this is really from the British Embassy" and finally, the killer argument: "It doesn’t have a rubber stamp."

Of course something this important cannot just be bought on any street corner.

My predecessor had gone through an elaborate process of getting official authorisation – a "Fikad" – complete with rubber stamp from the authorising ministry, before a BBC stamp could be issued.

Ethiopia’s obsession with these authorisations can be written off as insane bureaucracy, or as a make-work scheme to provide jobs for civil servants. It is both of those, but above all it is a way of shifting responsibility.

Take my problem with the satellite phone or satphone which served as an antenna for the BBC studio. I had taken it to London for repair and on the way back I was stopped at customs.

"It is the Catch-22 answer everyone in Ethiopia dreads: ‘I cannot give you permission because you do not need permission’"

The customs officer clearly had no idea what it was but he certainly was not prepared to get into trouble for letting me bring it into the country.

"Did I have authorisation for it"

"Er, no whose authorisation did I need"

With the air of a man making it up as he went along he thought for a moment, then proclaimed "the Telecommunications Agency," and impounded the satellite phone.

Waiting game

The next day I presented myself at the agency.

"Was I going to connect it to the Ethiopian telephone system"

"No."

"Was it going to interfere with wireless transmissions"

"No."

The official there looked relieved. Then I did not need his permission.

That clearly was not going to do at all.

A map of Ethiopia showing the capital Addis Ababa

Without a piece of paper and a rubber stamp I was never going to get the satphone back.

It is the Catch-22 answer everyone in Ethiopia dreads: "I cannot give you permission because you do not need permission."

Please, please would he give something, anything, with a rubber stamp on it to show to customs.

He weakened. Well all right, but only if I got an authorisation from the Ministry of Information.

So off to the information ministry, where the official in charge of the foreign press was friendly, but far too wily a bureaucrat to get caught giving me permission to have some dubious piece of satellite technology.

He offered an attestation that I was a fully accredited and responsible journalist. With a stamp.

"Not good enough," said the Telecoms Agency. "Try again."

This went on for some time until finally everyone’s back was covered. I was allowed to pay an eye-watering sum of money in customs duty and retrieve my equipment.

Rubber-stamped dictatorship

Of course the dark side of this is that if nothing can be done without an authorisation, then with an authorisation, anything becomes permissible, and all responsibility is lifted from your shoulders.

In the days of the Derg, the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Ethiopia from the mid-1970s until 1991, every arrest, every interrogation, every killing was documented, authorised, and filed.

And every piece of paper was kept, and is still there, in a vast, chilling archive. And every single sheet, I am prepared to bet, carries the correct rubber stamp.

Meanwhile I have carefully filed all the paperwork relating to the satphone, and if I go back to Addis Ababa in years to come I will check that my successor still has it.

It may seem a strange question, but you will not believe how long it took me to get it.

How to listen to: From our own Correspondent

Radio 4: Saturdays, 1130. Second weekly edition on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only)

World Service: See programme schedules

Download thepodcast

Listen oniPlayer

Story by story at theprogramme website

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Tito’s playground

August 8th, 2009 | No Comments

Former Yugoslavia under the late communist dictator Marshall Tito never fitted the Soviet template for its satellite states. Rebuked by Moscow for being "too independent" he was courted by statesmen, royalty and celebrities from all over the world, and whenever they visited him, they were entertained in decidedly un-Communist manner, as Frank Partridge discovered.

Marshall Tito

From the holiday coast of north-west Croatia, it is a 20-minute ferry ride to Brijuni, an archipelago of 14 islands that for the last 30 years of Josip Broz Tito’s extraordinary life became his private playground.

Tito would spend up to six months of the year on the islands, gardening, fishing and enjoying a lifestyle of luxury unimaginable to most of his people, if they had ever known about it.

But most did not because the islands were closed to all but their leader’s coterie of hand-picked staff and labourers and a guest-list of glitterati that an American president would have found hard to match.

And if word did slip out about Tito’s banquets and parties, there was no public indignation.

Playboy president

Most Yugoslavs liked the idea of their president cutting a dash for the cameras, kitted out in double-breasted suits from New York’s Fifth Avenue and smoking fat cigars in the company of world leaders.

"Tito would spend up to six months of the year on the islands, gardening, fishing and enjoying a lifestyle of unimaginable luxury"

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor meet Tito

The most head-turning exhibit in the island’s museum is a picture gallery of visiting VIPs, smiling in the company of the handsome, charismatic leader whose statesmanship and force of personality postponed the inevitable disintegration of the Balkan states for 40 years.

There is Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, visiting in 1954; Nasser of Egypt and Nehru of India, two years later, signing the declaration that spawned the Non-Aligned Movement that thrives today, with more than 100 member nations.

There is Queen Elizabeth II, paying a visit in 1972, Chancellor Willy Brandt of West Germany in 1973 and King Hussein of Jordan in 1978.

But Tito took his pleasures seriously too. He had a circle of famous and glamorous friends, among them Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida.

Gandhi’s elephants

And many beautiful women came to Brijuni on private visits unrecorded by the official photographer.

Tito would collect them from the boat in his 1950s Cadillac, a gift from President Dwight Eisenhower, and drive them to one of four sprawling villas tucked away in the woods.

Four years after Tito’s death in 1980, the wider public was admitted to Brijuni for the first time since an outbreak of malaria had led to its evacuation hundreds of years earlier.

An Austrian industrialist had bought the islands in 1893, hired a Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist to remove the mosquitoes, and turned the main island into an exotic retreat for himself and his friends.

Brijuni, Croatia

Fresh water and electricity were brought in, and he transformed the landscape with villas, lawns and gardens, sub-tropical trees and shrubs, a zoo, the first 18-hole golf course in continental Europe, and even a casino.

By the time Tito discovered Brijuni in the late 1940s, the Depression, Italian rule and the war had taken their toll, but he declared the islands his official summer residence and set about recreating their former splendour.

The villas were updated, the zoo became a safari park with animals donated by heads of state, including Shetland ponies from the British Queen and two elephants from Indira Gandhi.

Herds of fallow deer roamed around the parkland, keeping down the grass on the golf course.

Today, the main island is a national park, and a toy-town train shuttles tourists around the sights.

The government-owned villas, hardly used now, are still polished and cleaned every day.

In Tito’s favourite, Villa Bijela, they preserved his basement gym, with its empty swimming pool, antiquated whirlpool and sauna.

Villa Jadranka is notable for its Japanese art and scrolls, Villa Brianka is done out in Argentine marble and exotica from other friendly, non-aligned nations.

Bond lair

But nothing compares with the fourth villa, Tito’s "secret jewel", hidden from all but his inner circle.

It lies on the neighbouring island of Vanga, which is strictly out of bounds unless visitors are granted a special permit by the authorities in Zagreb.

Brandishing my permit, I was delivered to Vanga’s jetty by a fast speedboat, where I was met and shadowed by a burly, silent guard in full military fatigues, looking absurdly out of place amidst the sub-tropical vegetation and the soothing sound of the waves and breeze.

Tito's golf course on the Brijuni archipelago

Tito’s glassy, open-plan villa on Vanga is shielded from view by a bamboo plantation.

Inside, the brilliant white walls, futuristic furniture and splashy artwork, including a Picasso, is so 1960s it could be the villain’s lair in a James Bond movie.

The lone caretaker is a Communist-style babushka with scraped-back hair and without a scrap of make-up.

But her countenance softened when I asked her if she could still sense Tito’s presence. "Yes," she replied. "I feel it every day."

In the grounds, there are plantations of oranges and mandarins, and a vineyard laid out by Tito in 1956, from vines donated by South Africa and South America, from which several varieties of wine are produced for the very occasional visitors.

As I sipped on a glass of 2008 Malvazia, I drank in the beauty and tranquillity of this magical place, and considered just how wrong we were about the Communists.

Or one of them, at least.

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Spanish bullfighting on a budget

August 8th, 2009 | No Comments

Bullfight in Manzanares el Real

In Spain, the recession is testing the nation’s passion for that most cherished of traditions – bullfighting. Steve Kingstone visited a town that has decided to slash dramatically the costs of its annual bullfighting fiesta.

