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From Our Own Correspondent
Future Shock
00:27:42
Why did so many Germans vote for the anti-immigration AFD party?
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Transcript12 lines
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This is the BBC.
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Hello. Today, life after Hurricane Maria in the West Indies. What's left, what's needed and what can be done? Difficulties of another kind in Sudan after 20 years of US economic sanctions. The odd benefit of not being able to move money easily. Money making in Bangalore, as India's successful tech hub grows ever more creative. And tally ho in Ireland, with a varied crowd for whom the fox is not necessarily the main attraction. Pink isn't worn, though pubs are visited. Stop Islamisation. Burqas. We like bikinis. New Germans. We'll make them ourselves. These were among the slogans plastered on campaign posters for AFD ahead of the election in Germany on Sunday, Alternativ Deutschland secured more than 12% of votes and for the first time, seats in the Bundestag. It is the first anti immigration party to enter the German parliament since World War II. The right wing nationalists fiercely opposed Angela Merkel's refugee policy. But in her victory speech, she said she will win back AfD voters. She faces quite a challenge, especially in the east of the country, as Jenny Hill has found.
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On a misty grey autumn morning, the yellow leaves curled up on the damp pavement are a welcome burst of colour. So too are the stalls in Shvarin's old marketplace, piled high with apples and oranges. A trader weighs courgettes, hands them over to a shopper who moves briskly on to the flower stall. As the church bells ring out midday, I'm about to wander out of the square when suddenly, there it is. One of the most unusual statues I've ever seen. A splendid, rather cheerful lion, frozen mid stride. But it's the relief lovingly sculpted into the stone column underneath him that catches the eye. It tells the story of the 12th century nobleman who founded Schwerin, which would become the capital of the region of Mecklenburg Vorpommen. Henry the lion, as the prince was known, swept triumphantly into town on his horse. But the locals who were to become his citizens were having none of it. As he rode along, they turned their backs and one by one, bared their bottoms at him. This demonstration of cheeky medieval defiance is all there, graphically captured in stone. For anyone who passes by, it's tempting to wonder whether Angela Merkel knows the legend. Her constituency, after all, lies in the region. And it was here last weekend that 21st century citizens displayed their disgust with their leader. Although, thankfully, this time they kept their clothes on. Nearly one in five votes cast in the state of Mecklenburg Vorpommen was for afd. Schwerin's cobbled main street is a charming cluster of shops. A tobacconist selling gleaming wooden pipes, an antique store, a tea room. So the shattered window of one shop front is a shock. Someone's scrawled Hate Nazis across the building where the local AFD has its headquarters. But from inside, I hear a clink of glasses. Standing around a table laden with cakes and decorated with a small German flag, AFD supporters are toasting Sunday's success. To AfD, may it grow and prosperity. As they sip their sect, other people drop in, bringing food, flowers, congratulations. As they usher me in, I'm surprised by the warmth of the welcome. AFD doesn't much care for the mainstream press, calling them the Lugenpresse or Lying Press, a term from the Nazi era. Most of those who voted AFD were men, manual workers or the unemployed. Among the people here who offer me a seat at the table, a coffee, a glass of water, are a classics teacher, a pensioner, a businessman. They tell me they used to vote Conservative, Social Democrat, Left Party, Green, or in the case of one cheerful blonde woman, not at all. Birgitt's retired. Voting AFD was the only way, she claims, to rescue the country she knew. The old people don't dare leave the house after 6 o', clock, she says. I live in such a beautiful place, but when I open the door, the first thing I see is headscarfs. And then I go to the tram and I see the groups of young men. She means migrants. Bigot also has a theory about why AFD has drawn so much support from people in the Old East. Back in the gdr, she tells me, we didn't have crime, trust, drug addicts, problems. Now all that's changed. Florian, who tells me he's a freelancer in the shoe trade, says the refugees come here, but they don't plan to ever go back to their countries when the war is over. All along, they plan to stay and replace the local population. More and more people are realising that. It's clear these people are angry with Germany's established parties, with Angela Merkel and. And they're fearful too. What surprised many is that AFD drew support from people of all ages. Later, as it begins to get dark, I meet two members of AFD's youth movement. We sit together on a bench by the lake here, chatting and watching the swans drift on the water, ghostly in the Twilight. Martin, who's 28, likes the anti Euro stance of the party. He doesn't like the eu, thinks Brussels has too much power. But his real concern is immigration. It's normal, he says that if you have a lot of young men coming from other countries searching here for their luck and they see it's not so easy to get money or get a woman or whatever, they start trouble. Nick, a handsome blond lad who's just 15, agrees with him. I support the AfD because it's the future, he says, for me, for my friends, for my schoolmates, adding that there are plenty of other AfD supporters, including in his class. We say goodbye. There's a chill in the air now. Angela Merkel has vowed to win back the people I've met here in Schwerin. Address their concerns. I'm not sure they're ready to listen.
