← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
A Seat With a View
00:27:42
Air travel may be not quite the glamorous, magical experience it once was but our Day,...
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Transcript15 lines
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Hello.
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This is a download of from our own correspondent.
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We make one edition of the programme for the BBC World Service, but this
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is the one broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Here to introduce it, Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, there's something magnificent. Viewed from economy class at 35,000ft, a long, hot train journey into Upper Egypt. We're finding out what they make of the revolution. Far from the big cities of the north, the past collides with the future. As dawn breaks at the end of Africa and at a secret vault in London, we get our hands on some of the glittering riches of the czar of Russia. But first, your pay packet will go up by 50%. We'll cut inflation, we'll create jobs. Promises from the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This week he was trying to paint a rosier picture than that being put about by the anti government demonstrators who over the past few weeks have been grabbing headlines around the world. We will be walking towards much more beautiful days, he said. But the protesters are continuing their struggle in different ways. And as Chris Morris, just back from Istanbul, tells us, the country's future is at stake.
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It's been a very modern sort of protest, fueled by street art and social media deploying irony and humour to prick the pomposity of the powerful. The Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has called anyone who drinks alcohol an alcoholic, so protesters toast him with beer bottles. In the street, he's advised Turkish women to have at least three children, so protesters wear T shirts which gently mock him. Tayyip, they ask, do you really want three of me? From the whirling dervish spinning in a gas mask to the standing man of Taksim Square, everyone has been out to make a statement. The solitary protest of Erdem Gunduz, standing silently for eight hours in an area surrounded by riot police, has inspired hundreds of imit. We think in a different way, he told me in a backstreet bar at three in the morning, shortly after the police had brought his personal protest to an end. The government finds that rather hard to accept. And yet, for all their inventiveness and determination, the protesters represent a minority, a sizeable one, but a minority nonetheless. Millions and millions of Turks live in a rather different, more conservative world, and the past decade has been good to them. There's no doubt that the country has developed and changed dramatically since I lived here at the turn of the century. Better roads, better hospitals, more wealth in the provinces. The list goes on. But it's often the small signs that make the biggest impression. Like the guy who was serving behind a Turkish Airlines check in counter sporting a little bushy moustache. It in the complex code of hirsute Turkish politics, that means Islamist. And he wouldn't have been sitting there looking like that a decade ago. In a more secular world, the nation is becoming more hairy, said a friend with a half raised eyebrow. And why not? Want to know why? Tayyip Erdogan has won three successive elections mainly because he's spread prosperity, but also because many of his supporters feel he's liberated them from decades of what amounted to secular fundamentalism. Women wearing headscarves were banned from university. Men with beards were treated with official suspicion. No longer. The trouble is that Turkey needs a delicate balance. It always has done. And the impression is growing that Tayyip Erdogan is now swinging the pendulum firmly in the other direction. Recent comments made by an influential official in Mr. Erdogan's AK Party are revealing. Liberals who supported the party over the past 10 years, he said, will not be with us over the next 10 years. They will not like what we intend to build. This new construction appears to include more and more restrictions on drinking in any public place, no kissing on the subway and turning old buildings, parks and sometimes entire neighbourhoods into neo Ottoman disneylands to glorify the Islamic past. And when people complain, it's Tayyip Erdogan who leads the charge against them. Why, the prime minister asked recently, are the laws crafted by two drunkards respectable while the laws dictated by religion are rejected? It was a none too oblique reference to the first two presidents of the republic, the iconic Ataturk and his successor Ismetunonu. And for many people, that crossed a red line by insulting Ataturk and suggesting the laws of Islam should help run the country. Or all in one sentence. So we have an en pass. And old fault lines are being re examined not just between Islamist and secular, but also between right and left and worryingly, the sectarian line between Sunni Muslims and the minority. Alevis, the prime minister rejects accusations that he seeks to impose the tyranny of the majority and highlights his bold effort to seek peace with Kurdish separatists to prove his point. But much of his recent rhetoric about the protests has been divisive. It's all a vast conspiracy. You're either with us or against us. So is there anything outsiders can do but watch and worry? Well, for much of the past 20 years, the carrot of EU membership has helped drive reform in Turkey. It's been a process fraught with difficulty Turkey may well never join and may choose not to do so. But now there are those in Germany in particular, who seek to shut Turkey out for good. It seems to me that that would be a big mistake. Huge numbers of Turks have spent the last few weeks out on the streets showing how much they value European ideas of pluralistic democracy. And sometimes it's the symbolism that matters.