Under an already fierce mid-morning sun, the young runners limber up nervously. Some crouch down and touch the dirt, others stare resolutely at the cattle truck behind them.

They have come to run with the bulls – the ultimate test of testosterone in Spain.

One at a time, six beasts will be released, then stampede their way along an enclosed course ending in the Plaza de Toros – the bullring – where later, the animals will meet their end.

Except, when the truck door opens – nothing. There is a pause, someone bangs on the side, and finally two horns and a lazy-looking head appear.

"It is the kind of place where bulls run through the DNA… where the bullfight is the highlight of the fiesta"

After further coaxing, the animal shuffles out of the truck, and trots along the track. It is smaller than the standard fighting bull and the pumped up runners leave it for dust.

"These bulls are a joke," someone shouts, prompting a burst of good-natured banter. The crowd all know the inescapable truth – this is low-budget bull-running during a recession.

‘Unsustainable’

The town is Manzanares el Real, a 45-minute drive and a world away from Madrid.

Edged by mountains, overlooking a reservoir, the air is clean and the history rich.

Bull running in Manzanares el Real

The druids, Romans, and Visigoths were all here. Charlton Heston played El Cid, the legendary Castilian knight, against the backdrop of its 15th-Century castle.

It is the kind of place where bulls run through the DNA, where the annual fiesta is the highlight of the year, and where the bullfight is the highlight of the fiesta, where bullfighters are billed like film stars on colourful retro-style posters.

But like everywhere in Spain, Manzanares el Real has fallen victim to the recession – the country’s first in 16 years.

Nationwide, unemployment is nearly 18%, double the EU average. Locally, most of those out of work are immigrants who were once cheap labour on the building sites of Madrid.

‘Rump of reactionaries’

"In an economic crisis bullfighting is unsustainable for a small town," the mayor told me.

At just 35, Oscar Cerezal has already made a name for himself. In March he held a referendum on whether the fiesta should take place without bulls – a move which would have saved the town hall 140,000 euros (£120,000). That is a quarter of the annual event’s budget.

"Of course we have to tighten our belts – but if they scrap the bulls, we all know they’ll fritter the money away on something else"

Maria del Carmen

Maria del Carmen

"The conservatives in this town would come up to me in the street and say ‘who are you to ask the people what they think’" the mayor explained. "I told them – it’s called democracy."

But democracy failed to deliver a clear-cut result. Fifty-two percent voted to scrap the bulls, and 48% to keep them in some form – with barely one in five of the town’s 7,000 inhabitants bothering to turn out.

The mayor’s supporters portrayed the pro-bulls camp as an isolated rump of reactionaries. But with the outcome inconclusive, compromise was inevitable.

Hence, two days of bullfighting rather than three – using ‘novillos’, younger animals weighing 300kg (660lb), as opposed to the standard 500kg.

In the morning, they would take part in the bull run and in the evening, do battle with ‘novilleros’ or trainee bullfighters.

There was funding for a lance-wielding horseman – or ‘picador’ – but only on one of the two days. Overall it was a budget cut of 40% compared with last year.

Lifelong tradition

I spotted one of the novilleros arriving in a minivan, while most of the town was taking a siesta.

Bundles of capes and swords were unloaded at the temporary Plaza de Toros, erected in a field on the outskirts of town.

The owner of the facility told me he had rented out mobile bull-rings for three decades, and that business had never been so bad. Twenty small towns had cancelled bullfights this summer because of the economic crisis.

Map

But that evening, the makeshift plaza was almost full – as a band heralded the lycra-clad novilleros with a paso doble, the traditional soundtrack for bullfights, and a thickset man raffled off a leg of ham balanced on his shoulder.

There were families with young children, Spaniards and immigrants. And elderly fight fans were there too – in spite of the fact that pensioners had been charged entry, for the first time ever.

"I’m 68 years old and I’ve always come here to watch the bulls," said Maria del Carmen. "If they want me to pay, I will – just as I would if I went to the football."

There were murmurs of approval as this elderly aficionado denounced the mayor. "There are people who weren’t even born here who want to meddle with a lifelong tradition," she said.

"Of course we have to tighten our belts. But if they scrap the bulls, we all know they’ll fritter the money away on something else."

I left as the third lightweight bull was being dragged, lifeless, from the arena.

To this crowd, it mattered little that the novilleros were rough around the edges. There were shouts of encouragement, jokes and advice in abundance.

The town’s young mayor – eager to do away with this spectacle – had told me traditions evolve and sometimes disappear.

But recession or not, I sense this tradition will be hard to budge.

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Checking out of ‘Hotel America’

August 1st, 2009 | No Comments

After an eventful eight years in Washington, the BBC’s North America editor Justin Webb has mixed feelings about his imminent return to the UK.

"If you do not like your life and you have drive and luck, you can change it because – being American – you believe you can change it "

Justin Webb in Washington

"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…"

America was not designed to be left. The opposite in fact – it was designed to be arrived in.

It was programmed to receive and – as was the case in the Eagles’ song Hotel California – there is some wonderment at the front desk when you try to go.

For effect, I sometimes exaggerate our sadness at the end of our time in America, result: confusion.

"Our British home is in south London so we’ll probably all be murdered before Christmas."

"Oh, my gosh, um, why not stay" Because you have no sense of humour, would be one answer. But it is not why we are leaving.

In more than seven years of life in America, I have come to value – to love, actually – the stolid, sunny, unchallenging, simple virtuousness of the American suburban psyche.

The woman who is to sell our house is a prime specimen. She is perky. Nothing gets her down, not even the fact that we are selling in the midst of the biggest depression since the Great Flood. In this area it is different.

"You have a lovely home!"

But she thinks we have too many books. She does not say so but she talks of creating spaces on the shelves – for snow-globes, perhaps, or silver photo frames with perfect children showing off perfect teeth.

This is a cultural thing. When selling a home in America, you have to pretend that you do not live there.

No, you have to pretend that no-one lives there. Or ever has.

Previously owned homes are of course the norm for us Europeans. We understand that previous generations have made their mark. This means – as we English know, having grown up with rattling windows and mouldy grouting – that a home will be imperfect.

They do not make such allowances in America.

Illusion of safety

So the inspector’s report, the survey, is the cause of much deliberation and soul-searching with our potential buyers.

An outside light is not working properly. A tap is leaking. A chimney needs investigation.

"I feel crazy going back to the old world"

As I read it, my mind turns to our house in London which is actually falling down – somebody omitted to prop up the middle when an arch was cut in a downstairs room 100 years ago – but which is still eminently saleable.

The English understand that we are all falling down. Dust to dust, we intuit. Americans do not. They have not got there yet.

Truth be told, I would rather be them than us. I admire the concern over the chimney and the belief that the problem can be fixed.

I sit on the porch, in the growing evening heat of the Washington spring, the cicadas chirruping and the sound of lawns being mowed, and yearn to be staying. It would be so easy, so uncomplicated, so safe.

And yet of course – like the perfect home we tried to create – this safety is an illusion.

Route 17

From Washington let me take you south 600 miles (965 km) or so to the state of South Carolina.

A carriage filled with visitors in Charleston, South Carolina

In the steamy heat of the night, cicadas deafening in these parts, breeze all but non-existent, I drove Route 17 south, out of Charleston and down into the low country, the salt marshes.

Charleston is one of America’s most elegant cities, but Route 17 is not on any tourist maps, at least not as an attraction in its own right.

In a sense though, it should be. It gives a wonderful insight into hardscrabble American life, the sleazy glamour of the road that repels and appeals to visitors – and indeed Americans themselves – in roughly equal measure: gas stations, tattoo parlours, Bojangles Pizza, $59 (£35)-a-night motels, pawn shops, gun shops, car showrooms, nail bars, and Piggly Wiggly, the local supermarket chain which, in my limited experience, smells almost as odd as it sounds.

It is a panorama of the mundane: Doric columns a-plenty but all of them made of cheap concrete and attached to restaurants or two-bit accountants’ offices. On and on it goes, encroaching into the palm forests with no hint of apology.

