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Andrew Buncombe's Asia Diary
The Independent's Asia Correspondent Andrew Buncombe is based in Delhi. His dominion ranges over India, Pakistan, Burma, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, occasionally parts of South East Asia and - or at least he is hoping - The Maldives.
I was in Sri Lanka last week working on a couple of stories and was amazed how both the mood and the landscape had changed. Since I was last there in May in the immediate aftermath of the war, the number of road-blocks and check-points has dramatically reduced and there's a brighter mood about many of the cities.
There also appeared to be more people out and about; having confidently predicted that fewer check-points would reduce my journey time to the centre of the island, I was dismayed to find the roads chocker-full of cars and buses. More people, I was told, were travelling. Everyone I spoke to was very pleased that the war was finally over.
There's a feeling, however, that this may be something of a lull before the storm ahead of what is likely to be a bitter electoral contest next month between the sitting president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and the former army chief, Sarath Fonseka, the man who oversaw the crushing of the rebels. At the same time, while most of the civilians held in the aftermath of the three-decade civil war are now being released and while efforts are being made to de-mine villages in the north, there's still work to be done in bringing some sort of political settlement to those areas formerly under the control of the LTTE rebels. There's lots of talk, thankfully, of development and investment in those areas in order to try and reduce the sort of inequality and hardship that may have helped the rebels' cause.
There's also an investigation going on into allegations about the conduct of government forces during the final stages of the war, when, according to UN estimates anywhere up to 10,000 civilians caught up in the war zone and unable to leave, were killed. I won't prejudge the panel's findings but I suspect most of us know what usually happens when a victorious force investigates its own actions. (See Hutton inquiry etc.)
Undeterred, a group of activists in Ireland are looking to hold their own investigation. Organised by the Irish Forum for Peace in Sri Lanka, hearings will be held under the auspices of the Permanent People's Tribunal ."The tribunal has a long history of carrying out independent investigations of human rights abuses ranging from Vietnam to Guatemala," says the group's press release.
The tribunal will comprimise of 11 prominent individuals from the global north and south with long experience in matters of human rights and justice. The hearing will take place on January 14 and 15 at Dublin's Trinity College and its findings will be released the following day. [You can check out the forum's website for more details about the hearing and the details of those who will taking part.]
Why, you might ask, is there a need for such an inquiry in Ireland? The organisers say Ireland has been chosen as the location for the hearing of the tribunal, which first gathered in Italy in 1979, "because of its historical status as a post-colonial nation, the success of the northern Ireland peace process and its traditional policy of neutrality".
As a number of people correctly pointed out to me when I was there last week, the West has certainly acted with no little hypocrisy over Sri Lanka. Having launched its own wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that resulted in the deaths of perhaps up to 1m people and having paid and pressured Pakistan to launch counter-insurgency operations that likewise resulted in large numbers of civilian casualties, the West appeared to behave differently when it came to the final stages of the conflict with the LTTE.
But just because governments may act with hypocrisy, this surely doesn't mean that the deaths of 10,000 innocent people should be conveniently forgotten. I'll be very interested to see what the tribunal in Ireland comes up with.
There also appeared to be more people out and about; having confidently predicted that fewer check-points would reduce my journey time to the centre of the island, I was dismayed to find the roads chocker-full of cars and buses. More people, I was told, were travelling. Everyone I spoke to was very pleased that the war was finally over.
There's a feeling, however, that this may be something of a lull before the storm ahead of what is likely to be a bitter electoral contest next month between the sitting president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and the former army chief, Sarath Fonseka, the man who oversaw the crushing of the rebels. At the same time, while most of the civilians held in the aftermath of the three-decade civil war are now being released and while efforts are being made to de-mine villages in the north, there's still work to be done in bringing some sort of political settlement to those areas formerly under the control of the LTTE rebels. There's lots of talk, thankfully, of development and investment in those areas in order to try and reduce the sort of inequality and hardship that may have helped the rebels' cause.
There's also an investigation going on into allegations about the conduct of government forces during the final stages of the war, when, according to UN estimates anywhere up to 10,000 civilians caught up in the war zone and unable to leave, were killed. I won't prejudge the panel's findings but I suspect most of us know what usually happens when a victorious force investigates its own actions. (See Hutton inquiry etc.)
Undeterred, a group of activists in Ireland are looking to hold their own investigation. Organised by the Irish Forum for Peace in Sri Lanka, hearings will be held under the auspices of the Permanent People's Tribunal ."The tribunal has a long history of carrying out independent investigations of human rights abuses ranging from Vietnam to Guatemala," says the group's press release.
The tribunal will comprimise of 11 prominent individuals from the global north and south with long experience in matters of human rights and justice. The hearing will take place on January 14 and 15 at Dublin's Trinity College and its findings will be released the following day. [You can check out the forum's website for more details about the hearing and the details of those who will taking part.]
Why, you might ask, is there a need for such an inquiry in Ireland? The organisers say Ireland has been chosen as the location for the hearing of the tribunal, which first gathered in Italy in 1979, "because of its historical status as a post-colonial nation, the success of the northern Ireland peace process and its traditional policy of neutrality".
As a number of people correctly pointed out to me when I was there last week, the West has certainly acted with no little hypocrisy over Sri Lanka. Having launched its own wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that resulted in the deaths of perhaps up to 1m people and having paid and pressured Pakistan to launch counter-insurgency operations that likewise resulted in large numbers of civilian casualties, the West appeared to behave differently when it came to the final stages of the conflict with the LTTE.
But just because governments may act with hypocrisy, this surely doesn't mean that the deaths of 10,000 innocent people should be conveniently forgotten. I'll be very interested to see what the tribunal in Ireland comes up with.