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Jenny Hill first come the wind and the rain to wreak their destruction. Then come the looters to pick through what's left. This familiar sequence of events has played out again and again in parts of the Caribbean and America this summer. Some islands have been left virtually uninhabitable, and it'll take more than a year to fully restore power to others. Jake Wallace Simons has been surveying the wreckage.
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The first moment of fear came when the building began to move beneath me. Outside the rattling window, I could see palm trees thrashing in the wind as the sea hurled itself in great ragged shapes against the beach. The sound was a roar like that of a beast, and I could feel the hard build up of air pressure in my ears. This was Antigua in the eastern Caribbean at the height of Hurricane Maria. I had sailed to the island the day before and had seen Maria looming on the horizon, a churning mass of cloud streaked with rain, making the final preparations for its assault. I knew that islanders were battening down the hatches, but the sense of vulnerability, no inevitability was everywhere. My hotel, a hulking concrete structure used as a safe haven by locals, was not badly damaged that night. Nor was Antigua, apart from the loss of trees, flooding and the collapse of the weakest buildings. It was far enough from the eye of the storm. But when I looked out to sea the next morning, I knew that due south lay the doomed island of Dominica, where 70,000 lives had been blown apart by the ferocious winds. Further away, across the Caribbean Sea to the northwest was the island next in line, Puerto Rico. We had known this was coming, but there was nothing anybody could do. It was impossible to reach Dominica that day, as as winds were still high and the island's airports and docks had been destroyed. Nevertheless, I knew how the place was suffering. Just a few days before, I'd been on the smashed island of St. Martin reporting on the aftermath of Hurricane Irma. It's unprecedented to have had two such powerful storms hit in such close succession. Aside from the tragedy of the many lives lost, Irma caused hundreds of billions of pounds worth of damage, and Maria may cost hundreds of billions more. These are serious blows to small economies that rely so heavily on tourism and farming. France, Holland, the United States and Britain have all sent troops and supplies to the region, with the UK alone contributing 63 million pounds. But such is the scale of the disaster that on the ground, it often felt as if no help was coming. Again and again, people told me that they felt abandoned by the world. What little aid had reached the islands, they said, had been handed out incompetently. One woman I met on the island of St. Martin, who had been reduced to living on dry breakfast cereal, said she saw trucks full of aid rumbling past her to be distributed on parts of the island she could not reach. A furious Dutch soldier told me that his unit, which had been deployed to combat looters, had been forced to give their own rations and water to locals because aid agencies were nowhere to be seen. Walking around Saint Maarten, which has a population of 75,000, brought home the astonishing scale of the challenges facing domestic and international governments. Ships had been torn out of the water and smashed into buildings. Lorries rested on cars that had been blown onto their wheels. Walls had been torn from apartment blocks, leaving the stuff of people's lives on display as in a doll's house. The roads were clogged all afternoon as people struggled to complete their business before the curfew, which had been imposed to clamp down on gangs of armed looters. The managing editor of the local newspaper told me that his steel storm doors had remained intact during the hurricane, but the concrete to which they had been bolted had given way to destroying his house. His colleague had barricaded himself in his bathroom, watching as the ceiling bulged rhythmically in the massive air pressure before being wrenched off into the sky. Luckily, he survived, but when he unwound his arms from his cat, he found it had died of fright. So many were angry, many despairing, but some refused to let go of their hope. Last Sunday, I stumbled upon a service held on the terrace of a damaged church with wasteland stretching out in all directions. The congregation, many of whom had lost their homes, sang Psalm 118:24. This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it. They then got to their feet, raised their hands and prayed for assistance and protection. From heaven.