‘Bible-laced hypocrisy’

As it happens, I am due to visit one of those forests and the following morning I find myself standing next to a black, four-wheel-drive vehicle and another quintessentially American phenomenon. A politician mired in Bible-laced hypocrisy.

Mark Sanford, Republican governor of South Carolina

At the time I met Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, just a few months ago, I didn’t know about the hypocrisy. But I should have guessed when he offered to let me in to a secret. He was a closet tiller of fields, he said, and liked nothing better than to get out with his boys and work the land.

A little too wholesome to be true.

Weeks after telling me that all-American story, it transpired that he was also ploughing furrows in foreign fields. The man disappeared only to turn up in Buenos Aires with an Argentine woman who was not Mrs Sanford.

This from a man who, when he was a congressman, lived in some peculiar Christian fellowship house in DC. It did not stop his Doric columns from being false.

Zest for life

And yet for all the ugliness, the deadening tawdriness of much of the American landscape and the tinny feebleness of many of its politicians – for all that nastiness and shallowness and flakiness – there is no question in my mind that to live here has been the greatest privilege of my life.

The immensity of America, the energy and the zest for life remind me sometimes of India. And as with India, where I spent some time for the BBC many moons ago, America shines a light on the entire human condition.

Map of USA showing Washington DC and Charleston

Few other nations really do. Italy reveals truths about Italians, Afghanistan about Afghans, Fiji about Fijians. But America speaks to the whole of humanity because the whole of humanity is represented here; our possibilities and our propensities.

Often what is revealed is unpleasing; truths that are not attractive or wholesome or hopeful.

On the last day we spent in our home in north-east Washington, they were holding a food-eating competition in a burger bar at the end of our street. The sight was nauseating: acne-ridden youths, several already obese, stuffing meat and buns into their mouths while local television reporters, the women in dinky pastel suits, rushed around getting the best shots.

America can be seen as little more than an eating competition, a giant, gaudy, manic effort to stuff grease and gunge into already sated innards.

You could argue that the sub-prime mortgage crisis – the Ground Zero of the world recession – was caused mainly by greed: a lack of proportion, a lack of proper respect for the natural way of things that persuaded companies to stuff mortgages into the mouths of folks whose credit rating was always likely to induce an eventual spray of vomit.

There is an intellectual ugliness as well: a dark age lurking, even when the president has been to Harvard. The darkness epitomised by the recent death in Wisconsin of a little girl who should still be alive.

Stone-Age superstitions

Eleven-year-old Kara Neumann was suffering from type one diabetes, an auto-immune condition my son was recently diagnosed with.

Her family, for religious reasons, decided not to take her to hospital. They prayed by her bedside and the little girl died.

The night before she died – and she would have been in intense discomfort – her parents called the founder of a religious website and prayed with him on the telephone. But they did not call a doctor.

If Kara had been taken to hospital, even at that late stage, insulin could have saved her. She could have been home in a few days and chirpy by the end of the week, as my son was.

It was an entirely preventable death caused, let’s be frank, by some of the Stone Age superstition that stalks the richest and most technologically advanced nation on earth.

I deplore the superstition and the eating competitions and the tatty dreariness of so much of America, and I note that the new president is also unimpressed by the infrastructure and not a fan of fat but, after more than seven years living here, I am increasingly convinced that these elements of the nation are not the flip side of the greatness of America, they are part of that greatness.

There is something about the carelessness of America that gives space for greatness.

Making it big

Out on route 17 in South Carolina, you can do very well or very badly. You can crash and burn, or you can fill up with cheap petrol and ride off into the sunset. If you do not like yourself in South Carolina, you can hire a self-drive hire truck and take it to Seattle. If you do not like your life and you have drive and luck, you can change it because – being American – you believe you can change it.

Sonia Sotomayor

Sitting in a dingy apartment in New York watching Perry Mason on the TV, you can decide to make it big in law as eight-year-old Sonia Sotomayor once did.

This summer, now in her fifties, she becomes a Supreme Court justice and the latest American story to send shivers down the spines of dreamers of the American dream.

But if Sonia Sotomayor is to make it big, there must be something creating the drive, and part of that something is the poverty of the alternative, the discomfort of the ordinary lives that most Americans endure and the freedom that Americans have to go to hell if that is the decision they take.

This is the atmosphere in which Nobel Prize winners are nurtured. A nation which will one day mass produce a cure for type one diabetes, could not, would not, save little Kara Neumann from the bovine idiocy of her religious parents.

More than 300 million people live here now, settlers from all over the world. From Ho Chi Minh City, from Timbuktu, from Vilnius, from Tehran, from every last corner of the earth, they have made America their home and they are still streaming in.

I feel crazy going back to the old world. My five-year-old daughter Clara, who is the proud owner of an American passport, agrees.

She says she intends to leave home, at around 12-years-old, and return to her native land. I do not blame her.

If you are willing to chance your arm, if you back yourself, if you want to live the life, America is still the place to be. Drive out on Route 17 and take a chance!

So that’s it from me, I am checking out. But part of me can never leave…

How to listen to: From our own Correspondent

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Seeking Delhi’s ‘phantom squirter’

August 1st, 2009 | No Comments

Every day tourists all over the world fall victim to scams aimed at relieving them of some money, and often some dignity. The BBC’s former South Asia correspondent, Sam Miller, has been on the streets of the Indian capital, Delhi, investigating one such scam.

Shoe shine generic

I need help. For five years I have been obsessed with finding a man whose dexterity and gall I admire beyond reason.

His magical feats and evanescent persona have become legendary among my family and friends, though they are slightly fed up with hearing about him.

The world at large sees him as criminal for the way he has relieved tourists of many thousands of rupees, but in my view he is no more than a minor miscreant.

He has outsmarted me many times, and I still have not solved the mystery of who he is and may never do so unless I get some assistance.

‘Brownish goo’

I first became aware of his existence 10 years ago, but subsequent investigations have revealed that he has been plying his trade, if that is the right phrase, for more than 25 years.

"I grabbed the man by one shoulder and cleaned my shoe on his trousers"

I was in Connaught Place, in the heart of New Delhi, and as I emerged from an underpass a shoe-shine man came up to me, and whispered into my ear.

He then pointed at my right shoe on which sat, to my amazement, a small worm of brownish goo.

He offered to wipe it off, but I knew that something was, well, afoot, and cleaned my shoe with a few leaves.

Some months later it happened again and I had a minor altercation with the shoe-shine man.

Then one day, I decided I would take a photograph of the person who squirted my shoe.

But I was daydreaming as I wandered through the underpass and was squirted again.

Life story

The same shoeshine man appeared, clearly not recognising me. I was embarrassed to have been caught again, and, I am ashamed to say, I became incandescent with rage.

To the consternation of passers-by, I grabbed the man by one shoulder and cleaned my shoe on his trousers.

I became obsessed. I began researching the history of the scam.

There are dozens of accounts on the internet and several acquaintances had similar stories to tell. The scam goes back to at least the 1980s.

India

Only foreigners get squirted, it seems, and only those wearing closed shoes.

My epiphany came when I read the rantings of an American blogger, who described with pride how he pushed and swore at the shoeshine man, adding, "All in all, I feel pretty enlightened that I didn’t make him lick it off."

My sympathies were suddenly with the squirter and the shoeshine accomplice. I now sought out the phantom squirter, I wished to befriend him.

I wanted to find out his life story, how he learnt his trade, whether it is a father-son thing. How much money does he make on a good day Has he ever been caught

What are the mechanics of squirting, does he use a turkey baster perhaps, or a syringe And, most of all, what does he tell his family that he does for a living

I wrote about the phantom squirter in a book about Delhi and after its publication I returned several times to the underpass, once with a television crew in tow, discreetly following me.

I tried to look as nonchalant as possible. To my great disappointment my shoes remained spotlessly clean. I did an internet search to check that the squirter had not gone to ground and, yes, there were several more reports from angry victims.

There was also a video on Youtube, in which an American visitor to Delhi read out a poem.

