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CNN Live At Daybreak

Morning Call: Flooding in India; Turmoil in Indonesia

Aired July 20, 2001 - 08:31   ET

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

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: Well, all week long and every day 24 hours 7 days week, CNN covers the world for you. We've got more than 30 bureaus around the world and every once in a while we like to check with folks to see what they're working on.

Right now, let's go to Satinder Bindra. He is standing by in Orissa State in Southeastern India.

SATINDER BINDRA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol.

I'm looking at some very heavy flooding in the eastern India state of Orissa. Some one million people here are marooned. People are waiting on their rooftops. People are clinging onto trees.

Now, Carol, what we don't want to do is make these people just another statistic. So we're covering the story by trying to humanize it. We'll try to personalize the story too. So we're going to go to an area where a village has been completely submerged. Here, we'll focus on one family.

People in this area are very poor. And unlike the United States, no one here has any insurance. Relief workers also tell us it's very hard for them to get these people to leave their homes because they are scared their homes will be looted once they're gone. So our story will capture the suffering of these people. We'll point out it's been less than two years since a huge cyclone also hit these area, killing almost 10,000 people -- Carol.

LIN: Satinder, are you going to have a hard time getting to where you need to go because of conditions there?

BINDRA: Well, we are working with the Army. We're trying to catch a helicopter ride and if that doesn't work out, then we are also working with Indian army, which involved in a massive rescue effort to go out on a power both.

So, a lot of areas are completely submerged but we'll try and hitch a ride with the Army.

LIN: All right, stay safe. Thanks so much. Satinder Bindra checking in from southeastern India.

Now we move over to Jakarta. A couple of days ago, we talked to Maria Ressa, the Jakarta bureau chief there about a presidency in crisis. We've got Atika Shubert, her producer on the telephone with us.

Atika, what's going on there today?

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN PRODUCER: Well, we spent our day staking out what was a looming showdown between Abdurrahman Wahid and his opponents. Lawmakers want to impeach the president. He threatened to dissolve parliament by calling a state of emergency today.

So this morning we tried to get into a meeting of the top lawmakers to get their reaction. We spoke to speaker of the National Assembly. He threatened to impeach President Wahid tomorrow. But when we went to the presidential palace, President Wahid backtracked and he never ordered the emergency today. Now, that may sound like a retreat but in fact, there's a lot of horse trading going on behind the scenes. And President Wahid sounds like he might be close to striking a deal.

So what we're doing now is we're staying up into the night, trying to call our contacts in parliament, finding out who's making deals with Wahid or not, finding out what's really happening underneath all the political posturing.

LIN: Thanks so much, Atika and when you find out, let us know.

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