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And that was Chris Morris. Summer has arrived in Upper Egypt, the central section of the country south of Cairo. And with it has come unusually high temperatures and mounting discontent. People there complain that law and order's breaking down. They're unhappy about cuts in fuel and power supplies and about some of the people who've been handed top jobs there by the Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo. Upper Egypt has a certain reputation for people living in the big cities in the north. Television traditionally paints the region as a sleepy backwater where, if provoked, the locals can turn nasty. So Shaima Khalil was was just a little nervous when she paid it a visit.
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The smelly train with seats, which had seen far better days, meant a long, uncomfortable overnight ride to Upper Egypt, or said Masr, as we call it in Arabic, Islam Hammam, a young activist who studies in Cairo, had agreed to take me to his hometown, a place called Nagahammadi. People have the wrong idea about the south, he told me. We're educated. We know things. Yes, we're a bit tough, but not like what you see on tv. You wait, I'll show you. As the journey unfolded, gray, dusty buildings soon gave way to green fields and a clearer sky. The crowds of people fighting all the time for the limited space of the city had become farmers hard at work on their land. In Nagahomedi, you can smell the difference. The air is so much fresher than it is in Cairo. You can actually breathe in without coughing. It's early morning here, and I was told this is a busy square, but in fact there are just a few tractors on the road. Farmers are on their way to the fields. A few donkey carts pass by, carrying everything from building material to heaps of green cabbages. Everyone seems to know everyone here. Islam waves hi to about a dozen people as we walk about the town. He's clearly happy to be back home and points out with pride the different streets where he grew up. A man on a motorcycle with a Klashnikov rifle strapped to his back whizzes by. I look at Islam in horror, and he reassures me that it's okay. Nothing unusual. Violence is normal here. One of Islam's friends, a man called Mu'taz tells me it happens easily and for the smallest reasons. People used to buy weapons and hide them for an emergency, and now the emergency has come. He's referring to the deteriorating security here since the revolution. What about the police, then? I ask. Where are the authorities? But Islam and Mu'taz smile. They tell me the police often depend on powerful members of the community, the local patriarchs, to help them protect the town. That's how things are done in the south, and it doesn't seem that the revolution has done much to alter that. Some people do feel the benefits of the revolution. Now we have freedom, says Islam. Others are not so bothered. They just want jobs and stability. He tells me he's trying to raise awareness here. He and his friends are having political discussions with family elders. Mu'taz agrees. We say what we think now. We go on demonstrations, and we're not afraid. It's not like Tahrir Square, but we do it. In a nearby village, we're invited by the mayor to visit his land. I stop and take a picture of a lone buffalo in one of the fields, and a woman steps out of her house, all smiles and says, yalla, get closer to her. She doesn't bite. We're greeted by local bigwigs and tribal leaders sitting on wooden benches opposite each other in their traditional galabeya robes and turban like headdresses. They're drinking mint tea and smoking shisha pipes. The mayor takes me for a walk around his land, and I can see two women working away, one of them placing a big heap of green crops on her head, walking with amazing balance. These vast fields of wheat and sugar cane all belong to his family, he tells me. All this just seems a world away from Cairo, Tahrir Square and the revolution. The capital must seem the same way to them, I suggest to the mayor. No, we do follow events. Karam Hossain, a farmer and a fellow landowner, jumps in. We might be marginalized, but that doesn't mean we're ignorant. Of course farmers are aware of politics, he insists. Karam tells me that despite being a supporter of President Mohamed Morsi, he feels frustrated at the lack of development in Upper Egypt and still feels that this part of the country has been abandoned by those in power in Cairo. What are the development projects they have for us? He asks. There's nothing. Before we leave the village, we're invited by some of the elders to talk over cups of tea. Islam gets into a heated debate about the right to demonstrate, and I realize what a rare sight. This is young and old talking politics and discussing the revolution. We just weren't able to do this before, islam told me, smiling. This is part of the change.