He, like me, was rather impressed by the scam, declaiming that "with 20 million beggars roaming through that nation, at least one guy showed me some imagination."

Futile quest

A few weeks later a friend called me. "You’ll never guess what happened," he said.

He had been in Connaught Place with his girlfriend, and as they went down into the underpass he recounted my story of the squirter.

Shoeshine boys in Delhi in 1974

And yes somehow, he did not know how, he was squirted. And he saw the funny side of it.

Then just a month ago, as I prepared to leave Delhi for a holiday, I went back to Connaught Place and made a final desultory attempt to find the phantom.

I walked through the underpass and nothing happened. I was then strolling in a nearby park when a shoeshine man came up to me and pointed to my shoe.

And there it was, I had been caught again. I turned to the shoeshine man. I explained in Hindi that I was not angry, that I wanted to meet his accomplice and I even offered him some money.

He ran away, without the money, as fast as his legs could carry him.

Will I ever learn the true story of the phantom squirter of Connaught Place I am beginning to doubt it. Unless one of you can help me

How to listen to: From Our Own Correspondent

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Au Revoir European road trip

August 1st, 2009 | No Comments

As Mark Mardell prepares to leave his post as Europe editor he looks back at some of his highlights from the last four years and considers the Europe Union’s greatest achievement.

Meeting Bulgaria’s new Mr Big

July 25th, 2009 | No Comments

In Sofia, Nick Higham meets former bodyguard and newly-elected Prime Minister Boiko Borisov, the man many Bulgarians are counting on to rid the country of corruption.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov

Boiko Borisov is an intimidating man.

He has the shaved head, thick neck and massive shoulders of a wrestler, which is what he was, long ago.

He was also a fireman, karate coach, bodyguard and top policeman.

Today he is a highly successful politician.

On the day we interviewed him he had just accepted an invitation to become Bulgaria’s next prime minister in a brief ceremony at the country’s Communist-era presidential palace – all marble pillars, grandiose staircases and chandeliers the size of trees – but we met in his office at Sofia’s scruffy City Hall.

We waited in the ante-room with other supplicants – the man in charge of building the city’s metro, a senior Spanish policeman – while a succession of political henchmen came and went through the door to the main office.

Fighting organised crime

When we finally got inside, Borisov rebuffed my attempts at political small talk with a curt "stop chatting and get on with it".

He made me distinctly nervous and he had an even more unsettling effect on my Bulgarian producer and translator, who told me she was physically sick after the interview.

This formidable physical presence no doubt served him well when, in the early 1990s, he offered his services as bodyguard to the deposed communist dictator, Todor Zhivkov.

A file photo of Todor Zhivkov and Boiko Borisov

A decade later he did the same for Bulgaria’s former king, Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who returned from nearly half a century of exile to run for parliament and become prime minister. Borisov so impressed the king that he gave him a government job.

For our interview Borisov sat in an armchair in front of a cascade of silver cups, trophies and medals from his days as a sportsman.

When we were finished, he insisted on showing me the photos on his walls. There were pictures of him with top cops from Britain, the US and Europe and framed testimonials from the likes of the FBI and Europol, praising his efforts in the fight against organised crime. At the time, General Borisov was the chief secretary at the interior ministry and Bulgaria’s most senior policeman.

This was not idle boasting. The testimonials are evidence that he really is serious when he promises to clean up his country.

He was prepared, he said, to do whatever it took.

Bulgaria’s politicians are notorious for being on the take, but he told me he was not prepared to shield anyone, even a minister or deputy minister, who engaged in corruption.

"We need 100% trust from Brussels," he said.

"We’re going to do everything Brussels asks of us. For a country as poor as Bulgaria, it’s vital to get the money from Brussels flowing again."

Cash for licences

Bulgarian corruption takes many forms.

At one extreme there are the mobsters, known as "mutri" or "thick-necks", many of them ex-wrestlers, who made their fortunes in the post-Communist anarchy of the early 1990s, running protection rackets thinly disguised as security firms or insurance companies.

His political opponents sometimes accuse Boiko Borisov of being one of them, though one Bulgarian political analyst told me no-one had ever produced any evidence to show that he was.

"Bulgarians have turned to Boiko Borisov to get them out of this mess"

At the other extreme is the day-to-day corruption involving underpaid public officials.

Health workers who agree to speed up treatment or traffic policemen who turn a blind eye to speeding in return for cash.

In between comes cronyism, influence-peddling, embezzlement, fraud, rigged tenders for public contracts, and outright bribery.

I met an investigative television journalist who told me of a case he had recently looked into, in which a driving instructor and an examiner had taken a bribe to give a licence to a man who had never even driven a car. The price: 300 leva (around £130/$80).

Bulgarians have turned to Boiko Borisov to get them out of this mess.

In the recent general election around 40% of voters backed his political party, known as Gerb, which has adapted one of Barack Obama’s slogans. Its glossy television adverts end with Borisov himself, speaking straight to camera: "Let’s show them Bulgaria can," he says.

Waiting game

After our interview, we filmed the prime minister visiting a rebuilt school.

Former Bulgarian King Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha

Amid a mob of cameramen he patted children’s heads, chatted up their mothers, embraced their grandmothers.

There is no doubt he is popular, but so was a previous prime minister, the king.

Simeon successfully steered Bulgaria towards accession to the European Union, but he could not get rid of corruption, despite General Borisov’s best efforts.

In the most recent election the king’s party was wiped out, and Simeon himself resigned as its leader.

Bulgarians now wait to see whether Boiko Borisov’s career goes the same way or whether, as he promises, he really can fix Bulgaria’s problems.

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Gods, monkeys and beguiling Bali

July 25th, 2009 | No Comments

Visitors to Bali cannot fail to be delighted by its warm, clear sea and white beaches, writes Hamilton Wende – but the island’s special charms also include its cheeky wildlife.

Monkeys at a temple

It was in Bali that I punched my first monkey. A cute, furry beast it was, grey and white with a long tail and an old man’s face hidden in a fluffy mane.

It leapt out of a tree on to my wife’s shoulder and grabbed at her shiny earring.

She screamed. I was a few steps behind, so I rushed forward and punched ineffectually at the hairy pest.

I am only 5ft 7in (1.70m) tall but the monkey was only about a foot high.

The size differential counted in my favour and the monkey tumbled over a nearby temple wall overlooking a steep slope leading down to the sea.

The monkey’s fate remains unknown, but I would put money on his survival and recidivist criminal tendencies.

Unforgettable

The monkeys in the temple gardens of Pura Luhur Uluwatu are famous for their annoying and often aggressive behaviour towards the tourists who flock there.

But they are an integral part of the island’s Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and are, ultimately, part of the temple’s charm.

The temple itself is famously one of Bali’s holiest sites. It is a beautiful place, standing on a series of rocky cliffs nearly 328ft (100m) above the white surf of the Indian Ocean.

A kecak dance

Uluwatu is a guardian temple, dedicated to the spirits of the sea and keeping the island safe from any demons that might inhabit the south-west.

Going to Uluwatu in the late afternoon is an unforgettable experience. The sunset is exquisite and as dusk gathers you can watch a Kecak dance.

The men sit cross-legged in concentric circles, naked from the waist up around an ornate oil lamp carved with dragons.

They begin a rhythmic chant of "Chak, chak, chak," which induces a trance-like state, while their arms move in unison like flames, or the wind blowing.

Two young women wearing dresses of silk and gold weave their way through the chanting men as they perform a complex dance telling the story of Prince Rama and Princess Sita.

Exquisite food

Princess Sita is kidnapped by an evil king and Rama engages Hanoman, the magic white monkey god, to rescue her.

The final scene, well after the sun has finally set, where Hanoman breaks out of a ring of fire and destroys the evildoers is pure dance magic.

Gods and monkeys aside, there is plenty to beguile and fascinate any visitor to Bali.

The seas are warm, the beaches white, or charcoal black. The gardens and fields are a riot of emerald and scarlet and bright yellow.

One of the most beautiful sights in Asia, I think, are the green and silver contours of the Jati Luwih rice terraces. Rice, the Balinese people believe, is a gift of the gods.

