Not quite sure how I missed this, but Newsnight appear to have picked up on a story myself and Rajeev Syal broke back in April 2009 involving a long running investigation into Sudhir Choudhrie, one of the Liberal Democrats most generous donors.

Mr Choudhrie is alleged to have profited ‘to the tune of millions of dollars’ from a number of illegal arms deals in India involving Israeli arms companies Soltam and IAI. We broke the story just months after Nick Clegg had called for an end to arms deals with Israel.

Watch the Newnight report here.

Mullah Salam: Now former governor of Musa Qala

An exclusive three part web video report I associate produced has gone up on Frontline PBS, examining the recapture and reconstruction of Musa Qala in northern Helmand. Using footage shot over three years by Stephen Grey, we examine the history of ISAF’s mission in the town and what lessons it holds for the wider security and development project in Afghanistan.

Click here to go to the report and read the blurb and credits below:

“The eyes of the world will be on Musa Qala,” said William Wood, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, in 2007, after British and American forces had captured the town. Now, as President Obama and the U.S. wait to find out if a war strategy in Afghanistan based on counterinsurgency principles can restore security, FRONTLINE looks back at the lessons learned from this small town in the country’s most violent province.”

Credits:

REPORTER/CAMERA
Stephen Grey

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Oliver Laughland

SENIOR PRODUCER
Ken Dornstein

EDITOR
Sally Hilton

COORDINATING PRODUCER/EDITOR
David Ritsher

ADDITIONAL EDITING
Charlotte Buchen

SENIOR INTERACTIVE PRODUCER
Jackie Bennion

MUSIC
Dan Edge

TRANSLATION
Najibullah Razaq

ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE
Abu Dhabi TV
ABC News
ITN

THANKS TO
Alex Gardiner
The 82nd Airborne Division
1/75 Ranger Regiment
The Yorkshire Regiment (UK)
52 Infantry Bridgade (UK)

Mothers at the Igwamanoni dispensary © Oliver Laughland

The road to Luhaga village is riddled with potholes that jolt our 4×4 in all manner of directions. Its fat tyres spray thick clouds of orange dirt high into the air; engulfing the cyclists we overtake who falter by the roadside. We pass cotton fields in full bloom and rectangular rice plantations attached to small plots of houses with straw roofs and bricks made from mud.

I’ve travelled to the north of Tanzania, to the Kahama district, with the Women’s Dignity (WD) NGO, on the week of the African Union summit in Kampala, Uganda. As the heads of state come to the meeting this year themed around women and infant’s health, I’m here to see the work this specialist NGO do to educate people from rural areas in the basics of maternal health.

Run almost entirely by Tanzanian women in regions across the country, WD are planning to tackle ignorance on maternal health issues village by village. I join them at the start of a two-week community sensitisation programme that sees representatives from the NGO travel to villages deep into the interior delivering a free afternoon’s worth of programmes aimed at engaging and educating villagers in a country where 580 women die in every 100,000 child births.

Hundreds, from several neighbouring villages turn up to Luhaga having been rounded up by village leaders. There’s a buzz of anticipation before dancers from the Kahama Medical Cultural Troop burst into the centre of the makeshift stage, performing an acrobatic dance routine to a pounding drumbeat.  This is the essence of these meetings -making the content as engaging to attendees as possible.

As well as keynote speeches on research conducted by the NGO, the performers deliver dramas on the importance of taking women to hospital during childbirth and on how to treat preventable diseases.

Catherine Kamugumya, head of research at WD tells me: “We use these methods to actively encourage debate on maternal health issues. To hear what villagers have to think and educate them on how to achieve better healthcare for pregnant women.”

It seems to have worked. The meeting ends with a lively question and answer session where attendees are asked to explain what they have learned. “Men should take more care of their wives,” cries one man, “Pregnant women must go to the clinic to give birth,” proclaims another.

By the end, the charisma of the WD representatives is so infectious the village set up their own Community Emergency Fund. This a fund in which each household contributes a sum of money for a communal pot that allows any villager in need of emergency healthcare provision to pay for transport or any other costs.