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Shaima Khalil In Upper Egypt, 3,000 miles to the south, correspondents from around the world are still camped out at the hospital in Pretoria where doctors are treating the country's former president, Nelson Mandela. They've had little to report since he was admitted 14 days ago, suffering from a lung infection. Visitors have come and gone. Bulletins on his condition have been infrequent and terse. Serious but stable, the last one said. And South Africans are paying close attention. They still venerate him for bringing them multiracial democracy at a time when many feared their country was on the brink of civil war. Fergal Keene, our correspondent there during the violent days before Mr. Mandela became South Africa's first black president, has just been back.
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The only light was a thin vermilion strip on the Horizon. In another 15 minutes it had expanded, the color fading to pink and flooding with light. This foreshore at the end of Africa. I sat on my hotel balcony in the city of East London and willed these quiet moments to last. The night had passed uneasily for me. Faces and voices from years ago had come back, images of townships aflame, a woman placing newspaper over the body of her murdered son, the voice of a friend who'd been killed in the final weeks before the election in April 1994, which brought an end to white rule. I can't find a reason for these returning shadows beyond the simple fact that traveling back over old ground unsettled what was buried in my mind. How out of time and place those pictures seem now. And how changed is this country? Ten years before the election, I stayed in this same hotel, walking on the foreshore. The morning I arrived, I saw signs forbidding black people from stepping onto the beach. They served but did not eat in the dining room. They weren't allowed to use the same toilets as whites. I'd just driven through the Transkei, one of the so called Bantu stands where black South Africans were dumped while the best land was reserved for whites. Children appeared out of the mist at the roadside, their arms outstretched as they begged for food. A sullen police force kept watch on political activity, and a priest friend of mine had just been expelled for hosting a meeting of ANC supporters. And at his seminary in New Brighton Township outside Port Elizabeth, I sped away to avoid the stones being hurled by youths at the beginning of the great upheaval that would speed the demise of apartheid and white rule. That was 1984. I drove all over South Africa. I rode trains and buses. I spoke with Afrikaners in the farms of the Platterland and blacks in the townships with English speaking white business people in Johannesburg and Indians on the coast near Durban. And I left having come to the completely wrong conclusion. South Africa would ultimately be torn apart by a bloody race war. But nobody imagined back then that within a decade South Africa would be a non racial democracy with Nelson Mandela as its president. The truth is that up to the closing weeks of the apartheid regime, none of us who reported from here was entirely sure of a peaceful outcome. The road had been bloody through township wars, right wing attacks, breakdowns in negotiation. We hoped, of course, hope never left us. And as we watched the transition unfold over an Extraordinary week in April 1994, there was a sense of witnessing something unique in human history. Something we knew we would never experience again. If coming back has coaxed long vanished images back into my consciousness, it's also a dislocating experience. The poverty remains acute. Most of the country's good land is still in the hands of whites. The rise of corruption, the sense of entitlement to power and privilege among sections of the ANC elite is depressing and is, I would argue, the greatest long term threat to this country's stability. Scandals around kickbacks are a regular feature in the media. South Africa is a much more complicated place these days, and that is inevitable. In truth, it was always a complicated place. It was the moral contamination of apartheid, the rigid and stark divides it represented, that made South Africa seem a simple story. If I can trace one constant, however, it is the glorious fractiousness of South Africans. By this I mean their willingness to shout out loud about the failings of their leaders. This country has a vibrant free press. It has a civil society which has mobilized effectively around issues like hiv, aids, corruption and threats to free speech. It's still a country where scandals find their way into the newspapers and onto radio and television. This, above all gives me hope for the future. While South Africans practice a democracy that doesn't make the mistake of leaving politics to the politicians, there is some chance of reining in the arrogant and the crooked. Of course, it isn't enough to say it's all turned out better than we could have imagined. South Africa is beautiful, inspiring, exciting and also maddening. I was wrong in my predictions in the past and I'm not going to make any now. But I could never lose hope for this place. Never.