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Jake Wallace Simons the Trump administration has expanded its controversial travel ban, adding North Korea, Venezuela and Chad to the list of mainly Muslim countries whose citizens will face restrictions on travelling to the U.S. sudan, however, has been removed from that list, and the government in Khartoum is hoping that economic sanctions will also soon be removed. In January, Barack Obama temporarily relaxed some of the sweeping US economic sanctions that had been in place for 20 years, and Donald Trump is due to announce his policy next month, having delayed the decision about whether to make the change permanent in July. In the meantime, the sanctions continue to shape life in Sudan, says Sally Hayden.
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It was the night before the Trump administration was due to announce whether it would fully lift US Sanctions on Sudan, and a Sudanese sweet maker with was serving me a tasting platter of his confections. Imagine how much better they'd be with European ingredients, he said, gazing thoughtfully at a soft pink toffee. The people here don't know the tastes they're missing. Sudan was branded a state sponsor of terrorism in 1993 and has been under a complex set of American sanctions since 1997. Combined with intricate international rules on banking, that means that none of the 40 million people inside the country can withdraw money from a foreign account or use an international credit card. They can't buy clothes or electronics online or FedEx gifts or produce out of the country. It means managers in international companies must fly to Addis Ababa or Cairo to withdraw their employees salaries in lumps of cash, lugging suitcases of dollars back through Khartoum Airport. The sanctions hit me personally when I couldn't download WhatsApp to my Sudanese phone because the app store doesn't work inside the country. Later, when a friend sent me a link to an Airbnb listing, I got error code 451. Our services are not available in Crimea, Iran, Sudan, Syria and North Korea, it read. I can't upgrade my iPhone software. I'll have to throw it away and get a Samsung. Dr. Fareed, a disgruntled economist for the World bank, complained to me. He'd just spent two months trying to pay his son's university fees in Doha. He first attempted to transfer money from a US bank account to a Qatari one. But being Sudanese, he raised alarm bells with bank staff. I tried to convince them it was a regular transaction. I showed them the university bill. He told me, I'm talking about $20,000, not 20 million. The words overcompliance come up often when talking to Sudanese who travel regularly, coming head to head with companies who seem to find it easier simply not to do business with them, even outside Sudan itself. For the majority of Sudanese, who have far more limited means, the effects of the sanctions are more insidious. They're in the drugs cancer patients can't access, the aid that doesn't get sent, the vehicles rusting away for lack of spare parts. The sanctions were brought in to hurt the government, but they hurt the people, a young man with messy hair and green rimmed glasses told me in a bank from which we walked to a currency exchange to turn my tidy US Dollars into stacks of fraying Sudanese pound notes. He was a skeptic all round, though. When the sanctions are lifted, the the people won't benefit, he argued. It'll be the government that will. The sanctions certainly haven't hurt President Omar Bashir. He's been in power for 27 years and is the only sitting head of state wanted for war crimes in the International Criminal Court. He lives in a Chinese built palace on the banks of the Blue Nile. Some opportunists are taking advantage of the isolation the sanctions have led to. In Khartoum's Riyadh neighborhood, a place called Starbox has opened its doors. It offers an enthusiastic homage to the similarly named American chain, though you can spot the difference from its a coffee cup inside a briefcase. With need comes a black market, and the sanctions mean there's a whole parallel industry for moving money around. A samsar, a foreign exchange middleman, can even fly your cash to another country, taking a significant cut for himself. Yet sanctions can also offer protection. I learned this in a different coffee shop after a stranger approached me to practice his English. His name was Moolat, and he told me he was in love, but not with me. The lucky American woman had added him on Facebook. They'd never met in real life, but he said she wanted to marry him as long as he proved he was serious by spending some cash. It was obviously a scam, but my translator said not to worry. Don't forget he can't transfer money out of the country anyway, he laughed. This happens all the time. Eventually, scammers realize there's no point trying here. A few weeks later, I discovered a few hundred Sudanese pounds I had forgotten in my suitcase. Calling up my bank to ask whether they'd exchanged them, I was put on hold for 20 minutes. No, we can't convert money from Sudan, the teller said when he eventually came back on the line. I'm sure you'll find another way.