But the signs of neglect for maternal health are ever present. We meet a girl who wishes to remain anonymous, she has travelled for miles with her father to get to the meeting after she heard about it on the radio.

She fell pregnant aged 17 but lost her child during a traumatic childbirth that lasted for over 24 hours. She developed a fistula during labour and, despite four months in hospital, still has the condition, which leaves her incontinent and outcast from her community, a year after her initial diagnosis.

Pregnant women at the Kahama District Hospital © Oliver Laughland

After advice from the WD representatives she vows to return to hospital to get treatment for what is a very curable illness. “I would tell all women suffering with fistula not to give up,” she tells me, “When I am repaired I want to continue building a family as being a mother is very important.”

As the meeting finishes we head to the local dispensary at Igwamanoni. It is here where pregnant women from around the area are encouraged to come both before and during childbirth to ensure safer pregnancies. A modest facility with just one bed devoted to women in labour, we are taken on a tour by head medical officer, Stephen Dalalai.

He pulls a large canvas book from his office, the labour registry that shows around 30 births occurring every month here. One a day. The dispensary covers just 5 villages. Dalalai says that of these 30 labours per month one or two will present complications that the dispensary cannot deal with. When this occurs he calls an ambulance from Kahama town hospital which will take two hours to arrive and then a further two hours to deliver the woman to hospital.

Just as we leave a girl no older than 18 arrives. Her labour has begun. She has come alone, no father or husband in sight, with a look of fear in her eyes. The door to the labour room shuts. Another day, another labour. What became of her we never found out.

‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’.

We wrench loose an MDF board covering the once grand entrance, before slipping inside, avoiding the rusty nails. Our feet crunch over broken glass as we peer into the gloom. The ticket booths, smashed to shit, still welcome Mastercard and Visa and still dispense mouldy, discoloured maps. Plastic statues slump, their plastic heads scattered on the floor. ‘I love sex’. ‘Get out’. ‘Bobby and Pris wuz here 99’.

The ceiling is falling in, the lights exploded. The tropical undergrowth is slowly reclaiming this misguided business venture. The mosquitoes have returned to these stagnant lakes. Giant pink paper horses and blue paper elephants, frozen mid-motion, aflame and collapsing in upon themselves.

Perhaps this freakish fairytale was doomed to fail from the start. A tourist attraction designed for Chinese tourism and themed around ancient Chinese imperial history, elaborately carved from plaster of paris and plywood, built in 1980s Singapore, now stands closed a decade later and erased from the national memory.

Like so many Singaporean transgressions, ‘Tang Dynasty City’ remains very much present, but obscured from public view. On the surface, this highly successful city-state embodies the image its government seeks to project: it is clean, obedient, polite, orderly and well-planned. Gays, prostitutes, transvestites, the homeless, political dissidents, governmental corruption and national failures –all these get swept under the carpet of state-sanctioned discourse.

Tang Dynasty City ticket hall © Alex Jimenez

The same may be said of the higher education system. When we first started studying here, we were shocked and bemused by the attitudes of the Singaporean students. The learning culture is totally at odds with what we’ve come to expect from our experiences at a British university. In Singapore, we said to each other with a mixture of bemusement and reproach, the students just don’t question anything. They don’t question their lecturers and they don’t question the way the university is run. They don’t question the texts they read, and they shy away from questioning each other. They are excessively respectful of authority, they study too hard and hardly ever go out, and they ‘strive for excellence’ rather than seeking to critically interrogate established modes of thinking.

Dr Chee Soon Juan, a former neuropsychology lecturer at NUS, recalls his frustration with his students. On one occasion he came to class and told them that he was just going to stare at them. So he sat there, and stared. After fifteen minutes of uncomfortable silence, in which not one student challenged him or asked him to begin teaching, he simply got up and left.

