• BBC coverage
• In pictures: Kabul UN attacks
• Audio Podcast: Inside the Taliban

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark. This is The World. There was a brazen attack early this morning on a guesthouse in Kabul. Gunmen stormed into a compound housing staff from the United Nations. The Taliban claimed responsibility. Several people were killed including six UN employees. The attack lasted for two hours and sent people jumping out of windows and hopping from roof to roof to escape a fire that engulfed part of the three-story building. The World’s Aaron Schachter has stayed in the Kabul neighborhood in which the attack took place, Shar-e-now. Aaron, describe what the neighborhood is like, what these guesthouses are like.

AARON SCHACHTER: Well the guesthouses are basically compounds with steel and metal gates; guards out in front generally carrying automatic weapons, AK-47s. You drive up and get escorted into the compound. And generally, especially at places like the UN, they ask for identification. Even if you work for the United Nations you have to sign in and out. It certainly seems like a very secure place.

CLARK: So are these attacks … ? Do they suggest an escalation in the Taliban’s tactics?

SCHACHTER: Well I spoke with  a bunch of security firms today that protect journalists and diplomats and so on and the answers were mixed. One guy said this is definitely a move from attacking you know coalition forces to attacking regular folks going about their daily life. Others say no. The situation has been definitely getting worse over the past three months to a year and what has happened though is that targeting has become much more specific. So people haven’t noticed the degree of attacks. This is Crispian Cuss. He works with the Olive Group. That’s a security firm that’s in Afghanistan now.

CRISPIAN CUSS: So rather than there being just a lot of attacks against policemen and security forces there have been deliberate attacks against individuals in key institutions. And I think today’s attacks have really reminded everyone that the security situation in Kabul is still very dangerous. Less [INDISCERNIBLE] but certainly far more aware of who they’re targeting.

SCHAHCTER: So again that was Crispian Cuss. He works for the Olive Group that’s a security firm working now in Afghanistan and other places around the world.

CLARK: Now there was a rocket attack as well on the five-star Serena Hotel in downtown Kabul. No one died in that incident but two attacks today. What does this mean Aaron? Do people pull their aid workers out? Do they pull their diplomats out now?

SCHACHTER: Well everyone is saying no, that won’t happen including the United Nations. But there’s definitely a feeling of a bunker mentality right now in Kabul. The UN is hunkering down. They’re not letting people out of those compounds. News organizations are scaling back including hours. And this despite elections that are coming up. These attacks are designed to scare the regular people who work for these organizations as well as the organizations themselves. This is a man who works for US AID – the Agency for International Development. He says there’s definitely a lot more fear in Kabul now then there was yesterday.

MAN FROM US AID: Right now we’re waiting to see what develops. A big factor is what’s going to happen tomorrow. People are taking the threats from the Taliban very seriously but you never know what’s going to happen or when it’s going to happen. You just have to limit your exposure to the risk as best as you possibly can.

SCHACHTER: Again this affects the regular worker – the volunteers, the people who work for the NGOs, the people who work for the United Nations and other organizations. The security firms say what they’re doing hasn’t changed and won’t change all that much. But there is certainly a heightened vigilance.

CLARK: The World’s Middle East correspondent Aaron Schachter. Thank you Aaron.

SCHACHTER: You’re welcome Katy.

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• BBC coverage
• In pictures: Peshawar bombing

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KATY CLARK: The attack against that guesthouse in Kabul is not the only violence we’re reporting today. There was also a deadly attack in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. A massive car bomb tore through a congested market killing more than 90 people including many women and children. It was the latest in a string of militant attacks this month in Pakistan and it happened as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began a three-day visit to the country. The World’s Jason Margolis has more.

JASON MARGOLIS: Pakistani officials say the recent wave of bomb attacks is the Taliban’s answer to a military offensive to flush militants from their stronghold in South Waziristan. That’s a region bordering Afghanistan. There’s wide speculation that today’s car bomb was timed to coincide with the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Pakistan. Clinton spoke in Islamabad shortly after the bomb exploded today.

