David Hickey

David Hickey is a London-based journalist. This is his personal blog. Follow him/contact him on Twitter: @davidahickey

[davidahickey]

UK chief scientific adviser backs Tepco's handling of stricken Fukushima nuclear plant

On the same day that foreign journalists got a peek inside the wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant last week, Japanese media in London were briefed by one of the UK government’s chief scientific advisers about his recent visit to the same place. Prof Robin Grimes (pictured), who had been part of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies which provided official advice on the 2011 Fukushima disaster to the Government, visited Fukushima Dai-ichi on Oct 10 as an independent academic.

His visit took place just weeks before the plant’s troubled operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) begins removing more than 1,500 highly radioactive spent fuel rods, each containing 80 uranium rods, from the pool inside the No 4 reactor building. Some experts have said that the removal of the fuel assemblies, which must be moved on because of the risk posed by natural disasters, is the most dangerous stage of the clean-up to date. Even the chairman of Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority, Shunichi Tanaka, reportedly told Tepco’s president Naomi Hirose that the process “involves a very large risk potential.” But speaking last week, the Foreign Office's chief scientific adviser Grimes gave his backing to Tepco’s clean-up last Thursday, describing its work as “impressive”. “Do I think that they’re doing a competent job in difficult circumstances? Do I think that they’ve come up with innovative and interesting ways of dealing with a unique situation? Yes, I think they have,” Grimes said. “They’ve had issues with leaking tanks [of contaminated water], issues of water running through the site and water, washing in rainstorms, at the surface level, of water moving underground in and out of the reactor buildings. They’ve had to build concrete wall defences, they’ve got the frozen groundwater defences – they’re doing some pretty damn innovative stuff. And I think it’s impressive. And I think they’re doing as well as anyone could have done.” Grimes also said it was “amazing” how low the radiation levels in the reactors he visited last month were. “They were very good at giving me a handheld monitor so I could look at the dose rates I was getting. The highest level of radiation I was subject to would have meant that if I had been there for 24 hours for - I think it was something like 15 days on the trot - then I would have picked up my yearly radiation dose, and that was the very highest amount I was subject to. And of course you’re not at the point for very much of the time; you’re not getting anywhere close that a worker would be allowed to have in a year. It was amazing just how low those levels were.” As for Tepco’s inability to prevent the flow of contaminated water into the Pacific, Grimes said the amount of contaminated water getting out of the site is “very small.” “Tepco have done some incredibly interesting and innovative engineering to make sure the leaks aren’t significant from the point of view of the effect on human beings, so that it does not pose a hazard to people. And that’s the key. But you will continue over the years occasionally see a few drops through the ceiling, that’s inevitable.” But Grimes could not say with 100 per cent certainty that Tepco have finally got to grips with the situation. "I will never ever say a 100 per cent as an engineer. There’s simply no such thing. You understand my reluctance to say 100 per cent, because I’m a scientist."

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A digital portrait tribute to Harry Patch The longest surviving combat veteran of World War I, Harry Patch, has been honoured in a work featuring his voice and the music of Radiohead. The artwork, produced by David Tucker, was commissioned by the Not Forgotten Association to mark 100 years since the beginning of World War I. In the work, Patch can be heard recalling the moment he was hit by a shell and lost three friends. "That upsets me more than anything," Patch says.

Patch died in Wells, Somerset, aged 111 in 2009.

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‘I was a walking corpse’