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Sally Hayden Creative disruption is a slogan synonymous with Silicon Valley. The concentration of Tech companies in California has changed the way many people shop, access information and live their social life on the net. India, like many other countries, wants a Silicon Valley like Centre. And Angela Saini has been exploring its own high tech hub. A place not usually known for its creativity.
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Sitting in a rooftop bar in Bengaluru, or Bangalore as it's often still known, I start to feel my age. I'm with two very young Indian entrepreneurs. Over a drink, one of them, nicknamed Smokey, asks me what kind of music I like. I'm embarrassed to tell him that I don't get much time for music these days and when I do, I don't confess. It's jazz. Smokey prefers hip hop. He's a rapper in his spare time and as far as I can tell, he's a pretty good one. He's well known in Bangalore's underground music scene. He's also a trained research scientist. He and his business partner recently developed a new kind of digital stethoscope and this week they're trying to sell it to local doctors. Not, I have to say, with the greatest success. But that's not really the point. They're on the road to making their fortunes. This is what the tech start up life is like. Their lab, if you can call it one, is a spare room at the back of a vet's clinic on a noisy industrial road. The whole team has only just left University. Smoky and his co founder Arvind, who I'm sitting with, have such busy lives outside work that I find just hearing about them exhausting. When they're not doing science or running their business, they love to party. Their favourite hangout is a music studio. If they had wanted them, they could have both landed jobs in Bangalore's enormously successful software industry. Just down the highway is Electronics City. I've visited it a few times over the last decade. In stark contrast to some of India's older cities, the roads are spotless, lined with shiny office blocks filled with suited and booted young women and men, lanyards hanging around their necks like badges of honour. These security passes give them exclusive access to this gated world. They are the cream of Indian engineers, some of the cleverest people in the country, or at least the ones who have survived the hard slog through India's ruthlessly competitive education system. As a result, they've inherited the earth. Jobs here in India's own Silicon Valley command top salaries and more importantly, prestige. This is where almost every young Indian wants to be. But what these jobs don't usually offer is fun or the chance to show much creativity. Ever since the tech boom in the late 1990s, critics have complained about just how dull and conformist the industry is. Even the most successful firms here can't claim to be anything like Google or Apple. Most businesses made their money being the backroom boys and girls of the global computer industry, fixing code line by line, doing the basics, but doing it more cheaply than their American counterparts. They are where the world's digital chores are outsourced. Here in this bar, though, I can really see things changing. Smokey and Arvind have shunned the safe corporate life in favor of the more risky world of startups. Their product may not take off, and let's face it, most startups do fail. But their willingness even to try in a city in which every young child wants to grow up to have a lanyard around their neck but marks a turning point. Irwin tells me that as their business grows, they plan to move production to a hackerspace on the outskirts of the city, a kind of makeshift, inventive melting pot for engineers and designers where they can try out new things. Try and fail, possibly. But this is true creativity, no different from the kind that I've seen in Silicon Valley. India's tradition of rote learning in schools, its habit of hot housing students until they're burnt out, its technology industry that demands hard work more than an unusual mind. Despite all these pressures, the green shoots of real innovation are here. I wonder to myself if this could finally see Bangalore become the world's top tech city. Naysayers abound, of course. When I speak to one technology lecturer at a local college, he's far more downbeat. There's always been a self deprecating flavour to this city. They don't like to talk themselves up too much, but even when they're making billions of dollars. Where's the Indian Facebook? He asked me provocatively. He's an old man and he has the look of a teacher who has been perennially disappointed with his students. Where's the Indian Google? He continues. I don't know, but ideas are brewing. Someone I'm sure, is already having the next big idea.