HILLARY CLINTON: These attacks on innocent people are cowardly. They are not courageous. They are cowardly. If the people behind these attacks were so sure of their beliefs let them join the political process.

MARGOLIS: Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmoud Qureshi, spoke along side Clinton. Qureshi also had a stark message for the perpetrators of the attacks.

SHAH MAHMOUD QURESHI: People who are carrying out such heinous crimes, they want to shake our resolve. I want to address them. We will not buckle. We will fight you. We will fight you because we want stability and peace in Pakistan.

MARGOLIS: A 90-minute drive away from the press conference, eye witnesses in Peshawar describe the scene and criticize the official response.

MAN: [SPEAKING PASHTO]

TRANSLATOR: There was a loud blast suddenly and then a fire broke out. It’s been an hour and the authorities still haven’t been able to control the fire. There are people still trapped inside the buildings injured and we’re afraid that they’ll die. There’s no security. We’ve been fooled in the name of security.

MARGOLIS: Pakistan’s government structure doesn’t make it crystal clear who ultimately is responsible for that security – to police, the army, or the civilian government. Here in the United States there is a clear leader during a crisis. We turn to the commander in chief for words of security and reassurance. In Pakistan it’s more complicated.

ANDREW WILDER: In Pakistan leadership has always been contested between the civilian rulers and the military rulers.

MARGOLIS: That’s Andrew Wilder. He grew up in Pakistan and is now at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University in Boston. He says there’s been a power struggle between civilian and military leadership since Pakistan’s first coup in 1958. Wilder says popular support for the military declined in recent years towards the end of General Pervez Musharaf’s rule. But Wilder says the military is once again gaining public support.

WILDER: At times of insecurity and when there’s a feeling of growing security threat to Pakistan I think many Pakistanis are actually looking to their military leadership to take a lead in terms of tackling the militancy in Pakistan.

MARGOLIS: But preventing future suicide attacks in Pakistan won’t be easy explains Marvin Weinbaum, a former State Department analyst for Pakistan.

MARVIN WEINBAUM: However strong or weak an organization, it doesn’t take very much to be able to pull off a suicide attack. When it comes to individuals who are prepare to die for a cause it’s very difficult to be able to stop this. What you can do is you can minimize the consequences of their action.

MARGOLIS: Weinbaum says that’s done through better intelligence – knowing in advance that a bomb is coming. In Pakistan intelligence gathering is shared by the military and the civilian government. On that front, Weinbaum doesn’t see any rift. He says the military has stepped back from direct involvement in politics and each side has given the other space to operate. The other way thwart future attacks is to crush the enemy. That’s what Pakistan’s military is trying to do in South Waziristan. For The World I’m Jason Margolis.

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• BBC Archive: The Berlin Wall
• BBC Audio Documentary: How the Wall Fell

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. IN Berlin today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was sworn in fro a second term. Merkel famously grew up in communist East Germany. And 20 years ago in the weeks before the wall came down she was helping organize protests against the government there. The wall of course was the most potent symbol of the cold war dividing the city of Berlin in two. Many who attempted to cross form east to west were killed at its base. The collapse of the wall signaled the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe. Here’s Dan Rather on CBC.

DAN RATHER: In Berlin this is the definitely the “in” place to be. The sites and sounds – all the joy and the history in front of the Brandenburg Gate with West Berliners partying literally on top of the Berlin Wall in front of the gate.

CLARK: But when the wall came down it didn’t disappear. It just went other places as The World’s Alex Gallafent reports.

ALEX GALLAFENT: When I started working on this story I put something up on Facebook which just said, “Do you own a piece of the Berlin Wall?” The answers came flooding in from the United States, Britain, and beyond.

MONTAGE OF VARIOUS VOICES: My husband has a piece in his office. There was some at a lunch I went to last week. I think my brother’s got a piece. My sister owns a tiny, tiny chunk.