Head bowed, eyes down and arms planted rigidly by her side, Jihyun Park calmly recalled how she was handcuffed to the bed of her detention camp in Tumun, Kangwon Province, strip-searched for drugs or money, forced to give up her shoes and outer clothing and consigned to hard labour, ploughing the fields by hand from 4.30 in the morning to 8 at night. “I was one of 40 women,” Park explained last week in central London to a UN panel leading an inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea. “We had to make sure the officers were provided with food so we prepared the corn and took care of vegetables. Our jobs included [working] the hills.” Thought of as escape risks, the women were not allowed to wear shoes. “The road was rough,” said Park. “It was difficult for four women, two of us at the front pulling a cart, two at the back pushing. It was about a tonne in weight, even as we lost some of the load on the way. There must have been some broken glass or human faeces being used as fertilizer [on the ground] and that infected my leg. On another occasion, Park was forced to wear a bloodied hand towel that she had been using as a sanitary towel, which were banned on the camp. Park’s crime had been to use drinking water to clean it. The year was 2004. Park had escaped several years earlier to China, to where she had been trafficked, forced into marriage and given birth. Arrested and repatriated to North Korea, she had left behind her young son. Park eventually escaped North Korea for a second time, returning to China via a broker. Her son had been living with his grandmother. “When I escaped I called and asked to speak to my son. He got on the phone but he didn’t say a word and for about a minute he just hung on to the phone. The next day, the same thing happened. And the third time I tried I said, ‘this is your mother!’ And then he finally said just one word, ‘Mummy!’ And he started crying. When she was finally reunited with her son, Park told the inquiry that he looked as though he had never had a bath. “My son was worse than a kotjebi (homeless child). He was covered in grime.” Eventually, Park decided to leave China once again, this time with her son, then five, for what she describes as her “final journey”. But her leg had still not fully recovered. “If I was arrested again going towards South Korea this would have meant death. I thought this was the last time I could try. There were nine of us in this group and I couldn’t tell them about my leg condition. The others were ahead of us, crossing the Mongolian border. I had my son with me and I didn’t want to tell him we were really lagging back because I didn’t want him to get scared. At this time we were still in China and we saw others crossing the Mongolian border. “Somebody came over and he just grabbed my son and started giving him a piggy-back and started running and held my hand. I didn’t know who he was and I just decided to go along and was running and we crossed the Mongolian border.” This would be the man that Park would later marry and settle with in Manchester, north-west England. “He had noticed this mother and child were lagging behind so he had crossed the China and Mongolian border only to save us, risking his own life.”                                                            ****

The United Nations’ interest in human rights abuses in North Korea is not a new concern. It created a Special Rapporteur for human rights for that country nearly a decade ago. Yet the UN appears to be having no influence in Pyongyang and with the country’s leaders refusing either to allow UN representatives in or to cooperate with this latest Commission of Inquiry on human rights, the future of the 100,000-200,000 prisoners or detainees in North Korea's camps looks bleak. So, what is the point? The commission’s chair, Michael Kirby, said that once he has reported back with his findings to the Human Rights Council in Geneva in March next year, “it is for the UN institutions to respond cooperatively in doing what needs to be done.” Kirby is candid about what that might mean. “[It] doesn’t involve punishment. We have no blue helmets to deploy. But it will involve responding, it may involve technical assistance and outreach to try to bring North Korea back into the community of international nations.” However, the panel is reportedly consulting legal experts on the possibility of extending the remit of the International Criminal Court. North Korea, like China is not a party to the Rome Statute that set up the ICC. But the United Nations Security Council, of which China is a permanent member, could move to extend the court’s remit. Complicating matters, Kirby suggested China’s own treatment of North Korean defectors could also be called to account. It would be inflicting a second tragedy on defectors such as Park if the only response of the international community to their brave testimony is more of the same “outreach” that has yielded so little result to date.

[davidahickey]

Obama's chief climate envoy: Norms more effective than rules

Todd Stern outlines US long-term goals ahead of next month’s UN climate talks in Warsaw.

The Obama administration’s chief climate negotiator this week urged his counterparts to be “creative and flexible” in fashioning a new international agreement by a deadline of 2015 in Paris.

Ahead of next month’s UN climate talks in Warsaw and in the run-up to Paris in two years time, Todd Stern said on Tuesday that such an agreement will need “a supple architecture” that would allow countries to set their own nationally determined mitigation commitments rather than targets thrashed out at the negotiating table.

Such a deal in Paris, which has the goal of setting a roadmap that is aimed at avoiding 2C warming, should not be built on rules of compliance and penalties, Stern said. “An agreement that is animated by the progressive development of norms and expectations rather than by the hard edge of law, compliance and penalty has a much better chance of working.”

Such a view could put the US in collision course with Small Island States and the group of Least Developed Countries that have traditionally sought tougher targets.

For Stern, a future climate change agreement should not use 30-year-old categories that assigned countries as Annex 1 (industrialised nations such as the US, the UK, Japan and Russia and Non-Annex 1 (developing nations) as listed in 1992 since their material circumstances have changed. “China is already the world’s second largest historic emitter,” Stern said. Negotiators that come to Warsaw with a bill for compensation will go home disappointed. “Lectures about compensation, reparations and the like will produce nothing but antipathy among developed country policy makers and their publics,” Stern said.

