← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
A Tale of Two Termini
00:27:29
Unemployment's up, the tax bills are up, public cheerfulness is down. Hugh Schofield...
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Transcript12 lines
- [00:00]
A
You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
- [00:16]
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Today, a tale of two railway termini indicating France is further off the rails than it's been for decades. You're not going out in that. A clothes crisis for our man at the Venezuelan general election. Hundreds of thousands of Tatars have returned home to Crimea, but a search for their lost culture goes on. And they've got the biggest, the tallest, the most expensive. Today's China loves superlatives. But does size really matter? Now? It's not been a great week to be French. Unemployment across the Channel has just hit 3 million. Growth for next year won't get much better than zero. And on Friday the government presented its budget for next year 20 billion euros in tax rises. Perhaps it's not surprising. The popularity ratings of President Hollande have collapsed by 11 percentage points in one month, a near record in post war France. Our correspondent there, Hugh Schofield, has spent a lot of time recently hopping between Paris and London. Comparisons between the two capitals he reckons are not favourable for the French.
- [01:22]
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Anyone who uses the Eurostar regularly gets to know the stations at either end pretty thoroughly. So I don't think I'll be the first traffic traveller on the line to make the following observation. St Pancras Gem Garden. Get on the train in London and it's a treat. The station's an architectural marvel, it's clean, staff are friendly, get off in Paris and you know straight away you're in a less than salubrious part of town. A couple of weeks ago, about to board a train there to Brussels, I interrupted the activities of an obvious con man wearing a spurious official looking cap. He was trying to interest tourists in some scam. I stopped him because the staff weren't and for my pains, got shouted at as an interfering foreigner. Elsewhere, vaguely threatening vagrants with dogs and organized bands of aggressive looking beggars swiftly dispel any desire to linger. A year or so ago there were riots here. Now, I'm not going to draw any too facile comparison between France and Britain on the basis of a pair of 19th century railway termini. But I will say this. Never in 16 years of living in France and making pretty regular trips back and forth across the Channel, have I ever felt a greater disparity in national moods. Never in my Memory. Has the London Paris railway station paradigm ever felt so apt? You'll object that this has been a pretty unusual year in the United Kingdom, what with the Jubilee and the Olympics, and that appearances may be short lived and deceptive. And I'll concede that a lot of what made Britain so attractive was a spirit of optimism and community, no doubt inflated by the exceptional circumstances of the summer. But then again, it was hard not to see in all the bunting and the good cheer and the universal joining in ness of it all, a kind of shared national experience that really might mark some kind of historic psychological change. It really did feel like Brits were looking at themselves after half a century of decolonisation and de industrialisation and immigration and the end of deference and all the rest of it and saying, well, here we are and actually we ain't so bad. It pains me as a lover of France to remark that no similar state of mind is anywhere near realisation over here. Things do not feel great in France at the moment. On one level, looking at the statistics doesn't mean much because the figures are pretty bad in Britain too. But still, unemployment here just hit the 3 million mark and is going to keep rising. Every week sees a new announcement of large scale layoffs. Just now the last blast furnace in Lorraine, once the crucible of the French steel industry, has closed. Taxes are going up and no matter what the socialist government says, it's not just the rich who'll be affected. Business creators are furious because the new rules mean that people who build up an enterprise from scratch will lose more than 60% to the government when they try to sell it on. More and more of the brightest and the best are thinking of moving abroad. The day to day news is unremittingly awful. This week two young men were knifed and clubbed to death because of some argument over one group not respecting another group. This was in Grenoble, a town that in my old fashioned way I associate with a university, high tech industry and the Alps. Not anymore. Even the good news is bad. The national handball team recently won the Olympics. This week, several stars of the side have been arrested for match fixing. Now I know there's bad news everywhere, but there is something about the atmosphere in France that worries me. I think it is to do with a lack of perspective, a lack of potential for change. In Britain you get the impression that however controversial they may be, efforts are at least being made to redefine parts of national life like education or welfare. There is movement. The same can't be said Here in France, where the government's new plan to cut unemployment, for instance, with tens of thousands of state financed youth jobs, is basically the same as the one I Remember reporting on 15 years ago. Our two countries, it has often been observed, move forward on parallel tracks, separate systems, different gauges, but two trains of similar size moving forward roughly in tandem at roughly the same speed. But sometimes you can spot the difference. I feel it now. St. Pancras is a better destination than the Gare du Nord.
