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INSIDE AFRICA

Look Back at 2007, Part I

Aired December 22, 2007 - 12:30:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

FEMI OKE, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, I'm Femi Oke. This is INSIDE AFRICA, your weekly look at life and issues on the continent.
Now for the next two weeks, we're going to look back at some of the major stories that CNN covered in Africa this year. We will talk to Anderson Cooper about his work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dr. Sanjay Gupta about shrinking Lake Chad, and Betty Nguyen about Sierra Leone's elections.

We have a lot of ground to cover, so let's get right to it. This year, Anderson Cooper put together a special report called "Africa: Dispatches from the Edge." One of the countries he highlighted was the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there is an ongoing conflict between government forces and rebel groups in the east. The United Nations estimates the fighting has displaced more than 400,000 people this year alone.

Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda is by far the most powerful rebel figure involved in the conflict. He faces international arrest warrants in connection with accusations of mass rape and executions by his forces. No one has been able to apprehend Nkunda, but Anderson Cooper managed to find and interview him. Anderson told me about that unusual and memorable experience.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANDERSON COOPER: Hello.

GEN. LAURENT NKUNDA: Welcome. Welcome.

COOPER: Anderson Cooper, General. Nice to meet you.

What I felt really interesting about Nkunda is he is clearly a charismatic leader. He, you know, presents himself very well. He's got a little swagger stick. His clothes are very well pressed.

OKE: The point where you meet him and you're working with him, did you know where he was taking you? He asked you to get on the truck. Did you have any idea where you were going?

COOPER: Yeah, you know, we didn't. We really didn't have any idea what this whole day was going to be like, you know. We sort of set off with the goal of finding General Nkunda, and it took us, you know, many hours, and we had to stop and talk at various points to his troops. And finally, we got into sort of the inner circle, where we were finally grilled, and then got to speak to the man himself.

(on camera): There have been allegations that you have committed war crimes, violated human rights. Is that true?

NKUNDA: In this area or out of this area?

COOPER: Out of this area. They say that in Kusungani (ph) in 2002, that you ordered an execution of 160 people. Is that true?

NKUNDA: Not true.

COOPER: They say that in 2004, there are allegations that in Bukabu (ph), your soldiers looted widespread, committed many rapes. In fact, Human Rights Watch cites an instance of a woman being raped in front of her husband and her children, and one of your soldiers, they say, raped a 3- year old child.

NKUNDA: No, it wasn't (inaudible). It's before I arrived in Bukabu (ph).

COOPER: So, this stuff happened before you got there?

NKUNDA: Before I arrived.

COOPER: After the interview, he sort of -- you know, we said we'd like to meet some of your troops, and he got these -- got us into some vehicles and drove to this sort of -- this valley. And we started working, we really had no idea, you know, what he was doing, where we were going. And I just, you know, was sort of following along. I had a little small video camera, and was asking him questions as we went.

After a couple of minutes of walking, we find ourselves in this circle of men who are dancing, who have clearly been waiting for us.

And then we had the little classroom set up, and then his troops did some exercises running up a hill. I think I ran with them.

They're clearly well supplied. You know, it is a real fighting force, and you don't see that often in Congo. I mean, Congolese government forces, frankly, don't look as sharp as his forces look.

OKE: At one point, he actually started singing and dancing and (inaudible) doing their own (inaudible). What do you make of that?

COOPER: It was a fascinating afternoon. You don't really get that kind of access to warlords very often, and, you know, it's interesting to see that he has a sense of public relations and the importance of getting the message out.

NKUNDA: I'm for the defense of my people. Our part (ph) is for the defense of the people. We will defend the people.

COOPER: So, if you're attacked by the army, you would fight back.

NKUNDA: Yeah. Yeah. We will counter-attack, not fight.

COOPER: Counter-attack?

NKUNDA: Counter-attack. Yeah.

OKE: You know, or you believe that somebody's forces have committed atrocities, then you talk to him, and he's singing and he's dancing for you. That must be a very peculiar feeling.

COOPER: You realize you are dealing with somebody who has committed war crimes, and been accused of terrible war crimes, and very well may some day stand trial. And it's a strange experience, you know. Because he's charming, he is very friendly, and yet you know there's this other side of what he's actually done.

This is a man who clearly is in command of his army, clearly has military training, and has support and back up, and has the respect of his troops thus far, at least at that point in this conflict. So just spending time with him, really seeing his operations up close, I think I'm going to remember that moment of him walking into that crowd of people who were dancing and watching him interact with his soldiers.

