Is Anything Happening? Page 7

  In April 1982, there was plenty going on in the Falkland Islands, those tiny British colonial outposts in the South Atlantic, more than 11,000 miles from the UK, but only about 300 miles from Argentina, which had long claimed them as its own. When the islands were captured by Argentine forces, Margaret Thatcher dispatched the Royal Navy to seize them back for the British crown, a task that was achieved with the loss of six hundred and forty-nine Argentines, two hundred and fifty-five British military personnel, and three Falkland Islanders. The war lasted seventy-four days from start to finish.

  I was dispatched to the Falklands (Malvinas to the Argentines) two years later, when all was quiet. My instructions were to ‘see what’s going on’. The most accurate answer would have been ‘not a lot’, but that does not make for great copy.

  As it turned out, the long flight south turned out to be a great deal more interesting than the islands themselves. We left from the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, which is, or was, a major international airport in its own right, complete with a terminal building, flight indicator boards and boarding announcements. From there, we flew to Ascension Island, another British colonial pin-prick stuck in the middle of the ocean, 1,000 miles from the coast of west Africa and 1,400 miles from the coast of Brazil. (It is said that one reporter who asked his newspaper’s travel department to book him tickets to Ascension found himself in Paraguay instead. The capital of Paraguay is Asunción – it is an easy mistake to make.)

  From Ascension, my journey became much more interesting. In the mid-1980s, there were no planes that could reach the Falklands without refuelling, and there were no suitable countries en route that would grant refuelling rights to British military aircraft. So the only way to get there was on board an RAF C-130 Hercules transport plane, a great lumbering beast of an aircraft that looked as if it would have difficulty making its way to the end of a runway, let alone lifting itself into the air. And then to refuel, twice, in mid-air.

  A Hercules is built neither for comfort nor for speed. We sat on simple webbing seats, extending along each side of the fuselage and facing into the body of the plane, which was piled high with military equipment and supplies. The roar of the aircraft’s four turbo-prop engines was deafening, and there was little light. Total flying time Ascension–Falklands: thirteen hours. In-flight entertainment: zero.

  When it was time for the mid-air refuelling, I was allowed up on the flight deck to watch how it was done. The procedure was not designed for those of a nervous disposition. The tanker plane approached us from behind and then seemed to hover above us, frighteningly close, positioning itself so that an extendable hose could be lowered towards us. The Hercules pilot then had to manoeuvre his plane to within 100 feet of the tanker, enabling the rigid fuel-receiving probe that poked up from above the cockpit to make contact with the end of the tanker’s hose. It was like watching two flying elephants trying to have sex.

  Sometimes, I was told, if they got it just slightly wrong, the fuel-receiving probe would snap off. I decided not to inquire what would happen next.

  But I did get another chance to experience the joy of flying in a Hercules when the RAF offered to take me on one of their aerial patrols over the islands. They flew low over the water, checking that no rogue Argentine warships had been foolish enough to venture back into British territorial waters.

  ‘Come and sit next to me on the flight deck,’ said the pilot. ‘You’ll have a great view.’

  Then, with just a hint of a glint in his eye: ‘Have you ever flown a plane? Why not have a go?’

  I declined with as much grace as I could. Somehow I did not think that my first ever flying lesson should be at the controls of a giant RAF transport plane. But then he took his hands off his control stick and pointed at the one in front of me: ‘You’re in charge. Grab hold of it.’

  Perhaps it was a joke. I never found out. But when I gingerly pushed the stick forward, and then forward a bit more, the plane’s nose dipped alarmingly towards the ocean below, and the pilot quickly took control again. When we were back on terra firma, I apologised to the rest of the crew, but they simply grinned broadly. I doubt that it was the first, or the last, time that they enjoyed terrifying a clueless civilian by enticing them onto the flight deck.