GALLAFENT: The Berlin Wall is kind of everywhere now – especially in the West. It wasn’t just bulldozers and wrecking balls that took the wall down. It was hammers and chisels – individuals claiming fragments of history, wrapping them up to keep or sending them home to family or friends – to people like Noah Isenberg. He owns a chunk too.

NOAH ISENBERG: It was just in this little yellow cardboard container that I used to always have on my bookshelves and yet for some strange reason it’s gone missing.

HOWARD ROSENBERG: Well it’s interesting. I sort of feel like I have a piece of the wall too but it’s a different kind of a piece. It’s the piece that’s in my memory.

GALLAFENT: When the wall came down Howard Rosenberg was the TV critic for Los Angeles Times. He remembers how each of the major networks sent an anchor to be live at the wall. As Rosenberg puts it, “to validate the story for Americans back home.”

ROSENBERG: I mean television does this all the time. I always think of these stories as like a whale being carved up by Eskimos in which they use every bit of the whale – every part of it goes for something and everybody takes a little chunk out of it as if they were … . In this case individually taking a chunk out of the wall. A couple of them even climbed the wall on a ladder. You can’t say that they eclipsed this momentous event but they certainly chipped into it.

GALLAFENT: Even as it came down the wall and its meaning were being claimed. It meant the end of oppression or the triumph of freedom or capitalism. Today in Los Vegas it means something … . Well I’m not quite sure what it means. At the Main Street Station Casino Brewery and Hotel there’s a hefty section of the wall positioned behind the men’s urinals.

ROSENBERG: [LAUGHING] Oh I love it. That’s just great.

GALLAFENT: Since 1989 the wall has been sold, bought, and donated. It’s been broken apart and reconstructed. There were the small fragments. Some real. Some fake. And then there are the larger pieces. Entire sections of the wall transplanted to new homes. A few of that type are here in New York including one in the heart of the Midtown Business District. A section of the wall has been placed in a courtyard next to an office building.

JULIANE CAMFIELD: It’s still very intense. It seems so out of place.

GALLAFENT: I met someone who knew the wall when it was still The Wall.

CAMFIELD: It almost seems unreal. It seems like … . It looks like a movie prop. It seems to me like it can’t be really here.

GALLAFENT: Juliane Camfield was born in West Berlin in 1968, seven years after the wall went up. She left in 1989, the year it came down. Now she’s a New Yorker. Camfield is her married name. She studies this section of the wall from a distance. It’s painted with colorful graffiti faces, as much of the western side was. And set behind the wall there’s a fountain, a curtain of water framing the whole thing.

CAMFIELD: I think that’s part of what makes it so unreal for me. To have this weird fountain thing in the background because the fountain is sort of something soothing and you know a little tacky. And I think the wall it’s not beautiful, it’s something very provocative and shocking and symbolizing terror and death and separation and I don’t want it to be smoothed out.

GALLAFENT: Juliane Camfield more than anyone else I spoke to, seemed like she really owned a piece of the Berlin Wall. She had relatives in the East. The wall prevented her from knowing them. Her only link was what she learned from her two grandmothers on walks around West Berlin, a little island of freedom.

CAMFIELD: And we’d eventually end up at the wall because wherever you went at some point you would end up at the wall and they really, I guess, they kept their memories alive. They kept their connections to their nephews, nieces, cousins, uncles, aunts. It was very close to their heart. So when I heard them speak about it I guess these two grandmothers more than anything for me established the outrageousness of that piece of architecture.

GALLAFENT: Not everyone has a story like Juliane’s. Even people in Berlin itself are no longer defined by the wall as they once were.

CAMFIELD: When I think about Berlin it is mostly a divided Berlin because I grew up in a divided Berlin. When I go back and visit I realize it’s a very different city now and the people I knew when I grew up and who did not leave Berlin, for them I think it is much less present even thought hey live there, than it is present for me even though I live away from Berlin. It’s a paradox.

GALLAFENT: But Camfield’s certain of one thing. She will never own an actual piece of the Berlin Wall. In fact she says she doesn’t even think of it as an object. Thinking about its meaning is enough.

