OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  The bulldozers, Ernesto explains, are brought in on trucks and at the edge of the forest the heavy chains are slung between them. The vehicles then advance side-by-side, in military formation, and everything in their path gets torn down. The trees are felled, the stumps uprooted. The wreckage is then set alight and eventually ploughed ready to be used for agriculture – either as pasture for cattle or fields for cultivating soya beans. From land that’s dirt cheap, beef and beans fetch high prices on the global markets.

  But surely it’s illegal?

  Yes, says Ernesto, but there are loopholes. Virgin rainforest has the strongest protection in law but to retain that status it has to remain untouched; once it’s been tampered with in any way, it’s classified differently and enjoys less protection. So landowners encourage small-scale loggers to push into the virgin forest and extract the most valuable trees. When the work of the loggers is ‘discovered’, the landowner can exclaim in horror that his forest is no longer ‘virgin’ which just happens to mean, rather conveniently, that the penalties for any further deforestation are much lighter. And that’s when the bulldozers are brought in.

  JUST AS ERNESTO is explaining this, we spot a truck in the distance, parked close to the edge of the remaining forest. He’s immediately suspicious and we race over. In the front of the car is our escort, a policeman, who’s armed. Confrontations can turn ugly. Local campaigners, including a priest in this very area, near the town of Santarem, have been warned to shut up on pain of death. In another region, an outspoken American nun was murdered for resisting the loggers. The land beneath the trees can yield so much money that it’s triggered an equivalent to a gold rush, anarchic and unrestrained.

  When we reach the truck, a battered old thing, there’s no one around. But loaded onto it are four freshly felled trunks. I notice sap, almost colourless, dripping from one of them. I reach out and let my finger stick to it; it’s surprisingly watery. I realise that while the massive scale of the deforestation is shocking, touching the life force draining from just one tree provokes a different sentiment: it’s just plain sad.

  The policeman checks his revolver and goes off in search of the loggers. He enters the forest, calling out, pushing through the undergrowth. We follow him, past a severed stump – the newly-exposed wood seems unnaturally pallid, almost naked, and heaps of bright sawdust are scattered nearby. It’s like stumbling into a crime scene just minutes after the act. We press on, the policeman’s shouts echoing off the wood. And the din soon produces a result.

  One of the loggers appears, dressed in a stained football shirt, a sheepish grin on his face. The game is up.

  The ringleader stumbles out too, hot and irritated, shirt slung over his shoulder, brushing flies from his bare chest. He’s been caught red-handed and admits it. Two more trunks and his truck would have had a full load. Now he knows that the timber will be confiscated and that he’ll be fined. He’s so resigned to his fate that even the presence of a questioning British television crew doesn’t faze him.

  Do you know what you’re doing here is illegal?

  He nods, and Ernesto, translating, confirms that he knows the logging is wrong.

  So why do you do it?

  To make money, he says.

  But what for?

  He and Ernesto engage in a long discussion. It turns out the logger is trying to pay off a fine.

  What for?

  For a previous time he was caught logging.

  So this is a way of life, and he’s just one of thousands of men, pushing into the jungle, carving new inroads, paving the way for the big agro-industrialists. It’s a march on countless fronts and seems unstoppable. It occurs to me that the annual comparison with Wales or Belgium underplays the point: the total area of forest cleared so far is about the size of three United Kingdoms.

  And the reference to the UK has another relevance too. Much of the soya grown where the trees once stood is shipped across the Atlantic to Merseyside. It’s used in everything from chicken-feed to margarine. The soya cultivated in the Amazon has a particular attraction: it is not genetically modified. Soya from the world’s other big producer, America, is GM. So, as long as we choose to avoid GM food, the processors and supermarkets opt for Amazonian soya rather than American, a choice with a consequence. Standing by the four dripping trunks, I realise that their felling did not happen in isolation.