Earlier this year, I wrote a story from Sri Lanka about the efforts of several senior LTTE members to surrender in the very final stages of the war and how they were shot dead - apparently while walking towards government troops and carrying a white flag. My sources were pretty good - I had spoken with the Norwegian foreign ministry which confirmed that a senior minister had acted as an intermediary as the men tried to give themselves up. I also spoke with the Sri Lankan foreign secretary, Palitha Kahona, who confirmed that he had personally been in contact with the two LTTE members - whom he had met at ceasefire talks - and advised them how to surrender.
Of course, the quality of the sources did not stop the usual flurry of comments and insults that get hurled at journalists every time they write anything about Sri Lanka, from both the Tamil and Sinhala camps. You kind of get used to it.
But it did make me smile to read over the weekend, an interview in which former army chief Sarath Fonseka, now contesting President Mahinda Rajapaksa in next month's election, has claimed that Mr Rajapaksa's brother, who serves as the defence minister, had given the order to kill all the LTTE leadership. Mr Fonseka claimed that Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, ordered that "they must all be killed" and that he rejected attempts to surrender. Mr Fonseka conveniently says that he was not involved in the decision and had been out of the country at the time.
The Sri Lankan government has hit back angrily, turning on the man who was once an ally and even threatening to bring charges against him. One thing's for sure: this coming electoral show-down between the two men who were once friends and allies is going to be very bitter and very ugly. The other certainty is that once the election is over, all this talk of Tamil rebels being shot as they sought to surrender will be conveniently forgotten. Whoever wins.
Of course, the quality of the sources did not stop the usual flurry of comments and insults that get hurled at journalists every time they write anything about Sri Lanka, from both the Tamil and Sinhala camps. You kind of get used to it.
But it did make me smile to read over the weekend, an interview in which former army chief Sarath Fonseka, now contesting President Mahinda Rajapaksa in next month's election, has claimed that Mr Rajapaksa's brother, who serves as the defence minister, had given the order to kill all the LTTE leadership. Mr Fonseka claimed that Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, ordered that "they must all be killed" and that he rejected attempts to surrender. Mr Fonseka conveniently says that he was not involved in the decision and had been out of the country at the time.
The Sri Lankan government has hit back angrily, turning on the man who was once an ally and even threatening to bring charges against him. One thing's for sure: this coming electoral show-down between the two men who were once friends and allies is going to be very bitter and very ugly. The other certainty is that once the election is over, all this talk of Tamil rebels being shot as they sought to surrender will be conveniently forgotten. Whoever wins.
I've long argued that every time you take a flight, or get on a bus or make an overnight coach journey, you should be sure to talk to the person next to you. As I discovered earlier this year in Thailand, no matter how tired or grumpy and not in the mood to chat you may be, it can often turn out the person has a remarkable story to tell.
There was no excuse, therefore, to have ignored the young Indian woman who was sitting next to me the other week on a dawn flight from Delhi to Heathrow. For the the first couple of hours, I settled down into early-morning isolation and a film, but then - after I'd taken off my headphones - she introduced herself. It transpired she was on her first ever trip to the UK and was actually travelling to Edinburgh to meet her husband - a Scottish born man of Indian Sikh origin - to whom she had been married six months earlier, after an arrangement between the two families. "I'm a little bit nervous," she confessed.
Where to start? What to tell her? I could only sympathise and say that anyone in her situation would be feeling nervous and that I was sure things would work out for her. I also told her that if they did not, she would not have to stick it out if she did not want to.
The woman was aged 35 - quite old to be getting married for the first time in India - and she had only agreed to do so because her two younger sisters were also looking to get married and custom said that that the eldest should wed first. She told me that she had worked as a beauty therapist in the Punjab but was worried that her husband - who made his living selling kilts to tourists and whose English she struggled to understand because of his strong Scottish accent - would not allow her to work. She said his family was very conservative, "even by Indian standards".
I wittered on about the beauty of Scotland, the pleasures of Edinburgh, Britain's large south Asian population and did my best to try and boost her spirits. When the plane touched down I insisted she used my cell phone to call her family in India and tell them she had arrived safely.
But as I left in the hands of a British Airways official as she made her way for the connecting flight to Scotland, I could still not get my head around what struck me as an utterly bizarre course that her life was now taking, but one which is very common for thousands of young women from this part of the world. Sometimes, for all the shared language, similar food, shared interest in movies and families and everything else, some cultural divides are never bridged. I shook her hand and wished her good luck.
There was no excuse, therefore, to have ignored the young Indian woman who was sitting next to me the other week on a dawn flight from Delhi to Heathrow. For the the first couple of hours, I settled down into early-morning isolation and a film, but then - after I'd taken off my headphones - she introduced herself. It transpired she was on her first ever trip to the UK and was actually travelling to Edinburgh to meet her husband - a Scottish born man of Indian Sikh origin - to whom she had been married six months earlier, after an arrangement between the two families. "I'm a little bit nervous," she confessed.
Where to start? What to tell her? I could only sympathise and say that anyone in her situation would be feeling nervous and that I was sure things would work out for her. I also told her that if they did not, she would not have to stick it out if she did not want to.
The woman was aged 35 - quite old to be getting married for the first time in India - and she had only agreed to do so because her two younger sisters were also looking to get married and custom said that that the eldest should wed first. She told me that she had worked as a beauty therapist in the Punjab but was worried that her husband - who made his living selling kilts to tourists and whose English she struggled to understand because of his strong Scottish accent - would not allow her to work. She said his family was very conservative, "even by Indian standards".
I wittered on about the beauty of Scotland, the pleasures of Edinburgh, Britain's large south Asian population and did my best to try and boost her spirits. When the plane touched down I insisted she used my cell phone to call her family in India and tell them she had arrived safely.
But as I left in the hands of a British Airways official as she made her way for the connecting flight to Scotland, I could still not get my head around what struck me as an utterly bizarre course that her life was now taking, but one which is very common for thousands of young women from this part of the world. Sometimes, for all the shared language, similar food, shared interest in movies and families and everything else, some cultural divides are never bridged. I shook her hand and wished her good luck.