CAMFIELD: Do I need to look at it to be aware of that? No, I know that. I don’t need to have it.

GALLAFENT: And so she walks away carrying only the idea of the long gone Berlin Wall. For The World I’m Alex Gallafent in New York.

CLARK: You can see photos of Juliane Camfield and the Berlin Wall at The World dot org.

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• Guardian newspaper story
• Our weekly language podcast: The World in Words

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: Wine connoisseurs have a language of their own to describe fine wines – fruity, okay, nutty, buttery, and so on. Problem is many consumers have no idea what they’re talking about. Which is why Spar – a chain of British convenience stores is putting more colloquial descriptions on wine bottles like this one.

MAN 1: A totally stoten bevy that’s bricked in full flavor with plum, currenty fruit making it taste [INDISCERNIBLE]. A [INDISCERNIBLE] color with cherries and black fruit [INDISCERNIBLE] that runs from the front to the back of your mouth.

CLARK: That was the Scottish description of a nice $7 bottle of Merlot. The original description went like this.

MAN 2: A truly great merlot which is ablazed with succulent black currents and blueberries. It’s full bouquet is … .

CLARK: Quite a difference. Laura Jewell is Spar’s wine controller. Laura Jewell, do any of us know what it means to be ablazed with succulent black currents and blueberries. I mean isn’t that just making it even more confusing?

LAURA JEWELL: I think we’re trying to get people to be enthusiastic about the wines. And I think most people will understand the black currents and that it’s just full and brimming with them. So yeah, I think most people would get it in this country.

CLARK: Who do you think this will appeal to?

JEWELL: This is a bit of research that we’ve done and we’ve discovered that people find language on back labels quite intimidating as you’ve said. So in the middle of redesigning our labels we decided to listen to our consumers. And that meant that we decided to translate that tasting note into eight different dialects to reflect the wide geographical range of our customers. So we’ve done from Scottish in the north all the way to Summerset in the far south. So it’s appealing to a wide range of customers to talk to them in their language on a local level.

CLARK: Who did the translations for you?

JEWELL: We asked people who work in our stores and that are regional wholesalers. So we believe that they’re as authentic as we could get them to be.

CLARK: I’d like to play another local dialect here.

MAN 3: A sweet-smelling red with cherry and vanilla. [INDISCERNIBLE] with a touch of wood. This wine would be right good with your supper as it gets better and better as it [INDISCERNIBLE] glass. Now guzzle down this wine and I’ll be as happy as pig in muck.

CLARK: Happy as a pig in muck. I’m wondering is that really the kind of association you want made with your wine?

JEWELL: We want people to be enthusiastic about the wines and that’s what we’re trying to get across. So I’m perfectly happy with that. It’s a great recommendation and it if appeals to people and makes them smile and takes the stuffiness out of wine then that’s perfect for us.

CLARK: Is this a bit dangerous territory though you’re venturing into to? Maybe seen as a bit patronizing – like people in these parts of the country wouldn’t understand the original language on the bottle.

JEWELL: We just want people to have a bit fun with our wine labeling. And we recognize that there are many different dialects and regional variations on dialects. So we know that they vary from one person to another and from region to region. So it’s really just about making our labels more accessible to our customers in general.

CLARK: Laura Jewell is the wine controller for the Spar convenient stores in Britain. Thanks for your time Laura.

JEWELL: Thank you very much.

CLARK: By the way remember that $7 bottle of Merlot. As we are a Boston-based program we asked our resident experts to translate this into a local dialect. Here we go.

MAN 4: A wicked good Merlot with tons of fruit. It’s strong as hoss and explodes in your mouth. It’s got this awesome flowery smell. And you don’t want to stop drinking it. It’s a keeper.

[MUSIC]

CLARK: News headlines are next on PRI.

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The Soldiers perform their hit Coming Home:

• The Soldiers
• BBC: Singing soldiers in chart battle
• What’s on your iPod?