A new agreement that has two different systems on relevant issues like mitigation, transparency, accounting – one for developed countries, one for developing – would be unacceptable to the US, Stern added, while stating that there was still a place for the UNFCCC principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR), which centres on the obligations of poor and rich nations.

Finally, Stern warned that the US’ fiscal situation means that there will be no major change in levels of public funding. Instead greater private investment, leveraged by public money or public policy, should be unlocked, describing this is an “enormous opportunity,” without going into any more detail.

Stern was speaking at a two-day conference organised by London-based think-tank Chatham House titled Delivering Concrete Climate Change Action: Towards 2015. Read his entire speech here.

[davidahickey]

Revisting Wikileaks' Spy Files amid Europe's privacy uproar

EU leaders protesting over reported US surveillance need to look closer to home. 

I’ve not yet seen We Steal Secrets, which arrived in UK cinemas earlier this month. But it seems clear that Alex Gibney’s documentary on the whistleblowing (I don’t use that word lightly) website’s story is very much entwined with that of its founder, Julian Assange. Gibney clearly has a thing for flawed central characters – he previously directed a documentary on former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and is currently finishing another on disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong. But whereas Armstrong is talking to Gibney on that story, the director got no such cooperation from Assange, the subject of an arrest warrant issued by Swedish authorities in August 2010 over allegations of sexual assault. Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after being granted political asylum in August 2012.

According to We Steal Secrets, Assange demands off-camera a million dollars for a face-to-face chat. 

The documentary has been the subject of a near line-by-line rebuttal by Wikileaks. Unlike Gibney, I have managed to interview Assange on camera, and I didn’t have to pay a million dollars for the privilege. It was in December 2011 at London’s City University and the audience was made up largely of foreign journalists and students.  'Global totalitarian surveillance state' Assange was at the press conference flanked by Eric King of lobby group Privacy International and Gavin MacFadyen of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, among others. Sarah Harrison, the Wikileaks lawyer currently assisting the US National Security Agency whistleblowing contractor Edward Snowden in Moscow, was also there. It had been months since Wikileaks had last released anything of note, the Guantanamo Files. Assange et al were at City to launch the Spy Files, a database of documents from unregulated intelligence contractors that the Wikileaks founder claimed made up the “global totalitarian surveillance state”.  

Wikileaks said the documents showed Western firms not only selling mass surveillance equipment to Western intelligence agencies but also exporting surveillance technology to despotic regimes. France's Amesys sold its internet analysis software to Muammer Gaddafi's Libya in 2007. Later it emerged that when Egyptian activists raided state security offices, they found documents revealing that UK firm Gamma - like Amesys, mentioned in the Spy Files - had in 2010 offered Hosni Mubarak's regime spy technology. 

Political opponents targeted After the press conference I was told by a Wikileaker that there might be an opportunity to interview Assange on camera and was told to wait outside a certain room. So I made my way out of the lecture theatre where the press conference had taken place, along a corridor thronging with the lunchtime rush of students and to the room for my audience with Assange.

Wearing a nondescript grey shirt and dark suit and with his scruffy scraggly white hair nearly down to his shoulders, Assange sat in front of a screen adorned with the inverted logos of Visa and Bank of America and other firms that had suspended processing payments for WikiLeaks when the site went public with classified material leaked by Bradley Manning.

There was a Wikileaker staffer with Assange. I was told because of the number of interview requests I could ask only one question. So I asked him a very obvious one about why the Spy Files mattered. “This is an industry which spring up after 9/11 and has been devising equipment to intercept en masse the telecommunications of people,” Assange said in measured tones. “That includes statements by some of these [surveillance] companies that they target political opponents and that the entire telecommunications traffic of a country may be permanently recorded. 'Gaddafi was quoted 10m euros' Assange continued: “Computational power and the inexpensiveness of hard drives and the speed with which information can travel means that these companies now can cheaply store all SMS messages and all voice traffic and all emails. It is not expensive anymore. Gaddafi was quoted 10million euros by Amesys for the [surveillance] system which was deployed in Libya."

When I tried to ask him a very basic follow-up, Assange cut me off and said with a half-smile that I’d had my one question.  I had another go but that was it – interview over. My five minutes in the court of Julian Assange was over. Overshadowed by the serious allegations of sexual assault against Assange, the Spy Files did not garner spades of coverage at the time. The recent NSA leaks by Snowden, suggesting the agency is collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans and has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and others conducting mass surveillance on foreign communications traffic, make them worth revisiting. Germany's federal data protection commissioner Peter Schaar told the Guardian it was unacceptable for the US authorities to have access to EU citizens' data.