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Angela Saini Fox hunting. Endless debate, heated views, arguments about rural life, cruelty keeping pests at bay. The traditional fox hunting with hounds has been banned in England, Wales and Scotland for more than 10 years. But in Northern Ireland, fox hunting is still legal, as it is in the Republic, where, as Jake Warren found, they do things differently.
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As I drove through the Irish countryside and took in the mass of green farmland as far as the eye could see. I felt a calmness that only seems to envelop you when away from grey high rise buildings and the perpetual noise of city life. The only familiar thing for someone like myself traveling from South London was the usual chart music blaring out the car radio. But then came a sombre message from the DJ, who proceeded to list the names of around 30 locals who had died and a location for each of the masses that would be said in their honour before signing off with May the souls of the departed rest in peace. I was in Connaught and fast approaching my destination, the county of Roscommon. As I arrived, my phone beeped a message asking me to come to a local pub, P. Kelly's, at 7:30 that evening. There I could meet members of the Hunt before the thrill of the chase. The next day I got there early and was greeted with a general look of wariness towards an obvious outsider. The members of the Hunt had not yet arrived, so I decided to order a drink. Whilst I waited, after asking for a peyoni and receiving a Guinness, I felt my powers of ingratiation could have been better. I had been reliably informed that this was a place where an English accent was seldom heard and perhaps rarely wanted. A few moments later, in walked the huntsman. First to greet me was the chairman of the hunt himself, a 50 something man named Mikhail Curly, who welcomed me with a warm handshake, cheery enthusiasm and bade me join them for drinks. They were an eclectic bunch. Mikhail the local bank manager. There were students, a travel agent and a nurse. There were others too, but my recollection is a bit blurry. The next morning, with heads heavy from the night before, everyone assembled at the designated meeting point, another pub. I got talking with Erica, a younger member of the hunt at 19 years old, but who'd been riding and hunting for as long as she could remember. As she brushed her well behaved mare, she laid out some of the reasons to be passionate about fox hunting. She insisted it wasn't a personal endeavor, it was a team sport, the team being her and her horse. She felt strongly that allowing the horses to run free was a kindness that allowed them to enjoy their true nature and that people like me from foreign cities were too focused on one very small the kill. For her, she said, a great hunt isn't defined by how many foxes you kill, but by how great the riding, the jumping and the socializing with friends was. We made our way inside for what almost felt like an obligatory pre match pint at a football match. It was a sea of resplendently dressed huntsmen in green, and for the second time in 12 hours I'd entered a pub both looking and and feeling completely out of place. When he saw me, Michael bellowed out, your man from the BBC over here. And I waded through the crush towards him. He swept his arm over his ever growing congregation and asked me what I thought. I replied it was impressive, but couldn't help asking why everyone was in green. Isn't pink the traditional color for fox hunting? I tentatively suggested. Aye, in England it is, he replied, and after a moment's pause added, but in Ireland we choose to wear a different colour than the English. Awkward. And at that moment, a bugle sounded from outside. It was time to go. As I witnessed the hunt throughout the day, charging up hills, through woodlands and jumping seemingly impossibly high stone walls, it felt to be a sort of organized chaos, a mass of dogs, horses and humans in slightly odd but splendid attire, all gallivanting in unison, but without much purpose. At times it was easy to forget this was actually a blood sport. I saw Erica and her friends willing each other to jump walls, laughing freely, obviously having fun, and not a sniff of a fox to speak of. However, some hours later, a scent was caught as the hounds encircled and the fox went to ground. The mood changed. We had to wait in a field for over half an hour as the hounds went to work digging out the now burrowed in fox to the sound of cracking whip and a bugle. Erica confided that she found this part a bit boring. By then the light was fading and the fox was never coerced out of its hole. In all honesty, I was relieved.
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Jake Warren bringing us to the end of today's program. We'll be back with more from our correspondence on Saturday morning, as usual. Do join us. Goodbye.