It was at a July 4 party at the US Embassy in Delhi this summer when I met Joel Elliott, a young award-winning American journalist who had just arrived in the city. He was young and friendly and was doing his best to manage with the power-cuts and the stinking heat of the Indian summer. He told me he had decided to come to India to try his hand at freelancing and he had just upped and left his home in Georgia to come and do so. I thought he was far more courageous than myself and I was particularly liked his business card which read: "Available for assignments around the world".
Sadly I failed to keep in touch with Joel but it turns out that he quickly found his feet in Delhi, finding work with a couple of magazines and working on a series of stories. It appears all was going well until early last month when he was walking home late at night from the home of a couple of friends who lived near him in the south of the city. Encountering a group of policemen who were beating someone in the street, Joel threw himself into the fray, trying to persuade them to stop and getting hit himself. He also delivered a couple of blows before running off and the police giving chase. It did not take the police long to find him and when they did they allegedly gave him a beating he will never forget. Locked up in a police cell for more than six hours, he was refused permission to call his friends or the US embassy. His friends were eventually called and they took him to a hospital where he needed to stay for two days before he was well enough to walk out. "My flatmate took me to the hospital for treatment. I was covered in blood from head to toe from the police beating. My [trousers], which were still on me. were torn to shreds, and covered in blood. My shirt had been torn from my body," he later wrote. "The hospital staff, concerned about the gaping wound to the side of my head and blood clots in my right eye, combined with the massive bruising across the whole of my body, kept me at AIIMS Hospital for two days and one night. I received five stitches to my eyebrow."
Joel then took the decision to leave Delhi, but before he did so he filed a lawsuit against the police for $500,000. The federal information minister has announced an investigation but there's been no news on its outcome. Instead, the police have sought to put the blame on Joel, claiming he was drunk (something which has been disproved), that he was trying to steal a taxi (which is laughable) and that he had attacked an elderly person (which is equally nonsense).
Anyway, this week, Joel wrote a piece about his ordeal for the highly-respected Indian magazine Tehelka. In it, he makes the point that such brutality is commonplace and that human rights organsations have long pointed out how badly India's police force requires urgent reform. He also makes the point, that had he not been a journalist (and had he not been a white journalist at that) it's likely that no-one would have bothered to even listen to his story. I emailed Joel the other day. He is still in the US and considering his future. As I said, I thought he was a brave soul when I first met him, shrugging off the hardships and strangeness of arriving in the middle of India's summer. My first impression was clearly correct.
Just back from ten days in Pakistan and clearing out the accumulated detritus in my wallet, I came across two "loyalty cards" from a coffee shop in the capital Islamabad. One was completed, the other was half way to redeeming a free cup of coffee - a reflection of the fact that I spent a lot of downtime in Islamabad, perched on a comfortable seat, eating cake and making use of the free Wi-Fi connection. All pretty unremarkable, you might think. Except, of course, that this was Pakistan, the land of bombs and extremists and turmoil and terrorists.
But also the land of coffee shops. And why we're at it, also the land of cricket matches being played out on sun-drenched afternoons beneath the wonderful margalla hills, of plays and artistic performances, of people catching buses for interviews in distant cities, of electronics shops packed full of the latest mobile phones and gadgets, of hum-drum problems and the grey-edged ups-and-downs of daily life. This is essentially a long way of saying that any country, Pakistan included, is much, much more than just a collection of headlines, something perhaps, we too often overlook.
Pakistan is undoubtedly facing major problems from militant violence, economic uncertainty and the seemingly fragile nature of its democracy. But at the same time, it is a country of welcoming people, keen and enthusiastic to talk and engage with the few foreign visitors they receive. This was my 15th trip in two years and whenever I visit, I'm struck by the widespread recognition among the younger and educated people of the tremendous potential their country has, while at the same time not underestimating the problems.
When I return to India, I'm quizzed by Indian friends and colleagues about my experience - was it safe, was I threatened, was the country full of crazies? They find it hard to believe that I spent half my time in a pleasant cafe drinking coffee.
As you can probably imagine in these days of online interconnectivity, a journalist without their laptop is about as much use as soldier without their gun or a pastry chef without their butter - pretty much useless. So last week when I was in the sacred Indian city of Varanasi reporting on the remarkable, centuries-old death industry, it was pretty much a disaster when my laptop died on me. I'd just finished editing a piece of copy on Pakistan when a message popped up indicating that there was a crucial software error and then everything went dead. I joked, briefly, that in a city known as place where for generations people have come to die in order to obtain instant release, or passage to nirvana, it was perhaps appropriate that my computer had taken this opportunity to give up the ghost. The humour did not last long however; a quick phone call to the sympathetic but essentially helpless IT help team back in London confirmed that I was going to have to reinstall Windows from scratch and that unless I could find someway of retrieving my data I was going to lose three years worth of documents, photographs and music.