'This technology is dangerous' But EU leaders should be looking closer to home as well. Sales of Europe’s surveillance technology could still be infringing human rights overseas, as this Financial Times story suggests ("Eavesdroppers thrive despite privacy uproar across Europe", July 2 2013). Foreign secretary William Hague has conceded that the law governing software exports was a grey area. Only last month, at the ISS World Trade Show in Prague, another European firm detailed in the Spy Files, the venture-capital funded Hacking Team of Italy, showcased its remotely controlled spyware capable of tapping encrypted communications such as Skype calls.

Privacy International's King told the FT: "Lawful interception can only happen when there is the rule of law. [The export of] arms, weapons, bulletproof vests - even flares - are controlled. But surveillance equipment is not. And in the wrong hands this technology is just as dangerous." Further reading: James Bamford's piece for the March 2012 issue of Wired magazine, The Black Box - online here - on the NSA building a massive surveillance centre in the Utah desert.  

[davidahickey]

Absolutely love how joyfully bonkers the British public is on occasions like this.

— Isabel Hardman (@IsabelHardman)

July 23, 2013

The scene just prior to the unveiling of the #royalbaby easel earlier in front of Buckingham Palace. Bonkers indeed.  

[davidahickey]

Lindo Wing ennui. #royalbaby (at St. Mary's Hospital)

[davidahickey]

Why the IOC skirted over Istanbul's security dilemma

Istanbul’s 2020 Olympic presentation took place last Wednesday just weeks after anti-government protests that had been met with a violent crackdown by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Yet, far from facing a tough grilling on such a heavy-handed reaction by the police, the International Olympic Committee electorate skipped over the issue of security.

Each of the three bid cities’ presentations, which took place behind closed doors in front of 86 IOC members, were followed by a 45-minute Q&A session. Yet several IOC members I spoke to after Istanbul’s presentation said there were no questions asked about Turkey’s security. Deafening silence Istanbul was seen by most commentators as the most viable rival to Tokyo’s bid before last month’s protests. (The third candidate city is Madrid.) Istanbul’s crackdown on the protests that saw scores injured and many more arrested – I had seen with my own eyes unarmed middle-aged women being pepper-sprayed and unarmed demonstrators being tear-gassed - had been condemned in a European Parliament resolution and led to a call for restraint from the White House. In Lausanne, the silence on the question of security was deafening.  One theory had been mooted by long-time Olympic watchers: That, following the violent crackdown on protests, Istanbul has already been discounted by the IOC members from the running and that the race to host the 2020 Olympics was now a two-horse race between Madrid, spearheaded last week by Crown Prince Felipe (pictured below, centre), and Tokyo. If you’re an IOC member, why bother asking delicate questions of the Istanbul bid team if you’ve already made up your mind not to vote for them?

Subtle delivery For the man that counts, IOC Vice President and chairman of the IOC Evaluation Commission Sir Craig Reedie, the issue of security was addressed by the Istanbul bid leaders, if not in the Q&A then during the presentation itself. When I asked him wasn’t it strange that the IOC members didn’t ask questions to Istanbul's bid team members about security, he said that deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan (pictured above, centre) did discuss it, "in a skilful way". He added: "He took it on, clearly he would have to. There wasn’t a direct question as such but he dealt with it in his remarks. And it would have been wrong not to.” 

These comments were echoed by IOC presidential candidate Sergey Bubka - he also told me that the Istanbul bid leaders addressed the issue of security in the presentation itself. I asked Babacan  after Istanbul’s presentation if his team was able to address the IOC members’ concerns over security. “We’ve hosted more than 700 sports organisations over the last 10 years and I think we have demonstrated over and over again how to organise these things, [including] security, and things like planning [and] scheduling, with good results,” he told me. But really, is this enough? Should IOC members, which are the "supreme authority of the Olympic Movement" and proponents of its stated values of respect, friendship and excellence,.not have taken it upon themselves to probe Istanbul a little deeper into the issue of security when they had the chance? Otherwise, what is the point of this technical presentation event, introduced for the first time four years ago?

Saving face It’s possible that IOC members did not want to embarrass the Istanbul 2020 delegation, which included senior members of government such as Babacan, and left the thorniest questions to be answered deep in the bowels of Lausanne’s hotel lobbies. 