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark and this is The World. A blogger named Hossein Derakhshan was arrested in Tehran on November 1, 2008. He’d only been in Iran for two months. Derakhshan is a dual citizen of Iran and Canada. While in Toronto in 2001 he created one of the first Persian-language blogs and became a pioneer of the Iranian blogoshpere. It’s been a year since his arrest but details of his case are still murky. Iran has said little about it and his family has largely kept silent. Until now. Cyrus Farivar reports.

CYRUS FARIVAR: Last week Hossein’s father, Hassan Derakhshan, published an open letter in the Iranian reformist newspaper Salaam. It was addressed to the new head of the Iranian judiciary system. In it he said the family has only had just two short meetings with Hossein and they have no information about his legal situation. And that’s why a year after his brother’s arrest Hamed Derakhshan began speaking to the press. In an interview with The World Hamed Derakhshan told me he can’t afford to be silent anymore.

HAMED DERAKHSHAN: They have told us that it would be better for him. His case would be processed faster if there is no unwanted attention to it. But now I feel that you know I’ve got to do something about it.

FARIVAR: Hamed Derakhshan says his family still has very little information about his brother. They don’t even know what prison he’s being held in.

HAMED DERAKHSHAN: We don’t officially know what his charges are. There were rumors in the beginning that his charges are insulting religious figures. And then we heard about spying for Israel. But officially, now we don’t know what they are.

FARIVAR: With no real information out there, rumors have rampant in the Persian-language internet. Some even speculate that Hossein Derakhshan was collaborating with the Iranian government and perhaps spying for them. His brother Hamed Derakhshan denies these charges and says that the family continues to press authorities for more information. The Iranian government isn’t speaking about Hossein Derakhshan’s case and the Canadian government isn’t saying much either. Canadian officials declined to speak on tape about the case. But Rodney Moore, of the Office of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, sent an e-mail saying Canada continues to press for access to Hossein Derakhshan under international law. He added that Derakhshan’s dual nationality makes things complicated for them. And there are other complications in the case. Before he left for Iran in 2008, Derakhshan said something a little surprising to family and friends. One of them was Pedram Moallemian, an Iranian-Canadian living in Los Angeles.

PEDRAM MOALLEMIAN: He was convinced that the Iranian government and the judiciary system is a fair and adequate one and in case he was arrested he would be fairly treated and represented and he made it very clear that if he is arrested he does not want a big noise made about it outside.

FARIVAR: In his early years as a blogger Derakhshan leaned more towards Iran’s Reformist camp. He initially wanted to build bridges between Iran and the West. He even traveled to Israel on his Canadian passport in 2006. But Derakhshan began to change his political views. Derakhshan ultimately began supporting Iran’s hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his policies says Omid Memarian, an Iran analyst with Human Rights Watch in San Francisco.

OMID MEMARIAN: I think Hossein was smarter than that to become a fan of Ahmadinejad. But he was. He was really into the new government and defending their policies and he was after everybody. Like every single person who was into defending human rights issues, like Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel laureate.

FARIVAR: Derakhshan didn’t just go after Shirin Ebadi. He wrote inflammatory things in his blog about anyone he didn’t agree with. He even accused Memarian of converting to Christianity which is forbidden under Islamic law. In 2007, Derakhshan got slapped with a $2 million libel case. But Memarian says none of this should stop human rights advocates from trying to defend Derakhshan’s rights.

MEMARIAN: Hossein’s case is a human rights case. You know, no matter what Hossein did and no matter what damages he created for people, he has been disappeared for almost a year. He’s trapped and he needs help.

FARIVAR: At this point Derakhshan doesn’t have many friends left who are publicly willing to fight for him. For now it appears Derakhshan will likely continue to remain in an unknown Tehran prison. For The World I’m Cyrus Farivar.

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KATY CLARK: Asma Jahanjir is head of the Independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. And like all Pakistanis Jahanjir is deeply concerned by the current violence in her country. She’s visiting Washington at the moment. And Asma Jahanjir the situation in Pakistan is pretty difficult right now. Can you give us a sense of the mood in Pakistan cities with all of these terror attacks? How is it affecting life for the average Pakistani right now?