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And that's fergal. Keen. Not so very long ago, air travel seemed impossibly glamorous. Hollywood stars crisscrossed the Atlantic sipping champagne at 35,000ft. Even the less famous passengers dressed in suits, ties and in stylish frocks. The in flight catering seems hard to believe, I know was actually something to look forward to today. Of course, you know how it is. Shell suits and hoodies, interminable queues, a scramble for seats, a chronic lack of legroom. But our Peter Day, who flies more than most, says there's something fundamental about air travel which hasn't changed and is still magnificent.
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Nearly 10 years ago, I made a rash vow in a report from our own correspondent. I'd been on a reporting project that had taken me twice round the world. I'd queued at dozens of airports, taken lots of planes. But the worst thing about air travel, I then determined, was what happened in row 21. When the seat belt signs are switched off and the passengers are free to move around immediately, zonk. Back comes the seat. As the person in front assumes relax mode as a default position. The mean battery and space already allotted to an economy car's passenger is clipped even further. You are suddenly presented with an 8 or 12 hours prison. So, faced with the anonymous unpleasantness of the passenger in front of me, I made a public vow in that piece. Never again, I promised listeners, would I press that tempting shiny button on the right hand side of the armrest. And ever since, I haven't. Unless, that is, I happen to be right at the back of one of those planes that allow the seats with only the lavatories behind them to be reclined. Not all do. Musing on this penitential servitude the other day led me to think about the changes in in flight experience that have happened over the decades. Go back 30 years and the idea of air travel as some kind of luxury was still in place. Even in economy class, the luxury status was reflected mainly in booze. Premeal drinks served as soon as the seat belt lights went out often included those silly tiny bottles of champagne sealed with a mock plastic cork, sometimes for a small premium charge. And after the aperitif came the second round of drinks, served with the meal. And then with the coffee came a choice of liqueurs, as though it was everybody's absolutely normal mealtime practice to finish off with a sticky a weird reliance on alcohol as a signifier, the way you knew you were up in the air and having a good time. But this was before much in flight entertainment anyway. The days of Getting high in the sky on Aline Alk are now somewhat diminished, but not yet abolished. Like smoking, one curious privilege remains to be enjoyed pretty exclusively by the economy class passenger, which BBC reporters are eternally obliged to be. It is a seat with a view, and I call it curious because for the most part it is denied to travellers in more exalted and expensive classes. The configuration of first class and those dormitory, like business class cabins thrust the flyer away from the window so their flight is viewless. If you want to look out on the magnificence of the Himalayas, you have to kneel upright and hang your head over the back of the business class seat. First class flights achieve an illusion of exclusivity by pushing the seats towards the centre of the cabin, so it's almost impossible to lean towards the window and look out. And as for that revenue earner called premium economy or some such, well, the extra legroom would be welcome and perhaps even worth paying for, but for the fact that that most premium economy seats seem to be positioned over the wings, denying you a view in exchange for your premium ticket. And more and more as I travel, the view is the only thing I want. The splendours of a daytime flight home from Beijing over the snowy Gobi Desert and Ulaanbaatar from 35,000ft and then the Urals and the magnificence of a snowbound St Petersburg laid out like a map below. Genuinely thrilling. Or the temporary glory of the aurora borealis glimpsed on an overnight flight to London from San Francisco. Great green curtains of shimmering northern lights encountered only because I defied the insistence of the stewardesses who like the window blinds kept down at night and sneaked a view of the Arctic sky. I wanted to alert the whole cabin to the extraordinary spectacle that was going on just outside the window. But they were immersed in the movie or fitful sleep. I kept my silence and the shimmering magnificence dwindled to nothing after a wonderful 10 minute display. The reward of flying is a simple one. Not a tangle of frequent flyer miles, but a seat with a view at 35,000ft, clear weather and a decent flight map to tell you where you are. Not one of those where the plane stretches out its silhouette across half a continent. A seat with a view is even worth the unpleasantness of sticking to my 10 year old vow of abstinence from tilting my seat back to relax. Relaxation is an overrated activity anyway.