Perhaps the explanation for this silence on the issue of the protests was more prosaic: the rarefied, backstairs lobbying that goes on at such events is to explain for this strange silence. “Most IOC members probably don’t ask those kind of questions here,” IOC member Peter Tarlberg told me after Istanbul 2020’s demonstration, before adding with a laugh: “I think they are asked somewhere else - that’s my guess.”

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Lessons from Lord Coe: What Tokyo 2020 can learn from London 2012’s vision for an Olympic legacy

Lord Coe, the mastermind behind London’s successful Olympics, has warned the leaders of the three cities bidding to stage 2020 that they must fully grasp why it is they want to host the Games before they earn that right.

Coe’s comments came a day after the International Olympic Committee published a 105-page report evaluating the bids of Tokyo, Istanbul and Madrid to host the 2020 Games. The report notes that public support among the three bid cities is lowest among Japanese, at 67%, compared to 76% of Turks and 81% of Spaniards supporting their respective bids. Although the bookmakers’ favourite, the IOC poll figures seem to suggest that Tokyo has yet to present a compelling enough vision of why it should be hosting the Games. Longtime Olympic observers have commented that Tokyo "must present a compelling 'narrative'" and "lack[s] a cogent message."     Why host the Games? Speaking a few weeks short of the one-year anniversary of 2012’s opening ceremony, London organising committee chair Coe urged future Games planners to “understand why you are doing this, why you want the Games, what it is you want to do and recognise that the most demanding stakeholder ultimately on that journey [to earning the right to host the Games] is not the IOC, mayor, governor, sponsors, national Olympic bodies or the athletes - it’s the people who live in your city.”

'The most demanding stakeholders are the people who live in your city'

Coe, speaking at a Foreign Press Association event in central London yesterday, added: “Then you have to communicate the vision. The vision is not just something that gets you through the election [bid process], it’s what you deliver against on a day-by-day basis. Communicate properly and transparently and make sure people really know what you are doing and why.” London's legacy To a journalist that covered the run-up from 2009 and then the Games themselves, the “why” behind London 2012 to me always seemed clear: to regenerate East London and create a lasting sporting legacy. It is still too early to say whether or not both have been achieved. Previously, Coe has said it would take ten years before London’s legacy could be judged, although yesterday he said that his Games, which he said cost the public purse £9.5bn - 75% of which was splashed on the “overdue regeneration” of East London - was in the black.  There is still time for the Tokyo 2020 bid to successfully articulate why it wants to host the Games, beyond its very broad aim to create a compact and safe event. Next week leaders of the three bidders will get their chance to put their case in front of the entire IOC membership in Lausanne, Switzerland. IOC members will decide on the host city in a vote to be held in Buenos Aires on Sept 7. Listen, then engage Coe imparted one more piece of advice to his would-be host city counterparts, which might chime with Tokyo Governor Naoki Inose (pictured above, right, in London earlier this year with Tokyo 2020 bid leader Tsunekazu Takeda and Inose's wife Yuriko). Inose has been quick to chide the media over the reporting of comments he made to the New York Times in which he was quoted as disparaging Islam. Coe is clear who it is future Games organisers must keep onside. “Before you engage you have to listen," he said. "Understand who your friends are. Most of them will be in the general public. You don’t know it yet.”

[davidahickey]

Portraits from Gezi Park

Portraits of anti-government protestors at Gezi Park, central Istanbul. These photos were taken Tuesday to Thursday last week. Last Saturday, riot police forced protestors out of Gezi Park and demolished the 'tent city', which had been set up to prevent developers turning the green space into a shopping mall and army barracks.

[davidahickey]

Gezi Park's last stand: seven days in Istanbul's tent city

After nearly three weeks of largely peaceful protest, it took barely half an hour for riot police to sweep Istanbul’s Gezi Park clear of demonstrators on Saturday night.