The Jati Luwih rice terraces

In keeping with this, their food is exquisite.

Whether it is the simple delights like nasi goreng – fried rice done with many seasonings – grilled satay or a variety of noodle dishes served by street vendors, coconut, garlic, ginger, pepper, coriander, tamarind, lemon grass are just some of the spices used, and the results are spectacular.

More exotic dishes such as bebek betutu, duck steamed and roasted in banana leaf, or guling celeng, roast suckling pig, are like nothing you have ever tasted before.

The seafood grills at Jimbaran Bay are prepared on open charcoal fires and you sit at a table on the beach with the surf gleaming in the darkness just behind you while the lights of planes taking off and landing at Denpasar Airport float through the distant night sky.

Meeting place

Food is a blessing never taken for granted by the Balinese. All over the island one sees little woven baskets called banten jotan containing tiny colourful offerings of rice, fruit and flowers to the gods.

A taxi driver even had one on his dashboard.

"Every six months we have a ceremony," he said.

"For a car, for a knife, for anything metal. Also for a building, a house, animals.

"Everything has a ceremony. That is our tradition."

Perhaps the most peaceful place on the whole island is the temple of Pura Taman Ayun, built in the 17th Century.

The name means Garden Temple in the Water and it is built on an island in a peaceful river.

Pura Taman Ayun temple

The gardens of frangipani, hibiscus and bougainvillea tumble over the canals and ancient stones while birds and butterflies float through the courtyards and a large fountain dedicated to the gods of the underworld sprays cool water through the humid air.

Pagoda-like towers called meru rise into the blue sky. The number of tiered roofs is always an odd number, from three to 11.

The tallest represent the mountains in Bali above which the gods are said to live.

Strolling through its beautiful gardens, it is easy to see how so many have come to believe this island is the meeting place for gods and humans, and of course, monkeys too.

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Greenland comes in from the cold

July 25th, 2009 | No Comments

As world leaders grapple with the perils of climate change, there are parts of the globe where warmer temperatures are welcomed. Hardtalk presenter Stephen Sackur has just returned from Greenland where he found plenty of people eyeing opportunities amid the melting glaciers.

Fjord in Greenland

The musk ox steak on my plate was seductively dark and succulent. One of my dining companions was eyeing a slab of reindeer flesh big enough to feed a pack of huskies, while the other was drooling over scallops harvested from the clear cold waters of the Baffin Sea.

But never mind this traditional, and sublime, Greenlandic fare, I really want to tell you about my side order of leeks. Without wishing to sound immodest I know a thing or two about vegetables – it comes from being the son of a Lincolnshire farmer – and I can tell you the Rowing Club in Kangerlussuaq has few peers when it comes to fresh, home-grown vegetables.

That last phrase bears repetition, home-grown vegetables, in Kangerlussuaq, north of the Arctic Circle where the summer sun never sets and the winter darkness lasts for half a year.

Arctic thaw

I summoned restaurateur Kim Ernst from his kitchen. "You must have grown these fine vegetables in a glass house," I said with a sceptical frown.

"Not at all", he replied, "they’re all from my garden. If you don’t believe me come and see." So I did, and he was right. Greenland, is finally showing signs of living up to its name.

The last decade has brought with it markedly higher summer temperatures in the arctic North.

In southern Greenland farmers have planted fields of potatoes as the growing season has lengthened.

Greenland

Plans are afoot to establish forests of Siberian Larch on this windswept and treeless island.

For Greenlanders, all 56,000 of them, the long-term prospect of being able to "grow their own", from tomatoes to timber, is little short of intoxicating.

Eighty percent of Greenland is covered in ice. For thousands of years Inuit peoples have eked out a precarious living along the coastal fringe, reliant on the sea’s bounty: fish, seals and whales.

But now the climate is changing, and so too are the traditional rhythms of Inuit life.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the small fishing port of Illulisat perched above an ice fjord on Greenland’s west coast. A generation ago the waters of the surrounding Disko Bay would freeze thick and hard every winter.

The local Inuit would hitch their dog teams to their sleds and make long excursions onto the ice, to hunt for seal and to fish, but in recent years the winter ice has been treacherous or non-existent.

Fishing boats have been able to put to sea in the months of darkness, leaving Illulisat’s huskies chained to their posts, forlorn and useless.

Redundant huskies

"I used to have 25 dogs," one fisherman told me. "Now I have nine."

"What did you do with the others" I asked. "The dog catcher came round," he replied with cold detachment. "With a gun."

The giant glacier in Illulisat’s fjord has retreated more than 10 miles in the last decade. For international climate campaigners it has become a graphic symbol of our planet in peril. But Greenlanders have a different take on the changes they see.

Greenland

"We understand that this is a global issue," Greenland’s softly-spoken premier Kuupik Kleist told me in the capital Nuuk, "but we see opportunities as well as challenges. I want a Greenland that is open to those opportunities."

This summer Greenland was granted self-rule by Denmark, the old colonial power. Crucially, the new settlement puts control of potentially vast resources in local hands.

Oil, gas, a host of industrial and precious metals – even diamonds – are believed to be present in commercially significant deposits.

And the recent warming has made long-term exploration and mining a less daunting proposition. To see for myself I took a boat from Nuuk deep into the neighbouring fjord.

We passed whales blowing and diving, icebergs sparkling in the low sun and after two magical hours we reached our destination, a tent camp pitched above a natural inlet.

New goldrush

This is where a Greenlandic goldrush may be about to begin. Geologists from Nuna Minerals showed me their best prospect, a run of craggy rock where they have already extracted core samples from hundreds of metres down.

"This vast island, rich in resources, is coming in from the cold"

Greenland

"So far, it looks promising," Nuna’s geologist Rasmus told me, as we swatted a thick cloud of mosquitoes. "Twenty years from now if all goes well, there could be a port facility here, infrastructure, a profitable gold mine."

And what would that mean for this unsullied Arctic wilderness Rasmus paused. "Look, I appreciate this place. I work here. I have no intention of ruining it."

On my return to Nuuk harbour, I watched British tourists disembark from a cruise ship. They were serenaded on to shore by a party of Greenlandic schoolchildren in traditional Inuit dress.

"How adorable," one woman said.

Yes, traditions are held dear in Greenland but do not be deceived. This vast island, rich in resources, is coming in from the cold.

Stephen Sackur begins a three part Hardtalk on the Road, starting Tuesday 28 July 2009 for transmission times seeHardtalk.

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Sink or swim in modern China

July 18th, 2009 | No Comments

Chris Hogg heads to the small Chinese village of Zhushanxia, 200km east of Shanghai, to see how lives have been shaped by the economy under communist rule, the recession and the country’s economic recovery.

A farmer sells vegetables at a wholesale market on March 22, 2005 in Hefei of Anhui Province, China

Huang Jiao Ling lives at the end of a long dusty road.

Mobile phone numbers are daubed all over the walls of her home and those of her neighbours.

It is like a strange kind of mathematical graffiti, but the numbers are, in fact, advertisements for people offering goods and services.

In modern China, it seems everyone has something to sell.

Huang Jiao Ling, too, is an entrepreneur. She is in her 50s, but she looks younger.

In her front garden, where others might have planted vegetables, she has built a small workshop.

Inside, the walls are unfinished and the floor uneven, but there is just about enough room for a work-bench and a handful of basic machine tools.

Churning out widgets

On the floor are cardboard boxes filled with piles of tiny metal widgets.

They are simple to make – her husband sits at the bench turning them out rapidly by hand.

Fruit seller in China

A few feet away, his bicycle-taxi is parked just inside the front door of the house.

The machine work is a lot less tiring than pedalling passengers around, but he still keeps the bike.

It is useful, he says, to supplement their income in leaner times.

The Huangs sell the boxes of widgets to the factory where Huang Jiao Ling has a full-time job.

For a while this year they had to shut the workshop as demand dropped, but now the machines are humming again.

They have two children, because if you live in the country and your first child is a girl, you are allowed to have another one.

The girls go to very good schools, the best Huang Jiao Ling can afford.

She spends more than half her income on school fees.