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Peter Day gazing out of the window in economy class. Now there's nothing on earth as instantly associated with Opulent extravagance as the Faberge egg, first made for the rulers of pre revolutionary Russia. In each one is an exquisite work of art, fashioned from precious metals and gemstones. They were worth a fortune back then and even more today. My colleague Stephen Smith's been making a film about them. The World's Most Beautiful Eggs, it's called, and you can judge their beauty for yourself by tuning into BBC4 on Tuesday evening. The closest most people will get to Faberge's works is looking at them on tv. Stephen, though, has been a lot closer.
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How do you like your eggs? Fried or boiled? Or what about smothered in diamonds and slathered in lashings of gold? If that tickles your fancy, then what you're dreaming of is a Faberge egg with your toast soldiers. A word of warning, though, it might be a bit rich for your blood. The last time one of the really pucker Faberge eggs came on the market, one made for the Tsar of Russia himself, it went for £9 million. And that was back in 2007. I know what you're thinking, is it a little showy to have your gem encrusted bauble out there on the table with the corn flakes and the grapefruit segments? Well, I've been looking into these extraordinary ornaments in depth, looking into them and holding them in my own hands, as well as going to Moscow to meet the incredibly rich Russian oligarch who owns nine of them, enough for the most costly souffle of all time. And I've been trying to establish what you might think are much needed guidelines on the do's and don'ts of Faberge eggs. The first man to own one, Tsar Alexander iii, was in no doubt that its rightful place was on the groaning table at his palace in st Petersburg in 1885. He commissioned the egg from master jeweller Carl Faberge as an Easter gift for his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna, and she was presented with it at breakfast after the family returned from all night mass. This was the elegantly simple hen's egg, a pristine white ovoid. It breaks in two to reveal a golden orb, the egg yolk. I had the opportunity to confirm this for myself when I had the rare privilege of examining the egg at a secret vault somewhere in London. I wasn't going to be put off by knowing it was priceless, nor that its owner, Victor Vekselberg, is close to and said to be the richest man in Russia. No, I went ahead and handled the hen's egg with all the Poise and aplomb of a drunken man juggling hot chips. It came apart in my fingers, but only in the way that the great Faberge had intended. Thank God. It was like a Russian doll. The golden yoke concealed a golden chicken, which in turn had once nested on top of a golden pendant. Now, alas, lost. Don't look at me. Another egg hatched to commemorate the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896, included the charming novelty of a scale model of the Russian state coach. At the faintest touch of my fingernail, it twinkled away on wheels of platinum. Mr. Vekselberg, an oil and gas magnate said to be worth some 15 billion pounds, agreed to see me. Perhaps as a reward for not smashing his eggs, he spent some 70 million pounds on his clutch of nine, which once belonged to the American collector Malcolm Forbes. Instead of buying English football clubs, Mr. Vekselberg likes to spend his money returning Russia's imperial art to the motherland. Many pieces were spirited abroad after Nicholas was made to abdicate and assassinated with his family during the upheaval of the Russian Revolution. Himself was denounced as a profiteer and fled to Europe with little to show for his very brilliant career. As if in a dark fairy tale, his son Agathon was held prisoner at the Kremlin and the glittering riches of the Tsar's court were brought before him so that he could value them for sale to Western speculators. But what goes around comes around, as Faberge might have said to himself, as his eggs rolled off the production line every Easter and a fabulously rich remote elite is once again ruling the roost in Russia. Mr. Vekselberg and I were surrounded by what was once the lost booty of the Tsars in the oligarch's subterranean strong room, two floors below the streets of the Russian capital. But why does he keep some of his finest acquisitions in a lock up in London? He told me that they're in transit between exhibitions. I've never had any of the eggs in my house, he added. It would just look terrible if I put some imperial eggs on my buffet. So there you have it. A pointer on what to do with your world historical trinkets from one of the biggest private collectors. Unlike the Tsar of Russia, he favours the discreet approach. I hope this advice on Faberge eggs has been helpful. Follow that money box.
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Practical advice on how to handle your wealth from Stephen Smith. And that's it. Two new programmes next week on Thursday and on Saturday mornings. Can't promise any more sound investment advice, but do join us anyway. Goodbye.