ASMA JAHANJIR: Life is very tough. It’s very difficult. When I left Pakistan there had been three suicide attacks in the whole. And that day I myself was absolutely amazed that despite everything, despite the sorrow, despite how people were devastated, people were going about their own work. But there is a bit of depression. People are not going out for shopping. As you know we’re having slow economic turndown. For example, we don’t have electricity half the day. There’s a shortage of gas supply. There’s a shortage of water. All this plus the fact that openly the Interior Ministry is saying we cannot protect you, please protect yourself. This is very demanding on people. And yet the resilience of the Pakistanis is something that nobody talks about. It is amazing. They are so patient with what has happened.

CLARK: Patient to the point where do you think that they’re willing to stick it out? And is the government and the military willing to stick it out for as long as it takes to defeat the Taliban and other extremists fighting in Pakistan? I mean things are likely to only get worse before they get better.

JAHANJIR: I believe that the people of Pakistan have stuck so far. It’s very, very nasty there. And I believe that in any other place you would have seen numbers of people getting up and leaving the country which has not happened in Pakistan. As far as the political parties are concerned, I think that they are taking great risks to their lives both at a personal level and at a collective level. They are saying very openly that they are going to now fight militants. They are going to fight terrorism. It is in our interest to do it. But as far as the military is concerned whether they’re fighting when they have to or whether they have changed their way of thinking is still mood question and politicians are afraid that unless pressure is not kept on them the idea will be of dispersing militants rather than dismantling militants infrastructure in Pakistan.

CLARK: Well given all of the suffering, all of the violence, that Pakistan is experiencing right now, would you say Pakistan is in a state of civil war or on the brink of civil war?

JAHANJIR: Well I’d hate to use that word because I come from there; I live there. I would like to think that we are not in a state of civil war. But the fact remains that there are fissures that you can see even between and inside the security forces. You can see that there is resistance. We had one of the chief ministers of a province saying very openly on television that all those people in government services who are siding with the Taliban, supporting them, protecting them, are giving them protection and safe passage have to be turned in and people must come and tell us who and identify who these people are. Similarly there have been certain attacks where it is apparent that people from inside those institutions have had some kind of collaboration with the perpetrators. So we think that there is certainly cracks within the military and the establishment and particularly intelligence agencies themselves.

CLARK: On a personal level I wanted to ask about your life and your work right now. I mean for years you have been fighting against all sorts of human rights abuses in Pakistan. Well and I should say too that the government hasn’t always been happy with what you’ve been doing and what you’ve been saying. Has life gotten any harder or any easier for you say in this past year even?

JAHANJIR: Let me put it this way, that life is harder for all of us because there is just so much pressure, so much violence. You know you get so confused. It’s psychologically very disabling. And you don’t know who’s doing what. I mean when I was traveling Balutschistan for a week I was told to change my hotel everyday because if the intelligence agencies wanted to kill me and put it on the nationalists it would help them and if the nationalists wanted to kill me and put it on the intelligence agency it would help them. So we are going through that kind of an insecure period. But we still continue to work and must work.

CLARK: Asma Jahanjir is chair woman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan based in Lahore. Thank you so much.

JAHANJIR: Thank you.

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KATY CLARK: We go from a small island to big cars and the status they convey. That’s true just about everywhere including the East African nation of Kenya where government officials are known for driving large luxury models. But Kenya’s trying to crack down on that. The government recently ordered officials to turn in their Mercedes for smaller more fuel efficient cars. But so far it’s not going over too well. The BBC’s Jonah Fisher is Nairobi. And Jonah I understand a deadline passed today in Kenya for government ministers to turn in their Mercedes. What were these officials supposed to get in return and what happened?