National Day Singapore 2007 © Alex Jimenez

Of course, having been in Singapore for over three months now, this characterisation of ‘the Singaporean Student’ – as compliant, submissive and unquestioning – has revealed itself to be somewhat simplistic. There are definitely both public and hidden transcripts at work here, as there are in Singaporean society more broadly. In public, it’s fair to say that the majority of Singaporeans are passive and conformist. Decades of authoritarian rule combined with generally decent standards of living and state-controlled media will tend to do that to a society. But in private spaces, Singaporeans still think; they still feel discontent and have that nagging sensation that all is not quite as it appears. However, these hidden transcripts of dissent tend not to manifest themselves in immediately visible ways. Thus our new self-appointed task has been to delve under the carpet and search out this undercurrent of opposition.

Our clandestine visit to ‘Tang Dynasty City’ was just one stop on an alternative 24-hour tour of Singapore, run by a PhD student here who delights in showing both foreigners and young Singaporeans alike the ‘seedier’ sides of the city. Most of our activities were illegal. We spent a couple of hours in a gay club, snuck around a disused, decrepit hospital, wandered through a Chinese burial ground, discovered the red-light district, and broke into an indestructible house with a mysterious curse hanging over it – all in the dead of night. It opened our eyes to the kinds of alternative narratives hidden under Singapore’s carpet of orthodoxy. The gay bar was far more open than we had expected – considering homosexuality is illegal in Singapore – and the haunted houses we visited were clearly also frequented by local ghost-hunting enthusiasts and graffiti-spraying youth. We realised there is unorthodox activity going on here but it has its designated place, out of the sight of foreign visitors, and indeed, of many Singaporeans.

What we saw on the tour seemed an apt metaphor for Singaporean ‘resistance’. As we were shocked to discover upon our arrival here, public protest, spontaneous gatherings and political dissent are among those things illegal under Singaporean law. Furthermore, the government invests significant time and resources in manufacturing and maintaining a climate of fear, ensuring that all but a few dissenters are either too scared or too apathetic to voice their dissent. People are unhappy with how their government runs the country, but virtually no one is willing to speak up. We met with one of the few Singaporeans who does speak out, at great personal cost, whenever he can.

Dr Chee used to teach here at NUS. As soon as he became involved in opposition politics, however, he was fired. But this, after all, is the National University – the University where ex-Prime Minister (and now ‘Minister Mentor’, a position of authority without precedent in any other professed democracy) Lee Kuan Yew has an entire school named in his honour; where his son (and current Prime Minister) Lee Hsien Loong studied; and where his son in turn and countless other state officials studied. Criticism of the government has been erased from the curriculum. Since his dismissal, Dr Chee has not relented in his mission to make Singapore the functioning democracy its leaders claim it to be. His party, the Singapore Democratic Party, is marginalised from mainstream politics despite having considerable (though often covert) support; he has personally suffered the abrupt ending of his academic career, repeated imprisonment, bankruptcy and continued fines for his political activity, and total demonisation from the state-controlled media. Through making such an example of one man the Singaporean government is able to maintain its society in a state of fear.

Even more frightening than this, however, is that the generation who have grown up in Singapore during the last quarter of the twentieth century have no living memory of what society was like before. They don’t remember the 60s and 70s, when student rallies could number in their thousands and to question the government was natural rather than prohibited. An atmosphere of fear, secrecy and restraint pervades many popular recollections of this period. The leftist nationalist movements that undeniably played a part in Singapore’s formal independence are reduced to comedic asides in lectures.

'Haunted house' © Alex Jimenez

By now, the focus of civil society has shifted – and education is a prime example. As Dr Chee noted, the point of education is to question. And yet students in Singapore are programmed from an early age to compete with each other in the quest for ‘excellence’, rather than question authority. This can lead to some paradoxical scenarios: in one of our lectures (a Political Science class no less), the lecturer at one point broke away from the topic to state: “I’m sorry to break it to you, but Singapore is another example of an authoritarian government.” Whilst this might not appear a particularly controversial claim, it is extremely unusual in Singapore to hear such a sentiment expressed by a person in a position of authority – especially at NUS. We were surprised, then, to find that the class spontaneously burst into applause. Clearly such political sentiments are widely-held, but can’t be expressed without first being sanctioned by a figure of authority.