COOPER: Is there anything else you want people to know?

NKUNDA: No.

(LAUGHTER)

COOPER: Thank you very much. I appreciate your time.

NKUNDA: OK.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKE: Nkunda remained at large, and the fighting in eastern Congo has escalated in recent weeks. The U.N. says armed groups, including the DRC's own army, are pressing displaced people to join them.

The fighting is also taking its toll on endangered mountain gorillas. So, coming up on INSIDE AFRICA, Anderson Cooper updates us on their plight.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: Sitting with the gorillas -- they are so human in so many ways. You're looking at their eyes, there is intelligence there. Each of them is an individual. It's -- it is -- they're just magnificent animals.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OKE: And later, Dr. Sanjay Gupta reflects on his difficult desert journey around shrinking Lake Chad.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Making business news in Africa this week: China is starting to play a bigger role in the World Bank, and African countries may soon benefit. World Bank President Robert Zoellick says he and Chinese officials are discussing new joint African aid projects, and he welcomes China's new role as a World Bank contributor. China's lending policies in Africa have been criticized partly because of the fears that poor countries won't be able to pay back large condition-free loans.

And Zimbabwe's central bank has issued higher denomination bank notes in an attempt to relieve cash shortages caused by skyrocketing inflation. Many economists say the new notes will do nothing to slow Zimbabwe's inflation rate, estimated at some 10,000 percent, the worst in the world. This is the second time since July that the Central Bank has issued new currency.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKE: You're watching INSIDE AFRICA. Welcome back.

Mountain gorillas are indigenous to Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC. They're endangered, and only about 700 remain in the wild. Mountain gorillas in eastern Congo are especially vulnerable, given the region's brutal rebellion. This powerful yet gentle creatures have been a long-time interest for Anderson Cooper. He explained what he loves about them and gave us a status report on their plight.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COOPER: I've been going to see the gorillas since I was about 17 years old. I'm 40 now. So I've been doing it for a long time. I've probably gone about six or seven or 10 times over the course of my life. And it is among the most remarkable experiences anybody can have, a tourist, a journalist, whatever. I mean, it is just -- it's the most intimate experience, I think, you can have with an animal in the wild.

You know, you're told don't make eye contact, maybe look down if the gorillas look at you directly. Don't smile. I mean, there's a long number of sort of wives tales about how -- how you're supposed to act with the gorillas, but basically, you know, the bottom line is don't get too close, because there is the possibility of you transmitting human diseases to the gorillas. They're very vulnerable. And also, just, you don't want them to become too habituated to humans, because that's not good for their long- term survival.

PATRICK MEHLMAN, PRIMATOLOGIST: His name is Umma (ph), and we think he's about 22, 24 years of age. He's the only silverback in this group.

COOPER: Patrick Mehlman is a gorilla expert with a Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Conservation International.

MEHLMAN: He's just testing us. He's just testing us. It's OK. He's just trying to pass now. Just let him pass. As long as he does not feel like we're doing anything threatening, he'll just walk right by us, as he did.

COOPER: The tragedy in all of this right now, of course, is that the gorillas in Congo, who I was able to visit last year, when I went back this year, you couldn't even get to those gorillas. General Nkunda's forces have actually taken over that part of the park. So even the rangers have been kicked out, and the rangers cannot even get there to check on the gorillas or to protect them, and two of the gorillas from the family that I visited, I believe, were executed in June. Other members from the Rugando (ph) family were executed a month later.

So, it's a bittersweet memory. I mean, sitting with the gorillas, they're so human in so many ways. You look at their eyes, there is intelligence there. Each of them is an individual. They're just magnificent animals, and it is -- you know, it's such an incredible moment to be able to sit there with them. You're only allowed an hour with them, but the hour just flies by, and, you know, it's a bittersweet memory to think that those gorillas who I spent that hour with, that some of them are dead now, and many more of them may die before anything is done about it.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKE: And that was Anderson Cooper. Conservationists believe people involved in the charcoal trade killed the gorillas as a message to those who were trying to protect the forests in the area.

Coming up on INSIDE AFRICA, Dr. Sanjay Gupta takes us to shrinking Lake Chad and explains what he did when his pilot told him the rickety plane he was on might fall out of the sky.

See you on the other side.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

OKE: Welcome back. You're watching INSIDE AFRICA.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta went to great lengths this year to bring us a report about what's left of Lake Chad. It borders four countries, and just 40 years ago, was one of the largest lakes in the world. Since then, it has shrunk by 90 percent. Yet more people than ever now rely on Lake Chad.