"We have to think of their future," she tells me.

"It’s a Chinese tradition. Parents always think of their children, and when the parents get old, their children will look after them. It’s the same for every generation."

Yu Feng Guo is Huang Jiao Ling’s brother-in-law.

She is doing well for herself in China’s new modern market economy, but he has been left behind.

He used to work in a state-owned brick factory.

Different lifestyles

When the economic reforms began 30 years ago he watched as some of his co-workers left their jobs to start up their own small businesses, many of them selling prawns or fish by the side of the road.

He decided to do what he thought was the right thing, what the communist party would expect of a loyal worker in a state-owned enterprise – he stayed.

Eventually, the brick factory went bust and he was out of a job.

Rice paddy field

Now, dressed in a shabby khaki jacket, he works as a security guard in an open-air food market.

Those early entrepreneurs who had left his factory to try their luck in the fledgling market economy are now much richer than him and to his family this seems unfair.

"Thirty years ago everyone in the village was poor," his son tells me.

"Now the difference in lifestyle between the rich and the poor in our village is huge."

There is an implicit bargain in modern Chinese society between the leaders and the led.

Beijing tells its people "we will give you opportunities" – to earn more, to enjoy a better standard of living than your parents did.

But you, in return, will behave yourself.

Back on track

In Zhushanxia village quite a few cars can be seen bumping along past the fields, something you would not have seen 30 years ago.

If you have got used to having more, whether it’s a car, or a bigger house, or a more expensive school for your child, you have more to lose when times get tough.

That is why it is so important for the government to get the economy back on track.

When it first faltered, when factories started laying off workers, there was a risk that they would start to feel the government was no longer keeping to its side of the deal, so why should they

So in Beijing, of course, there will be relief that a recovery appears to be under way.

But the next challenge for the government will be to do more to try to ensure that everyone shares the benefits.

Huang Jiao Ling is happy her workshop is busy again, but still nervous about the future.

So she, like most other Chinese, is saving as much of her income as she can.

Her brother-in-law Yu Feng Guo, has no idea how he will be able to save enough to secure a state pension on his meagre wages from his unstable job.

He and others like him will be looking to their leaders for reassurance that they will be cared for as they approach old age.

But that will costly and complicated. Fixing the economy may prove to have been the easy part.

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Killing dissent

July 18th, 2009 | No Comments

The murder of Russian human rights activist Natalia Estemirova shows that life in Chechnya – although more peaceful than it was a decade ago – can still be brutal, says Rupert Wingfield-Hayes.

"Now Natalia herself has become a victim of the brutality she had worked so fearlessly to document"

A picture of Natalia Estemirova

I cannot pretend to have been a friend of Natalia Estemirova.

I met her only once, in April this year, in her little office in the Chechen capital Grozny.

We sat for an hour sipping tea as she told me about the latest horrors she and her team had uncovered in the dirty war that is still going on in southern Russia.

Outside, a group of rough-looking country folk were sitting in the hallway, their faces strained, their eyes haunted.

Natalia was the person they all came to, to tell of a missing son or husband, of a fresh abduction in the middle of the night, or a house burned in retribution for a rebel attack.

Most recently, Natalia had been investigating a killing by a government death squad in a small village in southern Chechnya.

Last words

Locals told her an old man had been accused of giving one of his sheep to the Islamic insurgents. On 7 July, government troops came to his home, dragged the old man to the village square, and then – as villagers looked on – they shot him in the head.

"This," they were told, "is what will happen to any of you who help the rebels."

Now Natalia herself has become a victim of the brutality she had worked so fearlessly to document.

Map Russia and Chechnya

At 0830 local time on Wednesday, four men dragged her from her apartment in the centre of Grozny.

Passersby saw her being forced into a white Lada. She managed to shout out: "I am being abducted."

They were the last words anybody would hear her say.

Nine hours later, her body was found 30 miles (50km) away, dumped in a forest. She had been shot in the head.

Sitting here in Moscow it is still very hard to comprehend how anybody could murder this softly spoken 50-year-old woman.

The finger of blame has immediately been pointed at Ramzan Kadyrov, the 32-year-old warlord who now runs Chechnya at Moscow’s behest.

He has emphatically denied it, and has promised that he will personally take control of the investigation.

That promise has been met with derision by friends and colleagues.

The truth is that Natalia was not short of enemies.

She was born to a Russian mother and Chechen father. When the first Chechen war broke out in the mid-1990s, most with Russian blood fled Grozny.

But she refused to leave.

Critics ‘end up dead’

When Moscow began its second onslaught on the city in 1999, she fled.

But a year later she returned and began documenting the abductions, torture and murders of thousands of young Chechen men by federal Russian troops.

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov

Later – as Moscow handed its war to its Chechen allies – she took on the local regime.

She was a thorn in the side of many, but particularly of President Kadyrov. And she is not the first of his critics to end up dead.

Three years ago a Chechen man called Umar Israilov turned up in Austria seeking political asylum. For several years he had worked as one of Mr Kadyrov’s bodyguards.

In testimony to Austrian authorities he said he had personally witnessed Mr Kadyrov taking part in torture sessions. He also said Mr Kadyrov kept a list of 300 enemies to be killed.

On 13 January this year, Umar Israilov was shot dead outside his Vienna apartment.

Sulim Yamadayev is another of Ramzan Kadyrov’s enemies to have met a sticky end.

He used to be one of the most powerful military commanders in Chechnya. But last year he fled to Dubai after falling out with the Chechen president.

On 30 March this year, Sulim Yamadayev was shot dead in the car park of his Dubai apartment. A week later the Dubai police issued an international arrest warrant for a man named Adam Delemkhanov.

It just happens that Mr Delemkhanov is Ramzan Kadyrov’s right-hand man. In April when I went to the Grand Mosque in Grozny for Friday prayers, there he was kneeling down right beside Chechnya’s president.

Culture of impunity

Anna Politkovskaya

My guess is that it will never be proved who ordered Natalia Estemirova’s killing. In Russia such murders are rarely solved.

Look at the case of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead outside her Moscow apartment three years ago.

Or of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, gunned down in broad daylight in Moscow this January.

They were both close friends of Natalia Estemirova.

There is what Amnesty International this week called a culture of impunity in Russia.

One by one, the voices of those still willing to stand up and speak out are being silenced.

Without them the outside world will never know about the horrors still being committed in places like Chechnya.

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Having tea with Russia’s Deripaska

July 15th, 2009 | No Comments

Russian billonaire, Oleg Deripaska, normally tries to avoid the media spotlight. But Tim Whewell was able to spend some time with him and gain an insight into his life.

Russian billonaire Oleg Deripaska

Having spent a couple of days in the company of the 164th (until recently ninth) richest person in the world, I can report that he knows an awful lot about the properties of silver foil, plans to make Russia into a nation of white-van lovers, and is partial, late of an evening, to a cup of special Siberian herbal tea.

I can report nothing about the view from his spectacular yacht, the Queen K, where he famously entertained Lord Mandelson, the speed of his private jet, or the furnishings in any of his many homes – because that was not the "vulgar" subject matter the Aluminium King of Russia, Oleg Deripaska, had in mind when he invited me on a private tour of his empire.

No. We were going to roll up our sleeves, put on our safety glasses and hard hats – and talk production.

We were interested in the source of wealth, not its trappings.

In the 85% automation level on the assembly line at GAZ, his car plant at Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga – the 3,200 welding spots on his latest model, the Volga Siber – the accuracy on his quality control apparatus of one micron – a thousandth of a millimetre, the 415,000 amp current that electrolyses the alumina at his smelter in Sayanogorsk in southern Siberia – do not stand too close – and the scorching 730 degrees Celsius inside the furnace.

Mr Putin driving a 1956 Volga

These are statistics to conjure with, not those you may have heard before about Mr Deripaska – how he was worth $28bn (£17.5bn) last year and only $3.5bn (£2.1bn) now.

In any case, he disputes those figures.

He never had anything like as much as they say, and anyway, he parries jovially as we sit back in his company’s Swiss-style chalet high in the Sayan Mountains, do I know how much money I have got

Touche! I am stuck.