  I think back to my cynicism on arriving. Maybe the chant, Save the Rainforest, has been repeated so often that its message had left me cold. But talking to Ernesto and seeing his team in action – tackling impoverished foot-soldiers – strikes a chord. The statistics may be numbing but they’re easier to grasp knowing our encounter stopped, or at least delayed, the felling of another couple of trees.

  An illegal logger – working to pay off his fines … for illegal logging

  Ernesto instructs the gang to drive straight to the environmental police compound. There’s a standard procedure to follow and they know it well. The trunks will be impounded and added to a stack, several storeys high, of thousands of others. More fines will levied. The men look miserable, their day’s labour wasted. Their truck starts up in a cloud of smoke. It will be impounded too. They crawl towards the main road for the two-hour drive to Santarem, the prized logs now a burden. It’ll be dark by the time they reach it and I surprise myself: I actually feel a bit sorry for them.

  The Fourth World

  JAN MORRIS was born of a Welsh father and an English mother in 1926, and lives with her partner Elizabeth Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales. She has written studies of Wales, Oxford, Venice, Manhattan, Sydney, Hong Kong and Trieste, besides a Booker-shortlisted novel about the imaginary city of Hav, the Pax Britannica trilogy about the British Empire, and the autobiographical Conundrum. Earlier in life she spent ten years as a foreign correspondent of The Times and The Guardian, and was the only reporter with the expedition that first climbed Everest in 1953.

  The Fourth World

  JAN MORRIS

  The place is bloody, reported a perhaps apocryphal dispatch sent by a British imperial administrator after a visit to one of the Empire’s less desirable possessions, and so are the people.

  I know how he felt, being myself of a politically incorrect generation. Places can often be bloody, and God knows so can people – but to my mind, never all of them! My own experience, after seventy odd years of the meandering life, is that scattered throughout the far reaches of our planet, in slums as in palaces, in deserts and suburbs and great cities, there exists a kind of vast supranational community whose citizens may indeed be bloody-minded sometimes, but who are essentially kind.

  A hazy adjective I know, but then the qualities of this virtual nation of mine can be elusive. Its members may not be brave, may not be selfless, may not even be generous. Sometimes they seem silly, sometimes rather arrogant. But I know them by now, and I recognise them in all their myriad guises. I have recognised the signs in statesmen as in housewives, in taxi-drivers as in actresses or tycoons – a look in the eye, a smile, a gurgle of laughter is often enough. I knew I was in the presence of an initiate when, one day in the high Himalayas, alone in the high snows, I met a wandering holy man with whom I shared not a word or even a gesture, only an instinct. And slowly, over the years I have come to realise that these people constitute a vast and powerful freemasonry. They have no secret handshake to identify them, they speak in many tongues, they believe in many gods or in no gods at all, but I think of them one and all as constituting a Fourth World of their own

  Here are some of the characteristics that qualify them for its conceptual citizenship: They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex, your age, your colour or your nationality. They suffer fools, if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily
grateful. They are seldom mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. In short, they are kind. Not always, not every one of them, and some are kinder than others, but in general the Fourth World of my experience, and of my imagination too, is a diaspora of kindness; and having encountered its citizens wherever I go, I have come to think that the identification of kindness is the ultimate achievement of the human and animal kingdoms, the one high ideal we can all understand – and better still, perhaps, harness.

  For consider the potency of kindness. By definition it cannot be a force for evil, but it constitutes an incalculable force for good. If it can instantly bond total strangers to one another in empathy, whatever their religions or their loyalties, even a Welsh agnostic and a guru meeting near the top of the world – if it can do all this piecemeal, so to speak, just think what it could do if all its disparate energies could somehow be united! Organised religion, as we know too well, has often exerted its power balefully. Love of country can curdle into selfish pride and aggression. Pride of club, pride of school or social class, pride of race can all turn nasty. But an association as wide and varied as my Grand Diaspora, bound only in decency and humour, could surely be unconquerable, if only its citizens knew it.