The following day was the eve of Diwali, one of the most important celebrations in the Hindu calendar and a day celebrated by Indians' huge enthusiasm for shopping. As it was, I had a day of interviews lined up for my story and it was not until early evening that I had time to set about trying to find someone to try and rescue my computer. It was at that point that I was directed to a computer and electronics store that went by the rather unlikely name of P.P Electronics and Surgical Aids. Inside the store, there was barely room to stand as people were busily buying televisions, computers and other gadgets, the belief being that Diwali is a fortuitous time to purchase items. The manager, Prashant Verma, was friendly but not very hopeful; he could fix the computer but it was going to take some time and there was no way he could even start to look at it until tomorrow afternoon. I begged, I pleaded, I explained the crisis at hand. Mr Verma looked at my sympathetically. Come back at 8pm, he said. It should take four hours. When I arrived Mr Verma seemed almost swallowed by the sea of customers. There was a group buying a television set, another buying a cable package and some others trying to decide on which laptop to buy. No-one seemed to pay with either a credit card or cash and large wads of notes kept changing hands. Mr Verma smiled and was patient with every customer; the perfect salesman. When the last of them had gone, he turned his attention to my computer. First he salvaged the data on the hard-drive, then he set about reinstalling the software. The hours passed by and Mr Verma's wife kept calling, wondering how he was getting on and when he would be coming home. I'm with the last customer now, he assured her. It was half-past midnight by the time I wandered out onto the quiet streets to flag down a bicycle rickshaw to take me back to the hotel. My computer was repaired, better-than-before, and for more than four hours of bespoke service Mr Verma had charged me 1,000 rupees, or the equivalent of just 13 pounds, before he waved me on my way. As I climbed into the rickshaw there was a spring in my step.
The following day was the eve of Diwali, one of the most important celebrations in the Hindu calendar and a day celebrated by Indians' huge enthusiasm for shopping. As it was, I had a day of interviews lined up for my story and it was not until early evening that I had time to set about trying to find someone to try and rescue my computer. It was at that point that I was directed to a computer and electronics store that went by the rather unlikely name of P.P Electronics and Surgical Aids. Inside the store, there was barely room to stand as people were busily buying televisions, computers and other gadgets, the belief being that Diwali is a fortuitous time to purchase items. The manager, Prashant Verma, was friendly but not very hopeful; he could fix the computer but it was going to take some time and there was no way he could even start to look at it until tomorrow afternoon. I begged, I pleaded, I explained the crisis at hand. Mr Verma looked at my sympathetically. Come back at 8pm, he said. It should take four hours. When I arrived Mr Verma seemed almost swallowed by the sea of customers. There was a group buying a television set, another buying a cable package and some others trying to decide on which laptop to buy. No-one seemed to pay with either a credit card or cash and large wads of notes kept changing hands. Mr Verma smiled and was patient with every customer; the perfect salesman. When the last of them had gone, he turned his attention to my computer. First he salvaged the data on the hard-drive, then he set about reinstalling the software. The hours passed by and Mr Verma's wife kept calling, wondering how he was getting on and when he would be coming home. I'm with the last customer now, he assured her. It was half-past midnight by the time I wandered out onto the quiet streets to flag down a bicycle rickshaw to take me back to the hotel. My computer was repaired, better-than-before, and for more than four hours of bespoke service Mr Verma had charged me 1,000 rupees, or the equivalent of just 13 pounds, before he waved me on my way. As I climbed into the rickshaw there was a spring in my step.
Last night we went along to the Indian premiere of the Oscar-winning documentary Smile Pinki, which highlights the work of a charity dedicated to eradicating the tragedy of cleft palates. I already knew about the movie and the work of the charity,The Smile Train, because earlier this year I'd spent a fascinating afternoon in one of the hospitals in Delhi used by the organisation to help repair the mouths of children born with the problem. It was genuinely uplifting to see the work that the doctors were doing and the impact it was having on the families.
Yet it was not until last night that I saw the film and I can say without hesitation that it is a hugely powerful piece of work. The director, Megan Mylan, was at last night's event in Delhi and she appeared to be a very decent woman who was utterly dedicated to portraying the blight that a cleft can bring to a child as well as the remarkable way in which their lives can be transformed by a simple, inexpensive operation. [In India alone, 50,000 such operations are performed by the charity every year.] What I found particularly powerful about Mylan's 39-minute film was its ability to reveal how a cleft palate is not just a physical disfiguration; children, tormented by their friends, turn inwards and become ostracised and refuse to go to school. In turn families wonder how their child will marry or find work. Can there be a sadder sight than that of a mother saying that she believed she had given birth to a monster? The incidence of clefts may not be any higher in the West than in the developing world, but here the problem rarely gets treated straight after birth, as it might in the UK or the US. Entire lives are ruined as a result.
It’s been a month since Kaya Eldridge, a British woman working with a charity in
Ms Eldridge’s case was unusual not because of what happened - there are countless similar instances of sexual assault and abuse taking place every day across India - but because the young woman decided to take a stand against her attacker. As she said herself, not every woman in this country (and elsewhere) who is the victim of abuse, has the ability to stand up and make a noise.
To that end, some friends of Ms Eldridge are today marching through
Ms Eldridge, a graduate of the LSE, was working in the city of
“People have some sort of idea that sexual assaults only happen to certain sort of women; it can happen to anyone, regardless of who you are or how many sexual partners you’ve had,” she told me at the time. “To question my character in court was not only entirely irrelevant but totally humiliating.”
The march to the Indian High Commission in Aldwych will end with the handing over of a petition to demand that a law passed in 2002 to provide protection for women who are the victims of assault, be properly enforced. The group of friends and supporters will meet at
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read about the public telling off that
This week - amid a so-called austerity drive by the government in which ministers have been asked to cut their spending and travel only in economy class - Mr Tharoor was asked whether he too would travel "cattle class", In a tweet, he responded by saying: "Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows." The following day, a Congress Party spokesperson was asked about the minister's comment and he replied:“The party strongly disapproves of this expression. It may be slang or jargon but we find it unacceptable. Since thousands of Indians travel by economy class…we don’t approve of this articulation.”
Is the Congress Party really so lacking in humour? It may be, but I suspect this dressing down of Mr Tharoor may be about other things. Clearly the minister is a man not entirely unimpressed by his own abilities and perhaps some people find him a little smug. But more importantly I suspect there is a degree of jealously at work here - about the fact that Manmohan Singh made the newly elected MP a minister in a senior ministry and of the largely positive media attention that Mr Tharoor receives. [Mr Tharoor has kept his head down since this blew up but one of his staff emailed me a picture of him flying economy class to his constituency in Kerala before the austerity drive was anniunced.]