On the one hand, I feel a certain moral obligation to stand up for that portion of the world’s population that does need to keep abreast of its financial affairs.

On the other hand, do I really want my new friend to think I am some kind of Fagin, sitting up half the night over piles of pennies

Mineral exploration

From this you will probably have gathered that Mr Deripaska and I quickly established an easy, bantering relationship.

He not only looks much younger than his 41 years, he is positively boyish in his energy and enthusiasms.

And so we bound down the assembly line at GAZ discussing axles and suspension, touching on the benefits of the Toyota Management System, debating why Britain lets its engineering talent go to waste.

Later in the week, four time-zones to the east, he diverts his helicopter to take me low over the breath-taking Sayano-Shushenskaya dam, once the highest in the world, the source of all those amps in the smelter.

All the time he is pointing down excitedly at the spruce-covered hillsides, telling me what geologists might find next under Siberia.

He has cornered the market in aluminium, but that is not enough. Down there is copper. Further on, molybdenum.

The helicopter’s nice, furnished with cream leather sofas. But we are asked not to film it. For security reasons and also, you will remember, because that is not the kind of thing we are interested in on this trip.

He tells me about all the extra trees he is going to plant around his factory, down where the mountains meet the bare steppe. He tells me about the computers he is giving to schools.

Becoming friends

Only late at night in the chalet – and Mr Deripaska likes late nights – do we turn briefly to darker, more emotional matters.

UK Business Secretary Lord Mandelson

"Why," he asks suddenly and insistently, "do the British press hate Peter Mandelson so much"

And again I am stuck. Because while I can think of many possible answers to this question – all intriguing enough to occupy a happy hour over a pint down at my local – I am talking now to Peter’s friend, a guy I am trying to bond with.

And so we return to the subject of whether his light commercial vehicle, the Gazelle, could have been improved by technology from the British firm he once owned, LDV.

I will be honest. I am not very interested in vans.

But I liked Oleg Deripaska.

I liked his teasing grin. I liked his ready laughter. And I appreciated his delicacy in not wining and dining me.

Our trip to Siberia was good for both our reputations – because, in these stern days of expense-related scandals, I have almost nothing to declare – only his herbal tea, the master-class in foil making, the unforgettable swoop in the helicopter – oh, and a tiny souvenir ingot of the first aluminium from his smelter.

As for a journey on a gigantic yacht – as Frank Sinatra almost sang in "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" – I am so glad I did not.

How to listen to: From our own Correspondent

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Mumbai revisited

July 11th, 2009 | No Comments

Despite India’s economic success, it is still home to millions of the world’s poorest people. Martin Buckley lived in Bombay, as it was known, in the 1980s. He recently went back and found, as he walked about after sunset, that the essential character of the city remains unchanged.

Mumbai at night

Bombay by night. It is hard to think of three words more expressive of history, exoticism, and empire.

And I do not begrudge the "new" name, Mumbai (the city was renamed in 1995).

The city’s presiding goddess is Mumba-Ai, and I spent a chunk of the 1980s living close to her temple in the heart of the city.

It was my first job after university, working on a magazine called Business India. Very few foreigners worked in Bombay then.

Pre-boom India was still locked into its Soviet-style command economy.

Paid local rates, I lived in a succession of seedy rooms in downtown Bombay.

We sometimes put the magazine to bed at 0300 local time, and I would walk home.

On the pavements were string beds, where men lay, totally abandoned in sleep.

I never felt threatened for an instant.

Slum living

We have heard a lot lately about Mumbai’s slums, so I thought it would be interesting to revisit my old haunts.

Dharavi slum

Mumbai is a long, thin city, and on its northern fringes, residential suburbs are mushrooming.

I went to visit Dharavi, the slum made famous by the film Slumdog Millionaire, which is nearer the city centre on land the developers would love to get their hands on.

This "slum" has electricity, workplaces, temples and mosques.

I asked a street trader selling school exercise books if he had heard of Slumdog Millionaire.

"Of course," he said, adding that tourists had been turning up in droves to see where the film was shot.

But he said they should go home, as no-one wanted them there.

I felt no danger in Dharavi, at least, not from people.

Stepping on a sleeping dog – an actual "slum-dog" – was far more of a worry.

‘Light beatings’

The next night, a hot, sticky evening, my first stop was at a downtown police station in central Mumbai, to interview a police inspector.

Child actor Azharuddin Ismail in his Mumbai slum

He was a sleek character, with manicured nails, dyed hair and an expensive-looking Swiss watch.

Sipping sweet tea from an improbably refined china cup, I sheepishly asked about the brutal police torture shown in Slumdog Millionaire.

"Ridiculous," he replied, though he did admit that what he called "light beatings" were routine. And no, I could not visit the cells.

He moved hastily on to more comfortable territory, showing me his CCTV screens, and declaring how modern forensics had transformed criminal investigation.

His biggest task, he stressed, was managing tensions between Hindus and Muslims.

Doggedly, I asked about police corruption and drugs mafia, but received peremptory replies.

Prostitution he claimed, was sharply down, but not through policing. Rather, he claimed it was because people were terrified of catching Aids.

Decomposing facades

Physically, central Mumbai has changed far less than I expected.

There are some elevated highways from which, I am told, motorcyclists periodically plunge.

A market in Mumbai

But the great tenements still rise in terraces draped with washing, their Victorian or art deco facades slowly decomposing.

Few of the 1960s-style Fiat taxis have been replaced by newer cars.

There are bullock carts toting jute bales, tiny shops with colonial interiors, hawkers selling fruit from trolleys, men sitting cross-legged in the street selling shoes, basket-weavers working and living on the pavements.

Markets sell everything from metal ware to fresh fish, and as 2200 approached, I could still see live mullet writhing in baskets.

Nearby were the entrepots of Mumbai’s thriving dockyards, with the seedy, raffish air of a Conrad novel. And it is much easier to buy a beer in contemporary Mumbai than it was in my day.

Religious tensions have worsened, but I passed Hindu and Muslim traders working side by side.

Decay and ambition

In Bhuleshwar, in the old heart of Mumbai, I visited the city’s presiding Hindu goddess.

The pillars of Mumba-Ai’s tiny temple were entwined with flowers to resemble an indoor forest, and people urgently jostled for a glimpse of the deity.

By midnight I had reached Falkland Road, Mumbai’s infamous red light district.

Women stood around gloomily, their faces showing none of the flirtation that is supposed to be their profession’s stock in trade.

Mumbai’s sex industry caters to millions of poor men, and its squalor and joylessness are all too evident.

A pimp was hanging onto my arm. I asked him if it was true that client numbers were down. He became aggressive. Was I there to spend money or ask nosy questions

I flagged down a taxi, and slid on to the back seat. Through the open window, the air was now pleasantly cool.

The essential character of the great city I had known and loved 25 years ago, seemed to me unchanged, and it was still a Dickensian canvas of decay, ambition, and exploitation.

But Mumbai is pragmatic. It looks chaotic, but it works.

How to listen to: From our own Correspondent

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All American life found at yard sale

July 9th, 2009 | No Comments

Across the United States yard sales herald the start of summer. Before heading back to the UK, Washington correspondent James Coomarasamy hosted his own and discovered it revealed an interesting insight into human nature.

generic yard sale

In Britain, they are called car boot sales, which immediately limits their capacity and makes them seem somewhat furtive.

In America, the land of the free market, they are the more expansive yard sales, where you wear your salesmanship as a badge of pride.

When you advertise your event, it is important to know the hierarchy.

Your basic "yard sale" is an emptying out of an overflowing garage or basement.

Next up is the "moving sale", which you have when well, you can probably guess. If you know other local yard sellers, you can pool your resources into what is known as a "multi-family sale."

But if you have pretensions – and a large house – you might advertise an "estate sale."

This is a different, altogether bigger beast. A magnet for owners of upmarket antiques stores, who circle in brightly-labelled pick up trucks, hoping to make serious acquisitions.

Ours was technically a moving sale, but its dimensions were of the more modest, yard variety.

