Adventures in Correspondentland (33 page)

The very soldiers underwriting our security inside Trincomalee instantly made us targets as soon as we drove outside – a classic ‘out of the frying pan into the firing line' scenario. What made it all the more worrying was that the Tigers would never be as hapless as the JVP. As in Afghanistan, driving through the countryside was a total crapshoot, but without the benefits of American armour-plating.

Fortunately on this occasion, our luck held, and by nightfall we had made it back to the safety of Mahogany Ridge: that place beloved of foreign correspondents, more commonly known as the bar.

Heartless though it is to say of a country threatened with extinction, the Maldives always offered light relief from the
battlefields of South Asia. Certainly, there was a ‘winning the lottery' feel to the call from an editor in London suggesting I head down there at my earliest convenience to cover its slow inundation.

It was the period, pre-Copenhagen, when global-warming stories were the easiest of sells. Still, even we thought a trip to this exotic paradise was pushing things a little far. We arrived in the capital, Malé, an island city protected from the rising seawaters by a three-metre-high wall, just in time for the celebrations marking Maldivean independence from Britain in the mid-1960s.

Part commemoration, part carnival, it was a peculiarly disjointed event that featured the Maldivean army marching in ceremonial dress, hundreds of schoolchildren dressed in bumblebee outfits, and music from Barry Manilow. One minute, it was ‘Gaumii Salaam', the Maldivean national anthem, played to a thumping martial beat; the next, inexplicably, it was ‘Copacabana'.

The country's then president was Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, a bespectacled autocrat who had become Asia's longest serving head of government by crushing internal dissent and imprisoning his political opponents on distant atolls. Unknown to most honeymooners and tourists, the Maldives was pretty much a police state back then, and everywhere we went government spies followed obtrusively behind, despite all the palm trees offering cover.

That night, however, the president looked more like a maracas player given the night off from a visiting cruise ship, dressed as he was in slacks and a Hawaiian shirt. Due to interview him in his presidential palace the following morning, I made the mistake of interpreting his outfit as a sartorial cue. I therefore turned up looking ‘beach casual', in sandals and a polo shirt. Regrettably, he walked through the door turned out in a grey business suit and woven silk tie: ‘head of state formal'.

The president faced one of the most wretched policy challenges of any leader in the world. As much as 80 per cent of the Maldives' 1200 islands and atolls were no more than a metre above the waves, and government scientists predicted sea-level rises of some 90 centimetres by the end of the century. Within a hundred years, most of the Maldives was set to become uninhabitable, and plans were already in place to evacuate its entire population of 360,000 people.

The government was encouraging forestation to prevent beach erosion and pushing ahead with a plan to clean litter and debris from the country's coral reefs, a natural barrier against tidal surges. In the country's schools, lessons in environmental science were given the same priority as writing and arithmetic. However, as the president was all too aware, the fate of his country rested in the hands of leaders in Washington, Beijing, Delhi and the capitals of the other major polluters.

However authoritarian at home, it was a measure of the president's powerlessness abroad that he had written to George W. Bush urging the US president to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and not even received a reply. ‘What happens here today will happen somewhere else tomorrow,' the president told us pleadingly. ‘So it is not just the Maldives and three-hundred thousand people. It is the global population which is being affected.'

In Kandholhudhoo, a densely populated atoll in the north of the Maldives, we witnessed the helplessness of residents in the face of the inundation of their homes and businesses. Every fortnight, they were flooded by tidal surges, and the force of the waves had recently punctured a three-metre hole in the atoll's concrete defences.

Climate change had made obsolete a centuries-old weather
guide called the Nakiy used by local fishermen, and two-thirds of the local residents had volunteered to evacuate the island over the coming decade. It made sense to leave now and rebuild elsewhere, because the islanders were certain to face mandatory evacuations in the years to come.

All this produced strong material for our ‘world in environmental peril' day – these kinds of theme days were becoming very popular in television news – even if the power of our reports was dented a little by the fact that I appeared live from a low-lying atoll in Bermuda shorts looking as if I were presenting a holiday program or trying to flog Maldivean time-share. Still, though heavily outnumbered by the torrent of abusive emails sent by envious colleagues in London, there was praise from the president's office. He was delighted that we had shone a spotlight, however briefly, on his stricken land.

So appreciative was he of our efforts, in fact, that, as we waited in the departure lounge at Malé Airport to board our flight the next morning, one of his minions rushed up to us with three exquisitely crafted mahogany boxes embossed with the gold presidential seal. All of us immediately thought it was diamond-encrusted Rolex time, and we started to wonder how we could explain away these gifts both to the suits in London and customs at Delhi Airport. Then, our BBC consciences kicked in – that sense of incorruptibility enshrined in the rule that correspondents should never accept gifts. Here, though, I hope you will forgive me for breaching this diktat, for in that felt inlay box I saw another trophy for my office back in Delhi. It was irresistible bounty: six cans of tuna marinaded in tomato sauce.

The bus was ready now to leave – or the ‘caravan of peace', as the Indians preferred to call it. Miraculously, all 24 of its passengers were prepared to risk the journey, despite being the targets of the attack on the tourism centre the previous afternoon. At Srinagar's cricket oval, where in the early 1980s local crowds cheered the visiting West Indians rather than the Indian national team – an act of disloyalty that foreshadowed the insurgency against Delhi – hundreds gathered to see them off.