  The place to stay in the Falklands was the Upland Goose Hotel in Port Stanley. Not because it was the best hotel in town, but because it was the only hotel in town. (It no longer exists, having recently been converted into apartments.) It was comfortable enough and only a short-ish walk along the gale-buffeted main street up to the Cable and Wireless station with its massive satellite dish and the only international telephone connection in the entire territory. (I was taken aback to read recently that one of the Upland Goose’s successor hotels now has Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi? In the Falklands?)

  They used to say that the Falklands were the ideal place to settle if you were likely to find life in New Zealand too stressful. The islanders were known to the British soldiers stationed there as ‘Bennies’, after the simple-minded handyman Benny Hawkins, a character in the then-popular ITV soap opera Crossroads. The islanders returned the compliment by calling the soldiers ‘Wenneyes’, because of their habit of starting every conversation with the words ‘When I was in Cyprus…’ or ‘When I was in Belize…’

  After a week there, I was close to despair and sorely tempted to send a William Boot-style cable back to London: ‘EVERYTHING FINE HERE NO PROBLEMS WEATHER WINDY SHALL I COME HOME?’ But I knew that I had to come up with something a bit better. Two thousand words better, in fact. My report began:

  Britain is spending £1 million a day in the Falkland Islands to ensure that time stands still. No one knows which way to move, so no one moves at all. There is no more talk of a new beginning: instead they talk of how to slow a decline which saw the colony’s gross domestic product slump by 25 per cent in the years before the Argentine invasion. The Falklands were dying even before that cataclysmic day two years ago – and all the signs are that they are dying still.12

  Little did I know then – although to be fair, little did anyone know then – that within just a few years, the sale of squid fishing licences to international fisheries companies would give birth to an economic boom. The licences now generate roughly 35 per cent of the islands’ annual GDP; sheep-farming, which used to be the islands’ main economic activity, accounts for a mere 2 per cent. Income per head of population (admittedly there are still fewer than three thousand people living on the islands) is now higher than in the UK. It just goes to show how accurate is one of my favourite quotations, variously attributed either to the economist Ezra Solomon or to J. K. Galbraith: ‘The sole function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.’

  Look up Shangri-La on Wikipedia and you will learn that it is a fictional place, a mystical valley synonymous with paradise on earth, as described in the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton. But I can tell you different, because I have been there. In reality, it is called the Panjshir Valley and it is located in Afghanistan, north of Kabul, just off the main highway that leads to the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the Salang Tunnel.

  Turn right off the highway about two hours out of Kabul and soon you enter a narrow gorge, with the river Panjshir flowing at the bottom and jagged cliff faces rising vertically as far as the eye can see. When I drove along it in 2002, just a few months after the US-led invasion that had defeated the Taliban, the road was little more than a deeply rutted dirt track, hugging the cliff face precariously and with vertiginous drops to the valley floor.

  But suddenly the gorge opened out into a much wider valley, green and lush, with wheat fields and apple orchards, an exact depiction of what I had always imagined Shangri-La to look like. There was just one sight that I had not expected to see: lines and lines of tanks and other military vehicles, neatly parked in fields along the roadside.

  Here, safely out of harm’s way, was the bulk of the Afghan army’s weaponry. Mohammad Qasim Fahim, the inter
im defence minister, was also the de facto leader of Afghanistan’s Tajiks, who are the dominant ethnic group in the Panjshir region – and he was making sure that he had what he needed to defend the Tajik heartland. Fahim had taken over as the commander of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance after the assassination of the country’s most powerful anti-Taliban resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud just two days before the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington.*

  Although the Panjshir Valley has a well-deserved reputation as an impregnable redoubt of the Tajiks, having never been occupied either by the Soviet Red Army or by the Taliban, my producer Craig Swan and I were keen to be out of the valley by nightfall. Apart from any other considerations, we were not keen to be driven back along the deeply rutted road through the gorge after dark. Our driver told us not to worry: if we were still in the valley when the sun went down, it would be easy to find a local villager to offer us shelter for the night.