Indeed, the "austerity drive" that the government is pretending to implement to help the poor and drought-stricken of
As to the party spokesman's claim that thousands of ordinary Indians fly economy class, I suspect he misses the real point which is that for the overwhelming majority of Indians taking a flight is something they will never be able to afford to do. For those people, the only way to travel is in the dirty, over-crowded unreserved carriages of the trains with their stinking toilets. They really should only be used by cattle.
UPDATE: Last night I was on India's NDTV channel debating this topic. You can watch here:
http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/new/N
This weekend, I was in the splendid "pink city" of Jaipur to work on a forthcoming story. It so happened that I needed to try and interview someone who - on the day in question - was due to be at the Rambagh Palace hotel, a remarkable property still owned by the royal family of Jaipur but operated by the prestigious Taj Group. The morning had turned into early afternoon and the local journalist who was working with me suggested that we have lunch in the hotel's cafe. I did have second thoughts, wondering about the cost of such an enterprise, but I realised that it made little sense to leave the hotel, eat somewhere else and then return. As it was, the cheapest thing on the menu - other than a bowl of soup - was the vegetarian club sandwich featuring "cheddar and green peppers", so our group ordered three of these, a couple of bottles of water and one coffee. Ten minutes later the sandwiches arrived, accompanied by a dainty bowl of fries and it was all very nice indeed until I took a bite of the sandwich to realise that this snack - which cost 600 rupees plus 12.5 per cent tax (around nine and half pounds) - was actually made using a slice of rubbery processed cheese that is usually sold in packs of ten, each individually wrapped in plastic. Now, I have nothing against processed cheese slices. Indeed plenty of times they've been a life-saver here in India when there's little else to buy at the local store. What am against is eating processed slices when I've paid the best part of ten quid to eat a cheddar sandwich at a hotel which claims to offer "luxury and extravagance that was once the sole preserve of kings". I wondered about complaining to the waiter but decided I was going to struggle to make my point so I just paid the bill, which ended up costing the same as a double room in the very pleasant heritage hotel down the road in which I was staying [ I have, however, emailed the hotel's press department for an explanation and will update this story when they get back to me]. What made the experience more depressing is that when I returned to Delhi and clicked on the internet, I discovered that the hotel, where the cheapest room costs 18,000 rupees, or around 250 pounds, had just been voted the best in Asia by the readers of Conde Nast Traveller. I can only assume they had something else for lunch.
I don't think anyone who is concerned about free speech and transparency can be pleased about the news that Sri Lanka is planning to expel James Elder, the spokesman for the UN humanitarian group Unicef, having very publicly accused him of being a propagandist for the LTTE. When I was in Sri Lanka earlier this year, I met and spoke with Mr Elder (pictured here during a previous assignment in Darfur) on a number of occasions and he seemed utterly committed to one thing - the welfare of the hundreds of thousands of civilians caught up in the war to crush the rebels and end the decades-long civil war. To several of us journalists, it was clear that raising the plight of these people was for him far more than just a job. As with another UN spokesman, Gordon Weiss, he appeared to genuinely care deeply about what was happening to them through no fault of their own. He thought it was an outrage that civilians - men, women and children alike - should be forced to cower in sand-bunkers on a beach, without access to proper medicine or sufficient food and water while a bitter war was fought over their heads. He also raised very valid concerns about the plight of 280,000 civilians now being held in overcrowded, refugee camps, surrounded by armed guards and razor wire.
Yet Mr Elder did not shy away from criticising the rebels for their considerable part in endangering the lives of the Tamil civilians. When the war was still going on, he regularly spoke out against the well-documented practice of the LTTE using the civilians as shields and urged the rebels to allow them to leave from that final stronghold on the beach.
What has struck me as a little odd is that the charge against Mr Elder has been led by Palitha Kohona, the Sri Lankan foreign secretary. Mr Kohona is a smart, charming man who has been kind enough to grant me several interviews, both at his office and home, and on the telephone. He has always been very convincing in explaining why the government had decided it needed to finally rout the LTTE, who had used suicide-bombs against both military and civilian targets in their long and brutal battle for a Tamil state in the north of the country. He spoke of the suffering the LTTE had caused for both the Sinhala and Tamil communities. In many way, his concern about the misery endured by too many Sri Lankan civilians was no different to that of Mr Elder.
I understand that it will now be all but impossible for Mr Elder to remain in Sri Lanka. The government there wants him out and although the Unicef director, Ann Veneman, has protested in the strongest terms about his expulsion, having had his professional credibility questioned in such a waty, Mr Elder may be very disinclined to remain even if he could.
The UN has decided that the most important thing for its operation in Sri Lanka is to remain on the ground. Regardless of the conditions imposed on it by the government, it believes that being there under virtually any circumstances is better than not being there and therefore unable to help those in need. That is why earlier this year, when criticism of the UN grew inside Sri Lanka, a decision was taken at the highest levels to more carefully calibrate its public comments. In effect, a degree of self-censorship was imposed.
All of this means we have a situation in Sri Lanka where the UN and its various bodies are committed to remaining in the country but are unable to say what it really thinks about what is happening to civilians there. How in heaven's name will Mr Elder's successor be able to do his or her job in the way they wish, forever worrying about every word they utter? One things for sure - none of this benefits those Sri Lankan civilians still in desperate circumstances, the very people the UN is there to help.
Yesterday, I went along to hear India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh reveal some important new figures about the estimates regarding the country's emissions of CO2 over the next two decades. Five studies, the minister said, had estimated that while the country's emissions could rise by three or four times from their current levels over the coming 20 years, the per capita emissions would still be no more than the global average of 2005.