Police at first issued a warning to protestors to leave the park within ten minutes shortly before 9pm, which had been occupied for days by hundreds of people opposed to a plan to raze its 600 trees and replace them with a shopping mall and Army barracks. Some heeded the warning, leaving their tents behind before the police incursion. But a hardcore of protestors standing on the steps leading from Taksim Square to the park, most armed with nothing more than a hard hat, goggles and a surgical mask, remained and these would have to be removed by force. The more experienced goaded the police to launch their assault with gestures of defiance. The police needed little encouragement and it would have happened anyway. Demolishing tents First, the water cannon trucks moved into position, the tension as palpable as the unmistakable slow whirl of their engines that I could hear from my position in front of Taksim Square’s Marmara Hotel. The water cannons then fired at the scores of protestors, dispersing them quickly. Riot police on foot then entered the park, demolishing the tents and sending protestors scattering into the warren of streets surrounding the park, where pitched battles into ensued into Sunday morning as the authorities battled to take control of the park and secure the surrounding area. Some of the injured took refuge in nearby hotels to the north of Gezi Park, their plush lobbies now temporary hospitals treating protestors, their sofas pushed together to form makeshift beds. “I was 10 metres away when they fired on us,” one told me at the Point hotel, the surrounds of his eyes caked in white residue, a result of being caught in the middle of a tear gas attack. “I was waving at them, saying, ‘Please, go easy. We don’t have any guns.' I was facing the riot police directly. I think I got hit by a gas canister in my leg. People were panicking. They were attacking families out there – fathers, mothers, children,” he said. Clean-up The clean-up of Gezi Park and Taksim Square continued overnight and into Sunday morning. But predictably, the clashes were not over. What had begun as a protest over the last remaining patch of green space in central Istanbul had morphed into a more general anti-establishment loathing that incorporated thousands of young activists demonstrating against what they perceived to be the increasing authoritarianism of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Government. Earlier on Saturday, the group representing the protestors, Taksim Solidarity, had declared their intention to stay in the park despite a warning from Ergodan to leave or face the full force of the hand of the state. “I want to drink when I want to, wear what I want, for gay people to be able to live freely, a free media,” one female protestor in her twenties told me, her head poking out of a tent. “Being here is so beautiful, the people are so beautiful.” So, on Sunday morning protestors that had been forced out the night before had reassembled to get as close to Gezi Park as possible, in front of the luxury Divan Hotel, which the previous night had been a refuge for some. The familiar pattern of water cannons firing at protestors played itself out again here. But I also saw police fire pepper spray a distance of only a few metres away towards middle aged women holding their arms out wide as if to ask, ‘What are you doing?’   My fear for Turkey – for the protests are not confined to Istanbul - is that now the protestors no longer fear tear gas, water cannon and pepper spray, what will the police resort to next? The director of Amnesty International Turkey tweeted that one of his researches had found "plastic bullets" around Taksim Square and Gezi Park. But once rubber bullets fail, what next? I also wonder if Erdogan might regret emptying the park, where the protestors were at least contained and easy to control, and allowing them to disperse and launch some kind of “guerrilla” street resistance. That is not to say that the movement would have fizzled out if it had been restricted to Gezi Park. Nearly a week before the police made their move, one male protestor in his twenties told me without hesitation: “If they attack us brutally, we will brutally resist. If they arrest us, the day after we’re released we will be back here.”

[davidahickey]

In Amenas: picture gallery

Last week I was one of around 90 foreign journalists granted access to the In Amenas gas plant in eastern Algeria, the scene of the four-day siege by Islamic militants earlier this month in which one Algerian and at least 37 foreign workers were killed. I’ve already posted a blog about it here, but wanted to share some more pics. 

I also uploaded a six-second clip from In Amenas using new video service Vine here and an Audioboo with one eyewitness here.

[davidahickey]

Inside In Amenas, the Algeria gas plant where 37 foreign workers died

The route that snakes through the Sahara desert from the tiny Zarzaitine Airport to the In Amenas natural gas plant is 70km long.

The road, now punctuated by checkpoints bolstered by sandbags and manned by heavily armed Algerian soldiers, takes an hour to negotiate. Only two weeks earlier this sprawling complex in the sand had been a scene of war, as Islamic militants purporting to be from Al-Qaida offshoot Signed in Blood stormed and then held the facility for four days, beating back the Algerian army.

At least 37 foreign workers and one Algerian died in the bloody siege, as well as 29 militants.

Now, the Algerian government was opening up the plant, which lies 1,000km to the south-east of the capital Algiers and near the Libyan border, to the media. I was one of around 90 foreign journalists – Norwegians, Britons, French, Americans and around 40 Japanese - on a bus that was part of a lengthy escort making its way to the site.

On arrival, signs of the siege quickly became apparent. Rockets and bullets had punched holes through the front façade of the canteen in the residential area, now heavily protected by armoured tanks and scores of soldiers.

