Erstellt am: 8. 9. 2011 - 14:50 Uhr

Reality Check: Niger, Gaddafi and who cares anyway.

The shifting sands of this arid state, drought prone, Gaddafi sanctuary?

Niger doesn’t feature very highly across the international news scene so often. Maybe that’s because it’s one of the poorest countries in the world encompassing some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. What it does have though is uranium which is Niger's largest export. That in turn pokes the interest of countries pursuing nuclear interests like Iran and North Korea as well as wary western governments that like to keep a close eye on the passage of such volatile materials.

But Niger could hold the key to the question burning commentators at the moment; that being where is Gaddafi. The border between Niger and Libya is around 350 kilometres and it is largely porous, it’s a line drawn in the sand and if say a former dictator of a north African country wanted to cross that line, he would have little problem on the ground. A few US spy satellites in the sky might be able to pick out some unusually large trucks and lengthy camel trains for this time of year making their way across the border. But this is also a largely nomadic region of over ½ million Tuareg berbers so it would be difficult to make out who is friend and who is foe in this dusty desert-scape.

Having said all of that, the “where is Gaddafi” question is not the main thing on the minds of people in Tripoli. They are more concerned with life getting back to a sense of normality, access to clean water, food supplies, their children going to school etc and how to reduce the flow of weapons or arms that are flooding the place. Weapons coupled with anxious turf warriors is not a great combination for a potentially peaceful future as Karim El-Gawhary told us today.

Also on Reality Check today, war correspondent Jason Burke on his new book “The 9/11 Wars”. Jason has spent the last ten years on the move covering the War on Terror for the Guardian and Observer newspapers. He's spent time being embedded with allied forces in Iraq or making friends with tribal elders in the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan. It's a decade of reflection for relations between the west and the arab world and the wars fought in the aftermath of that September day back in 2001. So what can he tells us about how the world really changed?