JONAH FISHER: That’s right Wednesday was the deadline for the government ministers here and their officials to hand over their gas guzzlers, their big cars, in return for smaller versions. But this had been a policy that had been announced in June by the finance minister to try and combat the widely here that the government and the ministers are wasting money. And so that he brought in this rule that all government cars have to have engines of less than 1800 cc. And the critical thing about that was that it ruled out the Mercedes cars which most government ministers here drive. And in replacement 130 Volkswagen Passats were ordered – much smaller engines. They are waiting in Nairobi for the large cars to be returned and traded in. This evening I think a local TV station was reporting that 14 cars had been handed over and traded in. So obviously lots of resistance from those government officials to doing this trade down.

CLARK: So culturally what does a Mercedes say about its owner in East Africa?

FISHER: Well it’s a good question. I suppose to many people here, I mean it’s not just new Mercedes that people drive as a symbol that they’ve made it. Old Mercedes are still widely driven here both in Kenya or in Ethiopia they do carry a certain penash. And I think many ministers here regard it as being one of the perks of the job which they get which symbolizes that they’ve made it. The real problem here in Kenya though is that government has grown to such a size. There are currently over 90 ministers and assistant ministers in this huge coalition government which is in place here. They have to put so many ministers in to keep everyone happy, if you like, that the cost of keeping everyone in cars, keeping all the officials happy has really become quite [INDISCERNIBLE] in the context of a country which is still for most of its people are quite a poor country.

CLARK: Sounds like the roads are pretty clogged with the Mercedes Benzes.

FISHER: Well yeah there are lots of nice cars here and in Nairobi in particular the traffic is quite frankly appalling. So one can see what the finance minister is trying to do. It’s been interesting though to see just how much a resistance he’s been encountering from ministers. A few of them were quoted in the newspapers today. One of them saying that 1800 cc and under cars were just for teenagers. Another one, a roads minister, quoted saying that with a small car he just wouldn’t be able to get out and do his job. That he wouldn’t be able to go into the countryside to monitor the roads here in Kenya. So it’s not gone down well. And of course the next step will be for the government here to decide how are they going to force those ministers who aren’t happy about it, who don’t want to change, to hand the Mercedes in and to be happy and willing to drive around in Volkswagen Passat.

CLARK: Well Jonah lastly I’m wondering how Kenyans would react if one of their ministers began biking to work?

FISHER: In absolute disbelief. I think people here in Kenya genuinely have a pretty low opinion of their politicians. They’ve seen them squabble. They’ve seen this coalition which has been in place really struggle to work and I think many Kenyans just see their politicians out for everything they can get out of government. They might be amazed because there are so many potholes here in the roads that they’d probably be lucky to get to work and back in one piece. They’d also be lucky not to be run over by one of the minibuses which carry people around. So yes it would be shocking for most people.

CLARK: The BBC’s Jonah Fisher in Nairobi. Thank you so much.

FISHER: Thank you.

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KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark. This is The World. Our global hit is coming up in a minute. First a quick note about a soccer game that’s got everyone talking in Spain. As The World’s William Troop explains you don’t have to be a soccer fan to get a kick from this story.

WILLIAM TROOP: The game did not go according to plan. On the one hand there was Real Madrid – one of the richest soccer clubs on the planet. It just spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the middle of a global recession to sign several top players. The galacticos they called them in Spain. Among them the reigning world player of the year Cristiano Ronaldo. He was out injured yesterday as Real Madrid played its first game in Spain’s National Cup Competition. The opponent was a lowly third division team – Alcorcon – from a Madrid suburb. That team’s payroll is about 400 times smaller than Real’s. The score? Alcorcon 4 – Real Madrid zero. Nothing. Nada. To put it American terms it’s as if the Yankees lost a playoff game against a Double-A farm team by say 12 runs. It could happen I guess. It just rarely does to the galacticos of Real Madrid. Today even the team’s general manager couldn’t hide his shame.

JORGE VALDANO: [SPEAKING SPANISH]

WILLIAM TROOP: First of all, he said, we have to apologize to our fans. Secondly, he went on, this humiliation could serve as a new starting point.

Somewhere down his list, I bet, is looking for a new coach. For The World I’m William Troop.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.