But when I go round to the side of the building to take a look through a window, I am quickly prevented from doing so. Nor can we enter any of the living quarters. I want to scan under the beds and inside the cupboards where workers had hid for their lives, some for as long as 48 hours.

It was in this residential area where many foreign workers at the gas plant – Japanese, Britons, Norwegians, Filipino and Americans – lived. And it was here, at its guard post, at around 5.45am on January 16, that the only Algerian killed by the militants, Lana Mohamed Amine, pressed the alarm that alerted other workers around the plant to the terrorist attack and meant they were able to decompress its system, preventing any major fireball.  

We do see other scars from the siege. From the bus, on the way to In Amenas’ central processing facility, 50 metres from the side of the road, lies a row of twisted and charred 4x4 carcasses used by the militants and destroyed without hesitation by the Algerian army’s Russian-made Mi-24 attack helicopters. The militants had not come by the same tarmacked road that we had. I am told it is not possible to stop the bus to take a closer look because of the escort. No one at In Amenas, nor anyone in Algiers we speak to during our weeklong stay, expressed any wish that their military had handled the crisis differently.

At the central processing facility four kilometres from the residential area, a huge pipe is stained black and metalwork hangs loosely, evidence of an explosion that one witness says claimed the lives of several Norwegians. According to the witness, the militants placed at least seven makeshift explosives - fire extinguishers rigged up with dynamite, nuts and bolts - at the facility's ground level.

Reports have suggested that some Japan Gas Corporation staff died when their vehicles were destroyed by the Algerian army helicopters. In total, ten Japanese died. Yet no one we spoke to could shed light on what happened to them. “They may have died over there,” one witness says, pointing to a spot behind a chain fence and patrolled by security. We couldn’t get over there.  

listen to ‘Interview with eyewitness at In Amenas, Tiguentourine’ on Audioboo

All the witnesses we speak to are locals. For the time being, the foreign staff are absent and nobody knows when they will return.

Lotfi Benadouda, a general manager at local firm Sonatrach who himself was held hostage and worked closely with some of the victims of the siege, says: “Security is being discussed at a very high level in the Algerian government. We expect that we will improve security [so that] all our partners [come] back. Security will change and improve to ensure that this kind of thing will never happen (again).”

This is now surely one of the most tightly secured areas on the planet, although this is too late for the 37 that perished. I’m not sure if the return of foreign staff, clearly hoped for – and soon - by the Algerians, will be hastened by the fact that the Government has opened up a cleaned-up In Amenas to the media. Nor am I sure if their confidence will have been stirred by what we see. Or rather what we cannot see. This was a guided tour, organised by the Algerian state and Sonatrach. We learnt what they wanted us to learn. 

[davidahickey]

The curious case of Tomio Okamura and the Czech presidential election

Voters in the Czech Republic go to the polls today and tomorrow to choose their president in the election’s second and final round. Their choice is between the pipe-smoking Karel Schwarzenberg, the country’s “richest aristocrat” whose titles include Duke of Krumlov, according to the Financial Times, and left-wing former Prime Minister Milos Zeman. Not on the ballot is the Tokyo-born entrepreneur Tomio Okamura, who last autumn launched an audacious bid for the presidency just days after being elected senator on an independent ticket. 

I made two visits to the Czech Republic at the end of last year to follow the colourful 40-year-old Okamura, born to a Moravian mother and Japanese-Korean father, on the campaign trail. I spent hours in his company, including one memorable evening watching him repeatedly step on the toes of his 21-year-old girlfriend at a dance class in downtown Prague, but I’ve still no idea what kind of president he might have been.

Okamura became a celebrity in the Czech Republic long before embarking on a career in politics, having been a judge on the Czech version of Dragon’s Den. His self-help business books are best-sellers. His personality makes trivial matters such as policy almost seem irrelevant (though I heard some vague talk about reorienting the Czech economy away from Europe and towards the BRIC economies).

At his first press conference since announcing he would run for president in October, there were noticeably many more journalists from Japanese media than local Czechs, indicating that the locals were not taking the self-made wealthy businessman’s political ambitions too seriously. There was more interest when we went back the following month, after one poll had suggested Okamura was in third place.