The figures are important because they will be used by Indian negotiators at the upcoming Copenhagen talks on climate change to argue that India need not agree to legally binding reductions. India and China, with the rest of the developing world, will argue that their economic development should not be hindered by the need to cut back on emissions. India, currently the world's 4th largest emitter of CO2 but with the second largest population, has an overall per capita level of emissions considerably lower than the global average of around five tonnes.
Referring to a recent report by Greenpeace India, I asked Mr Ramesh whether the Indian establishment was not hiding behind the country's 800m poor people. In short, I suggested, there were two Indias - a growing middle-class whose emissions, while probably less than the global average, were similar to those in Europe, and then the vast impoverished remainder who probably emitted virtually no CO2. My question was rather breezily dismissed by the minister who said he was certain that the emissions of himself and his colleagues on the panel were lower than their counterparts in the West. Anyway, he said, the only thing that people should focus on was the per capita emissions. [He did say, however, that India needed to take action against climate change through increased efficiencies, through a move towards more sustainable energy and by tighter laws on things such as fuel efficiency of vehicles.]
In the evening, I went to a talk to hear British ministers Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander making their case. Britain wants India to agree to binding cuts and has said the developed world is ready to provide up to $100bn a year to the rest of the planet to help switch to more efficient technologies. They recognised the need for India to place development as its main priority but said India's growth need not be held back by a move to lower-carbon economy. "I think that India has a very important role to play as a deal-maker in the coming months," said Mr Miliband, the minister for energy and climate change. Yet while the ministers were clearly trying hard to make positive noises about the reception they had received in India and insisted that the officials and ministers they had met with were serious, I suspect their visit is going to result in very little. Whatever the ministers may have been told, the truth is that India has been working hard to build an alliance with China in order to join forces and push back at Copenhagen.
I have some sympathy with India's argument. Indeed, why should the West, which has long plundered the resources of the developing world, now turn around and lecture those in India and elsewhere about how their economies should grow. Why should the West have happily emitted for decades in order to develop its economy and now demand that India and China do something different? [I would have more sympathy however, if I believed Indian politicians genuinely intended to raise up the lives of the poor and were to use economic development for that purpose. I remain unconvinced that this is a priority for many politicians.]
At the same time, I also believe that India could break the mould and lead the way on climate change rather than sticking its head in the sand as Mr Ramesh and others appear to want to do. I have written before about the potential of India to develop solar energy and there are very positive noises being made about some progress in this direction. But India could do so much more. Rather than following the dead-end fossil fuel route of the West (and which China appears to have adopted), India could be investing to become the world leader in solar technology and science. Vast parts of the Thar desert could become a producer of clean renewable power. There are huge amounts of capital ready to invest in such schemes. What's more, with scientists drawing attention to the perils of melting glaciers, extreme weather, crippling droughts and other phenomena associated with climate change, the real question is can India not afford to seize the challenge and lead the way?
I make no claim as to the veracity of the information I am about to impart, but if it turns out to be true then Gordon Brown will be very pleased indeed.
A traditional Indian astrologer called Ramesh Guru (pictured) has emailed me what he says is a forecast for our troubled PM based on his vedic horoscope. What’s more, as unlikely as it may appear, Mr Ramesh suggests the UK economy is about to rebound and that Mr Brown might even win the next general election as a result of his resulting popularity.
“I am telling my research findings of his moon sign horoscope based on thousands of years old ancient vedic astrology. I hope the news release from me is really interesting and very useful for [the] UK media and people,” writes the astrologer. “Under the leadership of Hone PM Gordon Brown the UK economy will become stronger. This is because of so many interesting and marvelous positive points in his vedic horoscope. You can expect sudden positive changes in economy from 19th November 2009.”
I suppose that this might all be a piece of creative trickery from some sly spinner 10 Downing St, but on his website Guru Ramesh claims to have helped other well-known figures, including the Bollywood star Claudia Ciesla.
“His vedic horoscope and other fundamentals are very supportive. He will outperform expectations as PM. He has more ability and skills to recover the economy from recession with development plans,” he adds. “Obstacles to economic growth will vanish from 19th November 2009. The year 2010 will be a BETTER year for him.The year 2011 will be the BEST year of his lifetime with many achievements.”
Mr Ramesh tells me Mr Brown’s moon sign is Cancer, that his birth star is Ashlesha, that his favourable colours are yellow, red, white and orange, that his favourable days are Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and that his favourable metals are gold and bronze.
Best of all, the astrologer reveals that the position of the moon in Mr Brown’s chart suggests he has earned good karma from previous lives. He adds: “Particularly, he had done more good for marine animals, land related components like farmers, agriculture, environment and forest [and] school children.” Gordon Brown, friend of marine animals. You heard it here first.
It had all the ingredients of the perfect romantic tale; two good-looking, intelligent and gifted students from
That at least was the insistence from
“In any event, it seems fairly clear that, for at least a month or two, the couple were close. There was a lot of giggling and blushing whenever they appeared together in public,” said Mr Sandford, in a comment that could hardly be considered conclusive.
Allies of the late Ms Bhutto have been quick to leap in and save her reputation, though had she fallen for the charms of Mr Khan, the so-called Lion of Lahore, she would hardly have been alone.
Pakistan's H
Mr Sandford, who has previously written biographies of Roman Polanski and Curt Cobain, suggests the pair became close in 1975 when Ms Bhutto was aged 21 and in her second year of studying politics at Lady Margaret Hall. For his research he interviewed both Mr Khan and his ex-wife Jemima.
Previous biographies of Ms Bhutto have claimed she did have boyfriends while she was a student. Mr Khan, however, has insisted he was not among them. Last night he was unavailable for comment but he previously told the Daily Mail: “Yes, I was interviewed, but I know nothing about the rest of what has been written. So it is not official. It is absolute nonsense about any sexual relationship or my mother and an arranged marriage. We were friends - that’s all.”