The paradoxical character of dissent here demonstrates that when conventional protest is proscribed, most people seek other ways of expressing their politics. What might seem like a taxi driver merely bemoaning his lot, takes on new significance given the fact that thousands of taxi drivers have had to attend a government training course instructing them to have neat hair, no BO, and to not talk to customers about “sensitive issues”. A sarcastic aside by an NUS lecturer carries great weight in an academic environment that stifles the free exchange of opinion. What might seem a slight matter, of whether or not to turn up to a peaceful vigil held outside the Burmese embassy becomes a decision of great consequence, between silence and massive social transgression.

Small acts may have enormous consequences, and the fact that much discontent is hidden does not mean it isn’t there. It only means you have to spend a bit of time unearthing and exposing it.

Article:

Written by Oliver Laughland and Pia Dawson

Film:

Filmed by Oliver Laughland and Pia Dawson

Edited by Oliver Laughland

Music by Tom Marriott

Photographs:

All by Alex Jimenez

Nato turn to militias in Afghanistan battle

A Channel 4 News investigation finds that a number of US and Nato units discreetly turn to help from Afghan militias blamed for assassinations and civilian deaths. Stephen Grey reports from Kandahar.

Elite American and Nato military units in Afghanistan have discreetly turned for help from the “private armies” of warlords and tribal leaders as a controversial tactic in the war against the Taliban, it can be revealed.

Working alongside both US intelligence and special force agencies, irregular Afghan militia groups are increasingly being blamed for theft, corruption, targeted assassinations. They have also been accused of involvement in raids aimed at killing the Taliban but in which innocent men, women and children have been killed.

Nowhere are fears more pronounced about the role of militias than in the southern city of Kandahar, at the centre of a Nato operations this summer to reverse the tide of the Afghanistan war. Here, many say private armed groups are feared more than the Taliban. Assassinations often publicly blamed on the insurgents are frequently carried out, it is said, by what some already refer to as “death squads”.

“If someone kills someone the government itself says don’t touch him,” said Shahida Hussein, a local human rights activist who is one of the few who dares to speak openly on the subject. “They say don’t bother him (the killer). He’s our friend. He’s our relative. He has a connection with us.”

Stephen Grey blogs
- The gangs of Kandahar – the city’s real power?

Hussein was speaking as she met the latest victim of a militia – a father whose home was ransacked, property stolen and who was thrown in jail by a well-connected militia that was hired by his son-in-law when he tried to assist his daughter in a divorce. She explained such militias only had power because they had protection and earned cash from both the Afghan government and Nato. “There is no real government here. Kandahar is run by people in the drugs trade, armed with weapons and backed by foreign countries.”

Apart from working with the regular members of the Afghan Army and Afghan National Police, Nato is increasingly reliant on irregular forces. Gunmen working for warlords protect the main Nato bases, are hired to provide security for Nato road convoys, are paid to provide intelligence used by Nato spy agencies, and are being recruited both to guard villages in the countryside and, most controversially, to work alongside elite military strike forces run by the US.

Members of a militia set up by American special forces to guard villages around Kandahar in Arghandab district.

The heavy dependence on militias runs counter to official policy dictated in Washington. The term “militia” is a banned word in any public statement, said one senior source. The US is well-aware that warlords and their private armies are despised for their role in seizing control and ravaging Afghanistan after Soviet troops withdrew in 1989.

According to one American diplomat in Kabul, however, the dire and deteriorating state of security in the country is forcing commanders to make compromises. “There is no choice but to deal with local power brokers in place and that means the warlords and their men,” he said.

According to another senior US military source, some of the militias have been “turned regular” by being given uniforms, training and identity badges and officially incorporated into the Afghan national army or police – but despite this he said they were “rarely part of the regular chain of command” and they retained loyalty to the warlords who recruited them and were “almost unaccountable” for their actions, he said.