Sanjay and his crew drove the entire coastline to find out what's causing it to shrink, and what's at stake. It turned out to be a long, difficult journey.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's 114 degrees, and we're stuck in Central Africa. We're trying to get to the source of Lake Chad to investigate why it's disappearing. So far, getting there is proving anything but easy.

There are no winches out here to free our trucks, just the bodies of our entire crew.

It doesn't always go as planned, as you know. I mean, we had some grander plans in terms of actually flying across the -- what Lake Chad once was, and that didn't quite happen.

OKE: And that had a big impact on how the rest of the assignment went. So no plane. What happened?

GUPTA: Well, as you know, because you do these stories in the field -- you're on a schedule. You have to sort of maintain some sort of schedule. And we -- we chartered this plane, a low prop plane to sort of get us from one country and go over four other countries and get us back to another area where we were going to report it.

Well, we got to the location and the pilot literally said, well, the plane might work, but the prop, the propeller hasn't been working so well lately, so we're not quite sure if it's going to stay in the air. Expect the unexpected. I guess that's the message out in the field. You just -- if you get upset about it, you think, oh, my gosh, we're doomed; this isn't going to work. Instead, we just got in the car and we drove.

OKE: The terrain you were working in is very, very dramatic. And as I was watching some shots of you on the sand, I was thinking, Sanjay of Arabia! What was the impact of the sand on you and (inaudible) -- and that really dramatic scene -- how did it make you feel in terms of the mood when you were reporting?

GUPTA: Well, you know, there is the -- there is the what you end up seeing on television, and then sort of the reality behind the scenes. And that is that those sand dunes that you're talking about, first of all, they were very hard to get to. We had to drive -- we were driving in this vehicle. And just because you're going over all this terrain, you couldn't put the air conditioning out on the car, because it took away too much power. So you're in 113-degree weather, no air conditioning. You can't open the windows because sand would go everywhere, and we have camera equipment. So you can imagine, we're basically in a sauna for a good six hours before we get to these sand dunes.

By the time we got there, we recognized that the vehicle that had all the water in it actually gotten stuck about a good two miles back. So we had no water, been in a sauna for six hours. Now we have to shoot for, you know, another few hours before the sun goes down.

So we've been hearing a lot about the fact that there might be some water underneath all the sand, and if people dig enough, in fact, you can find some of that sand, like I found here. Which means that if you dig deep enough, you might actually find some water.

That whole area that you saw, all that powdery sand, that used to be covered by water at one point. And that's why I wanted to go there. It's just so parched, it's so scorched. I want to show you that sort of earth and remind you that that's what happens when the water disappears. You're left with that.

After driving more than 50 miles from where the lake once was, we finally found some water again. We'll get in this boat, and take a look at what remains of Lake Chad.

The best way to try to understand Lake Chad is to actually get in. It used to be over 25 feet deep here. Now, it just comes up to my waist.

OKE: I got the feeling with this story that you probably got the short straw. It was challenging conditions, it was a challenging story to do, and meanwhile, Jeff is off on Madagascar, with all those beautiful limas (ph).

GUPTA: Right. Right.

OKE: How did you get this particular assignment?

GUPTA: I think if Jeff were here right now, he's say, well, I suffered as well. I suffered in Madagascar.

No, you know, I think that first of all, I spent a lot of time in Central Africa, and I'm fond of the place. I was in -- I was in Sudan, and I've been in Darfur a few times reporting over the past few years, and so I think I had a lot of institutional knowledge of the place, along with my producer Chris, and I think that was part of it.

Another part of it was the health impacts of these stories. That was something I really wanted to tell. As much as we talk about climate change and its impact on wildlife species, what is the impact on human beings? I wanted to go to some places that had the most concrete examples of that. And as I immersed myself in reading about Central Africa and Chad, in particular on Lake Chad, I found that this was an interesting story to tell, regardless of why the lake was shrinking, exactly, it was affecting the people there and you were seeing a dramatic effect on their lives now.

OKE: If you're trying to look up Lake Chad and look at what might be happening to it as far as it's shrinking over the last few decades, there is not much to go on, there is not a lot of research out there, in terms of people writing stuff. So really what you were doing was quite pioneering reporting. Did you feel that as you were there?'

GUPTA: Well, yeah, you know, I think it hadn't become the sort of international story that it should be. I mean, we're talking about the sixth largest lake in the world. I mean, just imagine that. The sixth largest lake in the world has shrunk by 90 percent. That's a big story no matter how you look at it.