This week a new report confirmed what anyone who has spent any time in India already knows - that its roads are deadly, chaotic places and that many of India's drivers have little or no concern for anyone other than themselves. The report from the World Health Organisation revealed that there are more fatal road accidents in India than anywhere else - even more so than China, whose population is bigger. Every hour, it appears, 13 people in India die in such accidents. Campaigners suggest the figure may actually be even higher as not all fatalities are recorded. "There is no estimate of how many people injured in roads accidents die a few days after the accident, Rohit Baluja, a member of a UN project, told the Times of India.
When I first arrived in India, I was initially tolerant of the chaos, charmed even by the way that cars, rickshaws, bicycles and bullock-carts co-existed on the roads. But the more time I spend here and the more scrapes and bumps and near-misses I'm involved in whenever I drive, I find I am increasingly angry. I am angry when I watch people refuse to stop at red lights - putting the lives at other drivers and pedestrians at risk; I am angry when vehicles refuse to stop at round-abouts even though there are signs imploring them to do so; I am furious when I encounter a car driving the wrong way along the carriageway because it will save the driver the 60 seconds it takes to drive in the correct direction and then turn around. Those responsible for such criminal behaviour are men and women, young and old, those driving other people about and those driving themselves.
Of course, it's not all drivers doing this - there are plenty of Indian drivers as horrified about the lethal habits of other motorists as I am. But the point is that bad, lethal driving has become the norm. Traffic police make occasional half-hearted attempts to crack-down but they do little good. What is required is a massive campaign of road safety education, a properly orchestrated driving test, strict fines and real enforcement. It also requires ordinary Indians to condemn dangerous drivers until they become socially unacceptable, in much the same way people who drink alcohol and drive have in the UK, and elsewhere. One thing is very certain - all this dangerous driving is not doing the people of India any good. Indeed, it's killing them.
I had a very nice email today from a man called Will Travers who heads an NGO called the Born Free Foundation. He said that he had enjoyed the piece I'd written about the threat facing India's tigers and the spluttering, two-steps-forward-one-step-back struggle to try and save them.
Will said he thought there was one important question missing from my piece, namely what can ordinary people do to try and help the effort to retain this remarkable species that is facing an uphill battle against extinction. One of the ways, of course, is to get involved with an NGO or campaign group that is fighting to try and save this remarkable big cat. Will suggested people could investigate joining one of the following - his own Born Free Foundation (www.bornfree.org.uk), the Environmental Investigations Agency www.eia-international.org) or the Wildlife Protection Society of India (www.wpsi-india.org)
I am sure there are plenty of other good organisations out there doing good work to help the tigers and I'm keen to hear about them. Maybe people have other ideas as to what can be done, or indeed success stories from elsewhere in the world where conservationists have been able to save seemingly doomed animals.
Today I watched a remarkable film that anyone who is interested in journalism, in Burma, in the fight for democracy or in humanity's capacity for amazing bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, really ought to go and see. The documentary is called Burma VJ and it goes on release at 40 cinemas across the UK.
This astonishing film by Danish filmmaker Anders Østergaard tells the story of a small team of video journalists from the Democratic Voice of Burma, an exiled news organsation based in Denmark that has undercover reporters inside the sealed country. The film uses the footage taken by this journalists as they covered the so-called Saffron Uprising of September 2007 when hundreds of thousands of Buddhist monks and ordinary citizens took to the streets to demand democratic change and to protest against the military regime.
The scenes are utterly remarkable. One of the most moving scenes shows the monks gathered at Rangoon's Shwedagon Pagoda and then marching out into the city. As they go they are joined by ordinary people and together they chant: "May all beings living in the east, May all people be free, Free from distress, Free from poverty, May everyone have peace in their hearts."
The film also shows the dramatic moments when a soldier shoots and kills a Japanese photographer, Kenji Nagai, after he had fallen to the floor.
Burma VJ is truly inspiring but there is no happy ending. As the film makes clear, in the aftermath of the uprising when the regime mounted a vicious crackdown on dissidents, many of the journalists who shot the footage were detained. Many are now serving huge prison sentences.
The Co-operative has launched a campaign to free five of the journalists now in jail in Burma - Htin Kyaw, Su Su Nway, Ohn Than, Si Thu Maung and Ko Win Maw.. Among those who have spoken out its support is actor Richard Gere, who said: "It is desperately important that people see this film and get involved in the movement to help Burma and Aung San Suu Kyi. I was incredibly moved on many different levels by what the filmmakers achieved. The conviction and urgency that Burma VJ conveys is very difficult to communicate on film in an honest way.”
The Co-operative's Paul Monaghan, added: “People put their lives on the line to get this footage out of Burma in the hope that the world would take notice. News stories come and go, but the oppression in Burma is as bad as anywhere on the planet, and we mustn’t turn a blind eye."
It's become a cliche among film reviews to be told that if you see one film this year, this should be it. What is certainly true is that if you do take the trouble to watch this documentary, to take the time to learn a little bit more about why these people were putting their lives on the line, you will come away anything but disappointed.
No more than half-an-hour before the taxi arrived to take me to the airport for the flight to Srinagar, a Fed-Ex courier knocked on the door with a new book about Kashmir. In the Valley of the Mist, published by Random House, is written by Justine Hardy, a writer and journalist who has dedicated a large chunk of her life to the sub-continent. One of her previous books, Scoopwallah, was about her time as a reporter on an Indian newspaper here in Delhi. Anyway, I've never met Justine and I don't know her previous work, but In the Valley of Mist deserves the warmest recommendation. In the two or three days I was in Kashmir rushing around and working on a couple of stories, I devoured her book, reading it late at night in the faltering light on a houseboat moored on Lake Dal.
