Extra Extra

Happy Birthday, Alan Johnston.

1. The BBC’s Gaza correspondent turns 45 today. This is his ninth week in captivity. Reporters without Borders say 14 journalists have been kidnapped in the Gaza Strip since January 2005, but this is the first time that any of them has held for more than two weeks.

2. Arriving in the UK, I found the headlines dominated by one of Britain’s periodic outbreaks of mass sentimentality, last seen on this sort of scale in the period following the death of Princess Diana. Urged on by the press and a growing constellation of their favourite celebrities, the public – or at least that part of it which most avidly consumes the news, and in turn (symbiosis!) helps to direct its attention – is alarmed about a pretty young girl called Madeleine McCann who appears to have been abducted while on holiday in Portugal with her respectable parents.

I’m sure much of the concern and sympathy is heartfelt, but the story seems to have taken on a life of its own, as a £2.5m reward for information is announced, and journalists from the rest of the world join the scrum that is noisily awaiting some sort of resolution to the drama. Somebody had to point out, as Deborah Orr did last week, that “in Britain, in the past five years, 44 children have been listed as missing and unaccounted for, with 11 having disappeared when five or younger, and four under 12 months old”.

3. A few BBC correspondents have resisted the gravitational pull of Praia da Luz, however. Mike Thomson traveled to the Congo to make a series of short reports about the trials of life there for Radio 4’s Today programme. You can listen to them here.

These are some of the interview quotes (as translated by the BBC) that struck me hardest:

What I felt was fear. I remember being very scared when I was killing those people…. Sometimes I have such bad dreams that I fall out of my bed. (Former child soldier in Goma)

I decided to surrender because I wasn’t getting enough money. I wasn’t getting enough to eat. But now that I have surrendered I am living a dog’s life. (Ex-combatant north of Goma)

Every day we hear that so-and-so was killed. The next day it’s this journalist or politician who’s been killed, and ordinary people too. We have to be home by 9 o’clock because when we walk around any later, we are afraid of coming across soldiers out looting and, you know, killing people. (Civil servant in Kinshasa)

It’s up to the opposition to restructure. (Minister of Planning and former Speaker of the National Assembly Olivier Kamitatu, who before the elections was expelled by his party – the MLC, now in opposition, with their leader in exile – for holding secret talks with the party now in power)

Who is going to arrest them? They’ve got someone supporting them somewhere, that’s why they’re not worried. Even the police tell us sometimes ‘we can’t do anything, we don’t have the means, you’ll have to ask the army’. (Magistrate in Goma on the impunity of criminal soldiers)

We’ve had cases where rapists go into prison through the door and out through the window to rape again. It’s a game of ping-pong. Many people die here every day, but there are no investigations, so either people take things into their own hands, and there is violent revenge, or, if the killer is powerful, he tells the family, “I’ll buy you a coffin for your loved one”. That’s what humanity has been reduced to here. (Immaculé Biraheka, a human rights activist in Goma)

And then there is the testimony that succeeded in upsetting many listeners, as warned (other parts of the interview were considered too disturbing to air): that of a young mother who survived four months of horrific abuse after being abducted by a group of Interahamwe militia. Her words might upset you, too, but please bear in mind this woman’s courage in choosing to tell the world what happened to her and her fifty fellow villagers.

After they killed the members of my family, 19 of the Interahamwe raped me, and then they killed two of my children in front of me, and then they took the baby off my back, and they tied a rope around its neck, and they forced me to pull the rope and kill my own baby. I was with my brother and my sister-in-law… They cut of the hands of my sister-in-law and they tried to force my brother to rape me. My brother said, “You’re my sister, I cannot rape you. If I rape you, I’ll die, and if I don’t rape you, they’ll kill me. So I prefer that they kill me.” So the Interahamwe cut his head off. In the end only 3 of us were left alive.

Let’s hope UN representatives Louise Arbour and Bill Swing tuned in. The former is “very confident that President Kabila is fully committed to the fundamental protection of human rights”; the latter argues that “the process has become the substance” in DRC.