  We told him that was good to know, but our firm preference was to be back in Kabul by bedtime. What we should have realised was that he would interpret our wish as a challenge to his driving skills – and that he would therefore be determined, come what may, to get us out of the valley by sunset. So we raced back down the valley at dizzying speed, negotiating hairpin bends and deep potholes with reckless abandon. The fact that you are reading these words tells you that we made it back in one piece. But our expedition to Shangri-La could have ended rather differently.

  So too could our decision to drive through the Salang Tunnel, built by the Soviets in the 1960s and at the time of its construction the highest road tunnel in the world. It had been badly damaged by fighting between the Taliban and rebel fighters after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and had been reopened only after the Taliban were overthrown in 2001. When we reached it in June 2002, after several hours of negotiating pot-holed mountain roads, past blown-up bridges and burnt-out Soviet tanks, we discovered that to say it had ‘reopened’ was perhaps a slight exaggeration.

  True, it was now just possible to steer very carefully round the piles of rubble at the southern entrance and drive at snail’s pace through the 1.5-mile-long tunnel. There was no lighting, and water was pouring through the tunnel roof. Our driver seemed no happier than we were as we crawled through the blackness; he was even less happy when, on reaching the northern end, we told him that we now wanted to turn round and immediately return whence we had come.

  I admit that I have a weakness for exotic-sounding places. I still hope one day to get to Timbuktu and Ouagadougou, if only because of the beauty of their names. So I did not need much persuading when it was suggested by a BBC colleague, Catherine Miller, in 2006 that a reporting assignment to Nepal, where a ten-year-long civil war was just ending, might be combined with a side trip to the neighbouring Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.

  To fly from the Nepalese capital Kathmandu to the Bhutanese airport of Paro is, like mid-air refuelling aboard an RAF Hercules, not for the faint-hearted. The flight itself is breathtaking, as it takes you along the highest ridges of the Himalayan peaks, including Everest. The landing, on the other hand, is seriously scary. (Some sources claim that only eight pilots in the world are qualified to land in Paro.)

  The descent starts as the plane threads its way through a gap in the mountains and follows the course of the Paro River in the valley below. But then, moments from touch-down, the plane takes a sharp right as the runway comes into view, followed by a sharp left just 100 feet above the valley floor to line up with the runway itself. (Type the words ‘Paro landing’ into YouTube to see for yourself.13) If the weather is bad, you do not fly to Bhutan – it is as simple as that.

  Bhutan has its own claim to be regarded as a real-life Shangri-La; it is the world’s only Buddhist kingdom and its Himalayan scenery is truly spectacular. But, for reasons that will become clearer later in this book, I did not fall in love with Bhutan, and I was not sorry to leave.

  The Amazonian rainforest of Brazil is another place that has always been high on my list of places that must be visited. It was, therefore, fortunate that my editor at The World Tonight for more than a decade, Alistair Burnett, had a deep interest in Brazil and was determined that it should receive far more attention than most of the British media were prepared to allow it. His judgement was spot-on: in the first decade of this century, the Brazilian economy was one of the most vibrant in the world, its charismatic President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became a global superstar, and it was awarded in quick succession the rights to stage both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. No one could argue that Brazil did not matter.

  But was a rapidly growing economy compatible with guardianship of one of the planet’s most important rainforests, uniquely critical as an absorber of carbon dioxide and therefore a crucial component in the fight to contain climate change? Let’s send Lustig to find out.

  And so it was that in June 2011 I set out with producer-photographer Beth McLeod and sound engineer-videographer Phil Zentner on a road trip deep into the Amazon, and across the mighty Xingu River to meet the indigenous Kayapo people and their leader, Chief Raoni. They had been campaigning for years against plans to build the huge Belo Monte dam upriver, a project that they said would destroy their livelihoods and have a devastating impact on the environment. It was a perfect example of the balancing act that the Brazilian government had to perform: on the one hand to legislate for continued economic growth and to meet a growing global demand for its food and minerals; on the other, to acknowledge the urgent need for effective environmental protection measures.