Justine clearly has a love affair going on with Kashmir but at the same time, her book is hardly sentimental. Focussing on the story of just one famliy, who she met selling carpets at a shop in a swanky Delhi hotel, she reveals just how much Kashmir has changed in the last two decades. Famed as a beautiful, peaceful haven where Muslims and Hindus intermingled and co-existed, she details how the valley become increasingly militant and how the Indian security forces then stepped in with brutal repression. Some of her most poignant passages detail the exodus from the valley of Kashmir's pandit or Hindu population in the aftermath of 1989.
And she can really write. In the very first chapter, she notes: "Beyond the silence of curfewed markets and streets the sky opens to water, mountains and sky, to autumn Kashmir, a monsoon-rinsed blue above peaks where heavy August rains leave a deep new snowline."
What I particularly liked, was that her memoir appears precisely rooted in facts - real people, real events. One of the characters she paints is a boatman who sells flowers who goes by the tourist-friendly name Mr Wonderful. In the hands of some writers - I'm thinking of the likes of Bruce Chatwin - such characters would likely be an amalgamation of different people. Not so with here; on an early morning boat trip across Dal Lake I was approached by a boatman who introduced himself a Mr Wonderful. Before he could finish his sentence, I asked him if he was there to sell me flowers. (He was, and we bought some bulbs to plant back in Delhi.)
Kashmir remains hot and angry. There are almost daily demontrations against the army and police's alleged involvement in the death of two young women. These demonstrastions, however, come after years of anger and violence. Justine Hardy's book is a fine introduction to what it is all about.
In these dog days of summer when the mercury soars and grid appears overloaded, there's a familiar routine I find myself in every afternoon. Somewhere around 3pm, trying to get some work done in my office, I find myself staring at the air-conditioner, urging it, begging it, to please keep going. The worst sound in an Indian summer is for the machine to come to a spluttering halt, indicating that the power has just gone.
In such circumstances - unless you have a diesel-powered generator - you're left with nothing but the back-up "inverter", essentially a car battery in the cupboard, that can power a lap-top, a light and feeble roof fan for a couple of hours.
I am well aware that I am one of the very lucky ones, of course. In my upmarket neighbourhood in south Delhi, where one of my neighbours is a state minister, the power cuts are reasonably short. Even during the power-crisis last month, the electricity was rarely off for more than one-and-a-half hours, and then just for two or three times a day. In some parts of the city and on the fringes, residents are somehow having to manage with power-cuts of 18 hours. People talk of constantly having to throw away food, of rationing the cold water from the fridge.
As I sat frying, I pondered that for a country with the skills, talent and global aspirations of India, it was a pretty poor show that the local authorities could not even manage to provide sufficient electricity for the capital. [Especially given the energy on tap if India was bold enough to become a pioneer in solar power in a way that no other country has done.)
But now I discover there may be more to it than that. A series of stories in this week's papers has revealed a possible reason as to why India's politicians are not doing more to tackle this problem; in short, it appears they don't suffer from power cuts themselves.
The articles have revealed that whereas the rest of Delhi is provided power by private companies (a decision having been taken to privastise supply several years ago), the so-called VIP or VVIP areas in the centre of the capital, including government offices and the Lutyens bungalows where the ministers, senior MPs and other top officials live, still get their power from a state-controlled supplier. What's more, the stories say that with three sources of power to turn to, the supply to these areas - including the part of the city where chief minister Sheila Dikshit has her official residence - never fails.
There's a footnote to all of this: why has India given up on the traditional designs and architectural features that once used to help keep people (or at least those who could afford them) cooler? There's a fascinating article about all of this posted on the 3quarksdaily website (hat-tip to the always readable Asian Window ) written by Aditya Dev Sood, founder of the Centre for Knowledge Societies in Delhi. After pondering the traditional and various ways of trying to keep cool in Delhi, he concludes: "The solution must be as integral to the architecture of the building as it is to the room, and it should involve the strategic location of moisture, greenery and forced ventilation through it. This, at any rate, is what a contemporary cultural-architectural response to Delhi's heat would have to look like -- a marriage of ingenuity with responsibility, informed of a thousand years of eloquent space-making within the city."
Earlier this year I was at Bangkok's main coach station catching an overnight ride up to the Thai-Burmese border town of Mae Sot. I was going primarily to interview some Karen war veterans who had fought with the British but who were now forced to live in refugee camps with little more than hand-outs. As I took my large, reclinable seat at the back of the bus I noticed a westerner, half asleep in the seat next to me. I assumed he was a backpacker heading out of town. But barely after a minute after sitting down I discovered, the snoozing traveller was a volunteer activist heading up to Mae Sot, to work on a project in some of the very same camps that I was due to visit.
This young activist - who I've been asked not to identify because of an ongoing project that for now means he needs to keep a low profile - and I quickly got talking, and it emerged he worked with some of the fine folk at Burma Campaign UK. He was friendly and enthusiastic and was clearly utterly dedicated to the cause of trying to raise the profile of the ongoing struggle for democracy in Burma and of the lives of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who now live in camps in Thailand. What particularly impressed me about this man, a freelance documentary filmmaker who studied at St Martin's, was that in his downtime he helped fund his passion and activism by working as a builder. He's is proof that you do not need a fancy title (or even a full time activist's job) to make a difference in this world.
What I did not know at the time was just what a terrific photographer he is as well. As it turns out he has just won second place in the well-considered PX3 photography competition organised in Paris. Suitably enough, he was chosen for his work on former Burmese political prisoners, a project that is still ongoing. His entry was entitled Even though I am free I am not. You can learn more about his work at his website here.
Today I called him on his mobile to congratulate him on his success (and to ask permission to use one of his images to go on this blog). There was something of a pause on the line that suggested he was not at home in the UK.
As it was he had just arrived back in Thailand to carry on working at the camps along the border. He is hoping his project will be completed by next year. "It's going to be massive," he laughed. Talk about dedication.