  For long years of contact with the people of the Fourth World have persuaded me that the power of kindness could be a vastly potent political asset. Think of it! It is not just that kindness is non-religious, or inter-religious. It is omni-religious! Omni-national, too! Omni-taste! Omni-purpose! Everyone understands the meaning of kindness, and all the great faiths pay service to it. We need no theologians to explain it to us. The least literate of tabloid readers know what it is about.

  Every political party, democratic or despotic, everywhere in the world, claims to be the Party of the People, the Party of Progress, the Party of the Future. Seldom, though, do any of them dare to propose any transcendental, fundamental solution for life’s problems. When did you last hear a mention of kindness in any political speech? But there is no political context, in my opinion, in which the Kindness Factor could not play a winning role. There is a vast putative electorate waiting to vote for it. Kissing babies has always been a messy and unconvincing duty of electoral candidates: extending the same techniques into the proportion of a political manifesto, preferably with a more sincere enthusiasm, could sway the opinion of millions. The kinder the party, the bigger its majorities would be!

  In a bar in Edinburgh one day I embarked upon an impassioned spiel concerning the grandeur of the notion and the latent force of the Fourth World, and in my somewhat heightened condition told the waitress that one day there would be a plaque above the seat where I sat, commemorating the birth of the International Coalition of Kindness.

  ‘Is that so,’ she simply said. ‘And in the meantime, shall I fill your glasses while we wait?’

  The Wrestler

  RORY STEWART (born Hong Kong, 1973) is an author, academic and – since the last election – the Conservative MP for Penrith, in Cumbria. He grew up in Malaysia and Scotland and served in the Army and Foreign Office before setting off, in 2002, to walk across Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal, staying in more than 500 different village houses. The Places In Between (2006) is the account of this journey. Occupational Hazards (2008), his second book, describes his time as a coalition forces governor in Iraq. www.rorystewartbooks.com

  The Wrestler

  RORY STEWART

  Most charities are founded rather differently but ours began with a wrestler. Aziz had won the Afghan national wrestling championship in 1963, gaining a broken nose, cauliflower ears, damaged knees and the title Parwan or ‘Wrestler.’. His speech was composed of boasts and scandalous revelations, interrupted by grimaces provoked by his bad knees. ‘I will make your project work. I challenge anyone to say I have ever taken a bribe,’ he told me, and added in a stage-whisper, ‘But I am a bandit.’

  I had originally set up operations in the front room of a tailoring shop with two chairs, a frayed pink Bokhara carpet, a safe, a feather-duster, six glasses and a thermos of green tea. There was also a laminated brochure, whose opening paragraph I had written on the plane, promising that the Turquoise Mountain project would conserve a threatened section of the medieval city of Kabul, improve living conditions, restore ancient buildings and create an academy to preserve and develop traditional skills.

  On the back page it said: ‘Presidents: HRH the Prince of Wales and HE President Karzai’. Prince Charles had sent me to Afghanistan because he wanted to help retrain Afghans in traditional crafts. I picked Kabul because I wanted to combine his interest with my own desire to save a poor community I had first encountered after the fall of the Taliban. The Prince had raised seed money for the first six months of operations. Thereafter, we would largely be on our own. I was listed in the brochure as Chief Executive. I was in fact the only employee.

  THE AREA IN QUESTION was called Murad Khane and my guide was Uncle Khalil. He invariably wore an old dark shalwar kamiz, muddy white gym-shoes and a tweed jacket and, because he was a pigeon-master, his hands were scarred by beak marks and by the sharp thread with which he pinioned his pigeons’ wings. There were three rose bushes in the courtyard of his house, standing in pools of muddy water, and an art deco balcony, built by his grandfather in the 1920s. Khalil was from the Qizilbash Shia minority which had been persecuted for centuries, but like most of his neighbours he was a house-owner. All but one of the houses in the district had been inherited father to son for over a hundred years.