  Raoni certainly qualifies as one of my more memorable interviewees. When he greeted us, he was bare-chested and wearing just a pair of red shorts. His lower lip was distended by the insertion of a wooden disc, perhaps four inches in diameter. Our conversation was conducted with the help of not one but two interpreters, one translating from Kayapo into Portuguese, and the second from Portuguese into English. Despite the difficulties, we got on splendidly.

  I was somewhat taken aback, however, when we asked the villagers if there were any musicians among them and whether we could record some Kayapo music. A flute player was duly summoned, but demanded $100 before he would play a note. It quickly became clear that we were not the first media visitors who had found our way to their village, remote as it was. My first reaction was that we were being ripped off, but then I thought again. After all, musicians the world over expect to be paid when they perform, so why should a Kayapo flautist be any different?

  * Fahim remained a powerful figure in Afghan politics throughout his life. He was the subject of several assassination attempts and died of a heart attack in 2014.

  CHAPTER 5

  DEPARTURES AND ARRIVALS

  There are two invaluable rules for a special correspondent – Travel Light and Be Prepared.

  SCOOP, EVELYN WAUGH

  MUCH AS I HAVE always loved travelling, I have always hated airports. Unlike railway stations, or docks, which are full of the spirit of adventure, of setting off into the unknown, airports are sterile and characterless. If you were to remove the signage from almost any major international airport, you would have great difficulty identifying which country you were in. It is as if they are all built from the same template. And, for reasons that I have never understood, they all seem to feature an Irish-themed pub.

  In my experience, airports equal stress. For a reporter, often travelling at short notice to a place where all hell is breaking loose, not always in possession of the correct documentation (visa, press accreditation etc.) and usually carrying a lot of heavy and deeply suspicious communications equipment, the stressometer can sometimes rise to alarming levels.

  Early morning, Stansted airport. I am on my way to The Hague to cover yet another tedious EU summit meeting. I check in, bleary-eyed, semi-comatose.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. This doesn’t seem to be your passport.’ Suddenly, I am wide awake. I snatch it back and, sure enough, I have picked up my son’s passport by m
istake and there is now no time to rush back home to swap it for my own. There is only one possible way for me to get to The Hague: if I can arrange for the Dutch immigration authorities to send a fax to Stansted, guaranteeing that they will not turn me back on arrival, the airline will allow me to board the plane even if I am not in possession of a valid passport.

  Somehow (this is before the days of mobile phones), from a public payphone in the Stansted terminal, I get through to the head of immigration at Schiphol airport. He roars with laughter when I recount my tale of woe, promises to send the required fax and tells me to ask for him personally when I land. He meets me at the passport control desk, hands me a wonderfully impressive laissez-passer and sends me on my way to the EU summit.

  All that remains is to negotiate my way back into the UK at the end of the assignment. The man at UK immigration listens carefully as I tell my unlikely tale. ‘You mean to tell me that you got through Schiphol without a passport?’ I confirm that this is indeed the case. ‘Well done, sir. I congratulate you.’ And I am on my way home. But since then, I have always been very careful to check which passport I have with me before I leave home.

  In fact, I learned very early in my career how important a passport can be. My first overseas posting was to Madrid in the early 1970s, when the Fascist dictator General Francisco Franco was in charge. Any sign of opposition to his rule was ruthlessly crushed, but that did not stop left-wing students regularly taking to the streets to protest against his regime.

  On one occasion, I found myself caught up in the midst of one such demonstration in the company of a splendid old-school BBC correspondent called Gordon Martin, then diplomatic correspondent for the BBC World Service. As the grey-uniformed riot police (known as los grises) bore down on us with batons raised, he whipped out his UK passport (then still the dark blue, hard-covered version), held it aloft as if it were a magic talisman and shouted at the top of his voice, in English: ‘British citizens!’