Okamura may have been a popcorn seller in Japan in the past, but judging by the reaction to him in Prague – a three-hour drive from his constituency in the country’s east - he seems something of a Marmite character. Some voters loved the fact that this outsider who spent time as a child in an orphanage  was challenging what they perceived to be the corrupt status quo. (One travel agency has started running tours of Prague’s most corrupt spots. Slogan: “We choose the best of the worst.”) Others said he was only entering politics to satisfy his ego. One woman voter was especially angry that Okamura had the gall to be going out with a 21-year-old university student.

In the end, Okamura’s hopes for the presidency were scuppered by the Establishment. Okamura says he had collected 58,000 signatures endorsing his candidature, but the Interior Ministry rejected his bid on the grounds that some of the signatures that he collected were invalid. Okamura revealed this to journalists while sat in a sauna in the quiet spring resort town of Luhacovice. Okamura cried foul but lost his subsequent appeals. Okamura’s name never appeared on that first presidential ballot. Would Okamura have made the second ballot anyway? That’s very unlikely, and Okamura himself conceded his chances were slim from the beginning.

For now, he’ll have to make do with his senate seat. But don’t bet against him taking a shot at the presidency again five years from now. By then we might even know what, as a politician, he actually believes in.

[davidahickey]

In newsrooms, 'the silos are still clear'

The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard asked a bunch of clever folks to predict what 2013 will bring for the future of journalism.

I haven't read all of it (there's a lot there), but this, from Heidi Moore in a piece titled Newsrooms as War rooms, I found particularly interesting:

"Journalists will be paid not for scoops, but for contextualizing information, organizing it in a way that serves the reader, and presenting it in multiple media.

"A relative minority of those teams in newsrooms, by the way, will be 'journalists' as they have been defined so far, with a background in newsgathering and reporting. Instead, prominent roles will be played — as they have been already — by interactive departments, social media experts, programmers, video experts, audio experts, and others with technical expertise. … There has already been significant progress toward 'multimedia' newsrooms, but in many places the silos are still clear: Journalists dig up information and then the proper interactive, video, or audio folks create a template to suit that information. It hasn’t gone as far as it has yet to go."

I hope the course designers at the NCTJ are reading.

Pic: victoriapeckham

[davidahickey]

Freelance journalists in Japan barred from anti-nuke coverage by press club

This remarkable video, uploaded last month, sheds light on Japan's kisha kurabu, or reporters' clubs.

These clubs are only open to accredited members and are attached to government offices and ministries and some corporations. Above,non-member and freelancer Yu Terasawa - who tweets (in Japanese) here and whose website (again, Japanese only) is here, pleads with the director of the National Diet press club building for access, so that they can cover an anti-nuclear demonstration taking place in front of the Prime Minister's residence. The regular protests take place across the road from the Diet press club, which offers an ideal vantage point for coverage. 

Alas, the club director is not too welcoming. And as David McNeill explains in this piece for the current issue of No 1 Shimbun, the journal of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, Terasawa is taking his fight to the courts - even though he admits the odds are stacked against him. Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders, an NPO which exposes violations on freedom of expression, has declared its support for Terasawa here.

[davidahickey]

O'bama fever: Irish villagers grateful for incumbent win

One of the places with the most riding on a Barack Obama victory in last month’s presidential elections isn’t even in the US. The village of Moneygall (population: 300) in Ireland’s County Offaly is Obama’s ancestral home – the president’s great-great-great grandfather on his mother’s side emigrated from there to the US in the 1850s.

We stopped by Moneygall’s Obama Cafe and the Ollie Hayes pub, where in May 2011 the president and his wife Michelle enjoyed a Guinness and some friendly banter with the owner as part of a visit to Ireland. They were choppered in from Dublin; a bypass was even built to bring their calvacade into the village from the landing field, locals say.

Although the president didn’t go into the Obama Cafe himself (his security detail did), owner Paul Costello says an Obama victory “means everything” for his business. “Moneygall is only a small village and the café would not survive on that alone, so you’re depending on the Obama connection to bring in the tourists. We have a visitors book signed by people from all over the world.”

The memory of the visit looks set to give a boost to O’bama fever for a good while yet – maybe even for another four years. Says the only slightly biased Henry Healy, an eighth cousin to Obama and his closest relative still living in Moneygall: “We’ll never forget his visit last year to Ireland. We were on our knees and he reminded us no matter how harsh winter may be, we will always remember springtime is just around the corner. He left us on a high and I think Ireland has been growing ever since.”