  We followed some children chasing a dog through the wasteland of mud that formed the centre of Murad Khane. Two old men squatted in the open to relieve themselves. Nearby, three cooks were peeling onions. I watched a woman in a burqa clamber over a heap of rubbish into her courtyard because the garbage had submerged her entrance. Four acres of Murad Khane were covered in rubbish. There was no electricity, no water, no sewerage. One in five children died before they were one; most of the population could not read or write; and the life expectancy was about forty. Around the edge of the central land-fill site ran a narrow bazaar, a couple of mosques, some bath-houses and about sixty mud-brick courtyard houses, crammed between the river and shabby six-storey 1970s shopping arcades.

  Uncle Khalil seemed confident that the bazaar could be easily rebuilt. Down a lane was an old mud-brick mansion, where three goats browsed in a courtyard littered with crates of bananas. The wooden shutters were carved with Mughal stars and floral arabesques, delineated with delicate lattice-work. The wood was unpainted, and the plaster patterns lightly washed with lime.

  Back in the bazaar, I was introduced to Master Abdul-Hadi, one of the greatest carpenters in Afghanistan. He was seventy-six years old and had been selling fruit in the market for fifteen years. He had no students to whom he could pass on his skills. This was the area I wanted to restore; these were the people I had promised to help.

  OFFICIALS FROM SEVEN Afghan ministries, eight foreign embassies and four charities told me our plans were unwise and possibly illegal. Although Kabul was in ruins and had ballooned from less than a million to more than five million people in five years, the consensus was that too much had been spent on the capital city already. The European Community wanted programs only in ‘gender, rural development and governance’; the military focused on the unstable areas of the south and east; and the Afghan government demanded that all funds be placed in the central budget of the Ministry of Finance.

  It was illegal to demolish a building in the old city; it was also illegal to rebuild there. Only charities could export tax-free traditional crafts; but charities were not permitted an export licence. The best craftsmen were semi-literate descendants of traditional craft families but vocational craft qualifications could only be given to those who had graduated in Persian literature at high school. There was demand for carved cedar and replicas of Afghan jewelry but the Interior Ministry banned the purchase of cedar and the Culture Ministry banned replicas. A senio
r Pashtun lawyer confided that the real problem with Murad Khane was that the inhabitants were ‘dirty, illiterate, superstitious Shia criminals, who would be better pushed out of the area’. He called them foreigners, as ‘they only moved to Kabul from Persia in the eighteenth century’.

  The new Mayor had also been Mayor of Kabul in the 1970s. He had spent fifteen years in Canada but had not learnt English. One of his first initiatives was to try to stop the women’s hour at the municipal swimming pool on the grounds that women could not swim. When I mentioned Murad Khane he pointed to a map behind his desk, inscribed in Cyrillic Master Plan for Kabul 1976. This scheme, drawn up by Soviet and East German planners, remained his dream for the old city. He wanted to demolish the ancient streets and courtyard mansions and replace them with concrete blocks. The next official I met was equally determined to flatten the historic site. His resolve was apparently strengthened by understandings with property developers eager to launder their new – and often heroin-derived – wealth through the construction of skyscrapers.

  But local people liked the idea that we believed traditional Afghan art and architecture were beautiful, worthy of international admiration, and could create jobs. I was determined to press on with the project, even if it seemed contrary to public policy, private interest and municipal regulations. The only way to do so was to make rapid progress and then dare the government to demolish what we were rebuilding.

  ‘We are the original inhabitants of Murad Khane,’ Parwan Aziz roared when I went to see him, at Khalil’s insistence, to get support from the community. ‘Only one house in the area has ever been bought or sold. I will not let the government touch it.’ I explained that I wanted to rent the mansion with the banana boxes and to restore it. He told me instead that I should rent two houses. ‘I will place you – the foreigner – at each corner, so the government will not send in the bulldozers. If you take the centre, the government will demolish the edges.’