Erica Gaston, a Kabul-based field worker for the Open Society Institute, has studied the issue of civilian casualties for the last two years. She said Nato commanders had yet to address the problem of irregular forces that lay behind many incidents involving the death of innocents.

“We often find that the irregular forces are at the root of some serious abuses, partly because when you have an irregular militia that’s not part of your regular army, or ISAF or anyone else there’s almost no way to bring any accountability over them. You can talk about changing the rules of engagement, or issuing new directives. But that simply doesn’t apply to a group of armed men who are simply paid to go in on an operation and add extra force to it.”

Ever since they arrived in Afghanistan, US special forces units, trained by in the doctrine of “irregular warfare” have recruited Afghan forces to work alongside them.

US and Nato forces train an Afghan special forces unit (source: ISAF video).

But in recent months, special forces have been under increasing pressure by the US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, to let the Afghan units lead raids on suspected Taliban and bear the brunt of the fighting, partly to allay cultural concerns about US forces invading Afghan homes and also in response to accusations the US forces were killing too many innocent civilians.

According to senior coalition sources, inquiries into many reported allegations of civilian deaths have often revealed that, allow the Americans got the blame, it was Afghan units involved that were responsible for civilian casualties.

One retired Nato officer, with recent experience of commanding special force operations in Afghanistan, said it was “standard operating procedure” to send the Afghan units in ahead of the coalition special forces.

“They have a better idea of what to shoot at and also, to be honest, take more of the risk,” he said.

Stephen Grey’s investigation on Kandahar was filmed and produced by Stephen and Afghan journalist N.R., (who cannot be named in full) with additional research by Oliver Laughland.

It highlights some of the fundamental communication problems endured by troops on the ground in Afghanistan trying implement a counterinsurgency strategy to win the hearts and minds of Afghan people.

I went down to film the event for the Sudan 365 website.

Co-filmed and edited with Tom Huntingford.

I made my first trip to South Africa at 17 and was taken aback by the blatant divide between the rich and poor in a country that professed to have moved on from apartheid or ‘separateness’. Two years ago I wrote the piece below that was shortlisted for a Guardian Student Media Award in the travel writing category.

Inside the Divide

by Oliver Laughland (photographs by Oliver Laughland and Rosie Roberts)

From 10,000 feet Johannesburg’s problems are invisible. It’s concentric structure; busy motorways and towering skyscrapers paint a picture of a cosmopolitan city that reflects the apparent post-apartheid reformation of ‘New South Africa.’ The compulsory tourist information video broadcasts photos of smiling black faces eagerly awaiting the football world cup in 2010 and advises to seek out the latest bargains in Johannesburg’s extensive maze of shopping malls. As the plane begins its spiralling descent this idyllic picture from above begins to diffuse. Thick plumes of black smoke soar into the atmosphere, rising from suburbs overflowing with tiny shed-like buildings. Along the blanket of gritty smog the sun rises, casting muddy orange rays of light over the city, revealing the opposing suburbs. High walls, landscape gardens, swimming pools and gargantuan housing lie on the other side of the metropolis. The divide is evident before I’ve spoken to a single person.

‘There won’t be any traffic in Jo’burg city centre, it’s a Saturday, there’s no-one there,’ the driver tells me. He’s right, as we drive through the commercial hub an unfathomable silence engulfs the car. Tower block housing lies ominously derelict and the few shops scattered along our journey through the city are closed. Along the skinny pavements a few homeless men sit, motionless. It seems that Africa’s only ‘global’ city sleeps at the weekends.
‘Where are all the people?’ I ask, dumbfounded.
‘They come during the week to make their money and stay at home during the weekend, there’s nothing for people here at the weekend.’

Johannesburg is a city that was built in a rush. Upon the discovery of gold and diamond mines in the nineteenth century Europeans and Americans flooded to the city in the hope of getting rich quick and leaving. One can’t help but think the same is going on today, though shares and stock have replaced gold and diamonds it seems no one wants to stay in the city centre any longer than needs be.