In celebration, chefs prepared a traditional Kashmiri feast. The Indian Army deployed a bagpipe band, wearing Highland berets and tartan. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appeared with a Formula One-style chequered flag to wave the bus on its way. In Muzaffarabad, the administrative capital of Azad Kashmir – Free Kashmir, as the Pakistanis called it – the departure was less formal but more boisterous.

To mark ‘the day of the bus', crowds clogged the streets, men clambered onto the rooftops, and garlands and rose petals were showered on the passengers as they stepped onto an air-conditioned coach painted with a special green and yellow livery. ‘Today is the day that another Berlin Wall will come down,' shouted Waqar Amer, who now worked as a tour operator after serving for decades as a colonel in the Pakistani Army. All along the 62-kilometre route between Muzaffarabad and the Line of Control, well-wishers came out to cheer, whistle, clap and sing. ‘Long live peace!' they shouted. ‘Long live friendship. Kashmir is one!'

The Muzaffarabad bus was the first to reach Kaman Post, the steel bridge that marked the crossing between Indian-and Pakistan-administered Kashmir – the Peace Bridge, as it was called. That week, Indian soldiers had painted its steel girders
in the saffron, white and green of the Indian tricolour but then had been forced by the Pakistanis to redecorate in a more neutral white. The Indians had also constructed a grand ceremonial arch on their side of the bridge that was far more imposing than the Pakistanis' more modest gateway.

This was much more than the usual South Asian one-upmanship. Primarily, it was intended to show that the Line of Control should now be seen as a border, fixed and immutable, and that Indian-administered Kashmir would never be part of Pakistan.

To drive home the point, the Indians had built a reception centre, with a manicured lawn, ornamental garden furniture, antique Victorian-style lamp posts that looked like they had come from the set of a Sherlock Holmes film and what were being touted as the best public toilets in the entire subcontinent. As the status-quo power, the opening up of the bus route unquestionably favoured the Indians. It explained why the Indian official delegation in Srinagar included not only Dr Singh but also Sonia Gandhi, and why not a single Pakistani official had travelled to Muzaffarabad to wave off the bus.

Whatever the diplomatic ramifications, the prime beneficiaries were the Kashmiris, who walked slowly across the bridge. People who had not seen their relatives for 35 years. Brothers and sisters who had been separated at birth. Grandparents who had never cast eyes on their grandchildren, or even heard them speak or laugh. Now, as they reboarded their coach on the other side of the Peace Bridge, they were within 160 kilometres of meeting them. Ever since the first Kashmir war in 1947 – the year of partition – the road to Srinagar had been laid with anti-tank mines to repel a Pakistani incursion. Now, the mines had been cleared away, and
the Indian Army stood at the side of road, in 50-metre intervals, to protect the coach from being turned into a coffin on wheels. Panicky rumours of a jihadist ambush proved to be just that, and while the militants did manage to explode a grenade, it went off without causing any injuries.

Srinagar was in near darkness when the bus finally arrived, since shops and businesses had shut down for the day because of a strike called by Kashmiri separatists in protest at the restoration of the bus link, which they had interpreted as a sign that Kashmir would remain forever divided. Yet there was still a mood of jubilation at the convention centre on the edge of Dal Lake, where the bus disgorged its passengers and the family reunions unfolded. In the embrace of his brother for the first time since the late-1960s, Shah Ahmed could not contain his emotions. ‘I have waited so long for this moment,' he cried, as he held a bouquet of flowers with one hand and hugged his brother with the other. ‘Thank you, Pervez Musharraf. Thank you, Manmohan Singh. You have united a family today.'

A definite watershed moment, the bus trip fuelled hopes of a less violent future in Kashmir, but other corners of South Asia were aflame. In Sri Lanka, where the ceasefire survived in name only, the Tamil Tigers had effectively resumed their armed struggle. In August 2005, they had even been audacious enough to assassinate the country's foreign minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar. An ethnic Tamil who had always been a hate-figure for the rebels, he was killed at his private residence – shot four times in the head and chest at the side of his pool after finishing his Friday-evening swim. So expert was the sniper attack that it had the feel of the opening of a Robert Ludlum thriller. More ominously for Sri Lanka, it also had the feel of the resumption of all-out war.

Nepal, meanwhile, was in the throes of revolution. More than a year after King Gyanendra had declared a state of emergency, he was confronted not only by the Maoist insurgency in the countryside but also by tens of thousands of demonstrators on the streets of Kathmandu burning effigies and shouting ‘Hang the king'. Still able to command the loyalty of his army, Gyanendra had adopted the tactics of embattled autocratic monarchs down the ages, which was to order his troops to fire live ammunition on his subjects.

Conversely, the mob had also learnt the lesson of successful revolutionaries: to march towards the gunfire. Gyanendra was holed up in his royal palace – a modern pale-pink building in the centre of Kathmandu with architectural echoes of a southern Californian mega-church – fending off appeals from one-time allies, such as America, for the restoration of democracy.

His son, Crown Prince Paras, was rumoured to be touring the capital in a helicopter, issuing shoot-to-kill orders to the troops down below. As the civil unrest escalated, the king turned his palace into a bunker and imposed a strict shoot-on-sight curfew in the capital. If anyone stepped onto the streets in the centre of the city, they risked being killed by his troops. Instead, the protesters amassed outside the curfew zone on the carriageway encircling the capital in what had the makings of a Ring Road Revolution.