We were selling children’s clothes, discarded books and toys, plus a panoply of pans and pots and small electrical goods, which do not work outside the United States.

The few antiques sellers who turned up to see what was on offer cruised slowly by without stopping.

Still, on a cool, but pleasant summer’s morning we attracted a decent crowd. And, as they began sifting through our boxes, I found myself mentally sifting through them and putting them into different categories.

Steely-eyed determination

Category one was the early birds. Our designated start time was 9am, but around half an hour before that, we began noticing unfamiliar cars parked on the street.

A woman pouring lemonade

These were the serious shoppers, some of whom had plotted a whole day’s itinerary of yard sales, from information they had gleaned on the internet and on telegraph poles.

Category two – and it overlaps with category one – were the hard bargainers.

They tended to be older Filipina or Latina ladies, with the ability to rummage through about a dozen different piles simultaneously.

They knew precisely what they wanted – and when they picked it out – they wasted no time in haggling over every dollar, with a steely-eyed determination.

Among them was a married couple. He, a Vietnam veteran with a buzz cut and slightly shabby T-shirt. She, his Vietnamese wife.

They said they had three houses in Vietnam, which they had largely furnished with yard sale purchases. That must have been a very long process.

They argued very loudly with each other over each and every item they considered buying.

Form of therapy

Category three – and it was a big one – were the people who were not in it for the bargains but for the company.

They poked and prodded at our modest offerings, like someone pushing unappetising food around a plate, with no real intention of eating it. Eventually, they struck up a conversation, or encouraged us to.

One elderly lady arrived in a tennis outfit, with one of those plastic devices which hold a tennis ball, clipped to her waist.

My wife asked whether she had been playing at the courts in our local park.

"Oh yes," she answered, "and at the courts on 16th Street and at one or two others."

Wax work of Sigmund Freud

She paused and added: "In fact, tennis is about the only thing that keeps me going. It’s what I live for."

Not quite sure how to reply, I averted my gaze and found myself staring at the ball-holder on her waist.

It seemed to be drooping downwards, in a frown. I had not expected a yard sale to be a form of therapy.

Category four – and this was my favourite one – was the devil-may-care, let-us-just-buy-some-stuff brigade.

Among them were two gentlemen friends from Waco, Texas, one of whom seemed rather the worse for drink at 11am.

Feeling slightly guilty, I sold them – for a very reasonable price, of course – a couple of overcoats and a book about Leonid Brezhnev’s daughter, which we somehow decided we could live without.

And then – four hours later – it was over.

Psychological experience

I am not sure who made more money, us or our 10-year-old daughter, who had enterprisingly set up a lemonade and cookie stall, to distract her younger brother from the fact that some of his favourite toys were being sold off.

Our sale had not exactly been a money spinner, but it had been an interesting psychological experience – and it was not quite over.

For, even as were packing up, some category fives wandered onto the scene.

They were mirror image of the early birds, the folks who knew that by waiting until the end they have less choice, but more chance of getting free stuff.

And they were right.

As a foreign correspondent, you often find yourself travelling far and wide to get a revealing glimpse of the human condition. But sometimes – just sometimes – you can find it in your own front yard.

How to listen to: From our own Correspondent

Radio 4: Saturdays, 1130. Second weekly edition on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only)

World Service: See programme schedules

Download thepodcast

Listen oniPlayer

Story by story at theprogramme website</p

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Libya’s struggles

July 9th, 2009 | No Comments

Travelling to the Libyan town of Sirte to report on the African Union summit, Christian Fraser considers whether Libya is ready for an era of mass tourism.

Paiting of Muammar Gaddafi at Tripoli Airport

It is midnight at Tripoli airport, across the road from the arrivals hall. Beyond high mesh fences and the white glare of towering floodlights, a Chinese workforce is labouring through the night on a new terminal.

The air is hot and heavy. The face of Muammar Gaddafi stares out from a nearby billboard, as if micromanaging his country’s construction boom.

En route to the African Union summit, I had just emerged from the old arrivals hall – dour, disorganised and full of government spooks. I was delayed for an inordinate amount of time while they checked, then rechecked, that rarest of Libyan commodities, a journalist’s visa.

The two faces of Libya, a perfect illustration of where the country has come from, and where it is going.

Once the international pariah, now a state in full-speed transition.

Embracing capitalism

In the past year, Muammar Gaddafi has travelled the world signing profitable oil and gas deals that will help transform Tripoli into the new Mediterranean destination – or so they hope – for an influx of adventurous tourists.

There is still some way to go, but the beachfront is awash with five-star developments the government is building with its millions of petrodollars. No more sanctions, no more socialism.

"Twenty-five thousand new flats," beamed Ahmed, my government minder, as we sped into town past another busy building site – $200,000 (£125,000) each," he marvelled.

I could tell he was an enthusiastic proponent of the new Libyan capitalism. And a loyal subject – a Gaddafi key-ring was hanging from his trouser pocket.

Tourist restrictions

There is much to see and enjoy in Libya.

A tourist takes pictures in Roman Theatre in Sabratha

Spectacular Greek and Roman remains, the open-air galleries of prehistoric rock art and glorious largely uninhabited sandy beaches.

Plus, of course, that frisson that is always associated with visiting a country previously off-limit to Westerners.

And therein lies the rub. As much as Libya may like the idea of tourists, and the hard currency they bring, it has yet to embrace the reality.

Tourists must still travel in organised groups with a government-approved guide.

There is no opportunity to wander unfettered around the well-preserved Roman city of Leptis Magna or the magnificent theatre at Sabratha.

Accommodation shortage

Pity the poor tourist who runs into the Libyan control freakery I experienced last week on the way to this African Union summit.

Map of Libya showing Tripoli and Sirte

It was held in Sirte, an undistinguished coastal town just along the way from Tripoli.

The flight to Sirte is a short one. A journey across a long stretch of barren coastline.

Beneath us those remote beaches from which hundreds of illegal African migrants escape to Europe every year. These are the people currently flooding into Tripoli.

I could see why stopping their advance proves such an enormous challenge. Aside from sporadic roadblocks, there is very little between the vast expanse of Sahara and the shoreline from where they set sail in their makeshift rafts and boats.

The building frenzy of Tripoli is yet to reach the distant outpost of Sirte.

"Mr Gaddafi cruised around his manor in one of those ostentatiously large buses favoured by touring rock stars"

Tourists might find a hotel room, but such was the shortage of accommodation during the summit, that journalists and dignitaries would be sleeping on a clapped-out, Panamanian-registered, car ferry brought in specially for the event.

No five-star facilities, these.

We paid top dollar for a cabin cloaked in the faintest whiff of diesel. Mine was already occupied by a cockroach and each day he raced me for the shower attached to the sink.

When Mr Gaddafi travels abroad he takes a Bedouin tent with him. I should have followed suit.

Closely watched

So why would you drag hundreds of summit delegates, 12 African leaders, diplomats, politicians and journalists to a one-horse town in the middle of nowhere

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi (R) welcomes Somalia President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed (L) to the African Union Summit

Simple really. It is the ancestral home of Libya’s egocentric leader, who for 39 years has fostered this one-man personality cult.

Throughout the week, he cruised around his manor in one of those ostentatiously large buses favoured by touring rock stars.

For his opening speech, he wore the golden robes of a king. One invited dignitary was so overcome in his presence, she fell to her knees at his feet.

Not satisfied with this all-encompassing power in Libya, the Colonel is even pushing a bold ambition for a unified continent, a United States of Africa modelled on the European Union.

EU ideals Tell that not just to the journalists, but also the VIPs at this summit who were herded from one location to another, closely observed at all times – and whose contact with the outside world was sorely limited by the electronic equipment used by state security, whenever the Colonel was in town.

Is Mr Gaddafi and his "new Libya" really prepared for all that comes with mass tourism The evidence of this African Union summit suggests not yet.

How to listen to: From our own Correspondent

Radio 4: Saturdays, 1130. Second weekly edition on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only)

World Service: See programme schedules

Download thepodcast

Listen oniPlayer

Story by story at theprogramme website</p

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

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