So we just spent a lot of time initially, even before we did one frame of shooting, sitting down and talking to people who knew about the situation, and have the science and the data to actually back it up. We wanted to be as credible as possible, while interweaving these amazing stories.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKE: That was CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta. The United Nations Environment Program says the shrinking of Lake Chad is half-caused by inefficient damming and irrigation, and blames the other half on climate change.

When INSIDE AFRICA continues, in 2007 Sierra-Leone held its first election since U.N. peacekeepers left two years ago. Betty Nguyen shares her thoughts on witnessing history that some Sierra Leoneans should never forget.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

OKE: Hello again. It's only been five years since Sierra-Leone emerged from a civil war that killed 50,000 people, and robbed countless survivors of arms and legs. This year, Sierra-Leoneans took a major step toward burying that bloody past. They flocked to the polls to choose a president in the country's first election since U.N. peacekeepers left two years ago.

Ernest Koroma was declared the winner after a runoff. International observers deemed the vote free and fair.

Betty Nguyen covered the elections, as well as some of the daunting problems Koroma's government will have to face. I recently sat down with her, and (inaudible) reflections on that experience.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETTY NGUYEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We had the producer, we had the photographer, we had the drivers, we had me, we had the local people on the ground that were helping us.

And so, because it was election time, everyone had already secured drivers. So all of us had to pile everything into one little SUV for a six-hour drive from Freetown to Cono (ph).

The first thing that we saw once we arrived in the Cono were the mines. You could see them off the side of the road, and you could see the miners sifting and digging. People are working, people are being watched very closely.

OKE: I remember Yayaba. He had some interesting sunglasses.

NGUYEN: Those glasses.

(CROSSTALK)

NGUYEN: You know, Yayaba (ph), I don't know if he was nuts because of what he's been through, what he's seen, that 10 years of, like I said, a bloody civil war. Of if the hot sun and working day after day looking just for this little peace of diamond, and he's thinking it's going to deliver him from this poverty.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Like this, I'll get this, I'll leave Africa.

NGUYEN: You get a diamond this big, you can leave Africa?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah.

NGUYEN: How much do you get for this?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This? $1 million.

NGUYEN: U.S.?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

NGUYEN: That's just not the case. But, you know, they live off of that dream, that dream of hopefully finding that one diamond that will rescue them from the conditions that they're in.

OKE: There were a couple of shots of children which keep recurring in your reporting during that week. And I know that that experience was actually a very important one for you, seeing what the children were up to.

NGUYEN: Yeah, it was really hard. One thing in particular was when we were driving through Freetown, I looked over a saw a trash heap, a dump, essentially, and if you looked very closely, you would see children in there. They were digging among the mud and the muck and the trash to find some type of metal that they could sell, which they would only make a penny for pound. They were there digging amongst the pigs, looking for something to help feed their families.

OKE: There were a lot of interesting characters that popped up in your reports over the week. I remember one gentleman. He was so determined to vote, he was going to vote with his toe, because he was an amputee.

NGUYEN: And it was wonderful that he was able to share his story with us.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I said to him, to them. I said, "don't cut of my hands. Don't take my hands. I am your brother." They said no, "I'm not your brother."

NGUYEN: Just really heart-wrenching. Not only his story, but the thousands of others who, you know, had their limbs hacked off, but yet believe in democracy and would do what it would take to come out and vote.

And it didn't matter where they live, how far away they live from a polling station. It didn't matter if they had the ability to walk there or if they had a lost a limb to the war. They were going to be there, and they were going to get that ink stain on their finger and make sure that their vote counted.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKE: Corruption is widely considered one of the biggest problems facing Sierra Leone. President Koroma has promised zero tolerance polices towards corruption.

Now, next week on INSIDE AFRICA, we continue our look back at 2007. We will talk to Richard Quest about his trip to the West Africa to film a special program about the environment. The show took him to Cameroon, where he learned more than he wanted to know about the animal kingdom.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD QUEST, CNN CORRESPONDENT: How did I learn that it's the wild life on the wild life's terms? A bread roll in the groin. A broken camera from a chimp.

She's taking your picture.

An elephant that nearly destroyed all our equipment. And a silverback gorilla that gave us what we want. That's how you treat the wildlife.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OKE: Oh, yes, I'm looking forward to it. We have so much more on Richard's experiences in Cameroon next week. And if you're celebrating, happy Christmas from all of the INSIDE AFRICA team. If you're not, have a great week. And we'll see you INSIDE AFRICA very soon.

I'm Femi Oke. Until the next time, take care.

END

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