As we leave the central business district a road sign indicates left for Sandton and Randburg, right for Soweto; we turn left.

The following evening we head to Sandton’s substantial restaurant quarter. The web of steak restaurants and pizzerias pay homage to South Africa’s diverse culinary tradition. We sit at the table and are immediately overwhelmed by the raging argument that breaks out on the opposite side. A group of ten, headed by a broad, imposing father, argue with their waiter.
‘I didn’t order three fucking cokes, I ordered two, go and change it now you idiot’
‘I’m very sorry sir there must have been some sort of mistake’
‘Do I look like I care? You’ve embarrassed me in front of my family and my friends. Just deal with it now.’ The three rat tailed children sit in silence, a smug grin across their faces. As they leave the father flicks a 1 rand coin at the waiter, it ricochets off his forehead and falls to the floor. ‘You don’t even deserve that,’ he says, slamming the door as he leaves. The waiter bends down to pick it up.
‘Thank you sir.’

The drive to Mozambique starts early. We lock the three electric gates, set the laser-guided alarm, check the ‘Armed Response’ sign is fully visible, tip the security guard and exist along Sandton’s unpaved roads. Lines of conveyor belts carrying coal from the mines to the refineries dissect the vast emptiness of South Africa’s rural expanse. Thatched huts sparsely populate the mountainous plains in the distance and rivers curve around the roadside. The border crossing reveals itself as a concrete contrast, surrounded by a vacuum of unguarded open space. At the precise point we touch the soil of Mozambique the tarmac road is replaced with sand dunes.

Small children begin to run alongside us, ‘Sweet! Sweet!’ they cry, sprinting for as long as their skinny legs can possibly hold them upright. Winding down the electric window of the air- conditioned 4×4 I throw handfuls of boiled sweets down to them, for those brief moments wrapped up in my own self-majesty. The sweets run out as more and more skinny-legged children take up the chase, their eyes fill with disappointment as they realise there’s none left, that their friends have been given something but they have received nothing. We leave them behind in a cloud of dust.

Returning to Johannesburg after time passed by the coast we turn right at the cross roads leaving the gated suburbs of Sandton behind. Created during the apartheid regime under the Bantu Housing Act, Soweto is a township rich in the history of rebellion. The disused power station in the Orlando region is covered head to toe in colourful mural. It bares images of South Africans breaking the chains of apartheid oppression, of a united population looking back on their history with the future in mind. People walk on paved side streets towards market stalls that line the roadside, a welcome break from the desolate, unpaved roads of the rich suburbs. There are no high walls, armed guards or razor wire. While Soweto may be the poorest suburb of Johannesburg there’s a sense of freedom, almost joy, that can’t be felt anywhere else in the area. We drink at a bar where ‘all are welcome’ and are treated to a bizarre dance from a man dressed as Johnny Walker, in pristine black winkle pickers and old wayfarer Ray Bans, ‘It’s how he makes his living, he goes into the city and dances round his cane for tourists.’ The old house of Nelson Mandela provides an almost kitsch shrine to the statesman. We view an old pair of Mandela’s boots inside a protective glass box; ‘he used to wear that pair often when going out for walks.’

We leave, driving through another district of Soweto, where box shaped huts made from rusted corrugated iron stand shoulder to shoulder. Mountains of rubbish form playgrounds for barefooted children dressed in dirty, frayed clothing. The smell of human excrement drafts its way inside the car and dark smoke from the massive bonfires immerses the roadside. Dissected by equality and opportunity, those who have and those who do not live along blurred but visible boundaries that characterise modern South Africa. Freedom and despair live side by side.

To mark the start of the campaign, the organisers came up with a fantastic idea; a global beat for peace.  Last Saturday in cities across the world members of the Sudanese diaspora and other peace activists came together to pound out a global beat, started off by this viral.

I went down to make a short film about the protest outside Downing Street:

Thanks to Tom Huntingford and Celia Lusted for help with filming and to Pia Dawson for inviting me down.