- [06:06]
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And that's Hugh Schofield. In Paris. The Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez is calling for a huge turnout in Sunday's presidential election. He's appealed for voters to turn out from every barrio, every street, every housing complex, everywhere. Most polls suggest he has a slight lead over his state governor rival, the 40 year old Enrique Capriles. But the opposition campaign said to be energetic, the final days of campaigning could be crucial. Many Venezuelans worry the result will be a close one. This, they fear, could lead to confrontation and violence in a country awash with guns. Paul Moss has been in the capital Caracas, in the run up to election day.
- [06:46]
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I don't normally worry too much about what I wear when I go out reporting. Don't get me wrong, as a respectable member of staff at the BBC, I do try to look fairly smart. A clean shirt, maybe even a tie if I am going to interview someone especially important. But I have never fretted too much about what colours I am dressed in. Until, that is, I came to Venezuela to report on the presidential election. The incumbent, Hugo Chavez, has been in power for 14 years, but now faces his toughest challenge yet in the form of Henrique Caprile. The opposition candidate is young, clean cut and with a certain boyish charm. But it's not just two individuals competing here, it's more like two competing systems. Hugo Chavez is the man who brought his own self styled socialist revolution to Venezuela. Capriles, meanwhile, is promising a more traditional capitalist path to prosperity. This much I knew already. But it was my first day covering the contest and what I was about to learn was that clothing could be an issue. You're not going out to do interviews wearing that, are you? Cried a colleague. He was looking at me with such horror you'd think I planned to visit a major government ministry dressed only in my underpants. What that? I asked, trying to imagine which particular part of my outfit had caused such great offence. Ok, so the shoes could have done with a bit of a polish, but this was surely no reason to call in the fashion police. That shirt, he said, it's red. Do you want to get your head kicked in? And then I understood. Red is not merely the traditional color of socialism here in Venezuela, as in the Red Flag, Chairman Mao's little Red Book, or even the Red Menace. Red is the uniform of the Chavistas, the devotees of Hugo Chavez and all his works. Chavez rallies are a sea of red clad followers. If you half close your eyes, you could imagine the country had been invaded by an army of militant Father Christmases. And the mood here is militant. Venezuela may be a democracy, but the last attempted Coup was only 10 years ago, and political violence is very much a reality. Last weekend, three Capriles supporters were shot dead trying to reach a campaign rally. All the signs are that it was Chavez supporters who attacked them. But there has been violence on all sides. So, mindful of the risks, I changed my red shirt for a sober blue one. Hmm, I'm still not sure, said my colleague. Blue, it turns out, is one of the Capriles colors, another to avoid. After all, there are more glamorous reasons to be beaten up than accidentally wearing the wrong shirt. What about an orange T shirt? I asked. No go. The problem is that Capriles represents a coalition of opposition parties. This means you have a whole rainbow of colors to avoid. Orange is the party color for one member of the Capriles coalition, yellow another. It seemed almost the whole spectrum had been covered. Of course, the coalition has united the opposition behind one candidate. I don't really like Capriles that much, one well to do Venezuelan told me. But 14 years of Chavez, that's enough. It turned out she'd ended a holiday early just so she could fly home and vote. Others speak of disillusion, like the university lecturer I met, rather bitter about how things had worked out. I voted for Chavez first time, she said. Now he wants all power for himself. But all this still left me with the challenge of retaining neutrality, not wearing anything that would suggest allegiance one way or the other. The only thing left in my suitcase was a green T shirt. But actually it wasn't pure green. More blue green. What would that make me? A semi Capriles supporter? Perhaps an eco Caprile supporter? To be honest, I was more bothered by the state. The T shirt was in, rather crumpled, andlet me be brutally frank, after three days in a laundry bag, it didn't smell too good. Certainly not what you wanted to put on at the start of a hot, rather humid day in downtown Caracas. But the green T shirt was all I had left, so I murmured an unheard apology to the various people I would be meeting that day and set off to work.
- [10:55]
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And that was Paul Moss. In Venezuela, the Ecuadorian Foreign Minister has called again for talks between London and Quito about Julian Assange, who has now been holed up in their embassy in London for more than three months. The WikiLeaks founder has been sheltering there to avoid extradition to Sweden. He's wanted for questioning about rape allegations made by two women. He fears if he goes there, he could be handed over to the United States. If that happens, he says, he could face prosecution, even the death penalty, over his website's release of secret American documents. There's divided opinion in this country over the plight of Mr. Assange, but in Sweden, Joe Fidgeon's been finding out. Most people believe he should return to face the music.
- [11:40]
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It was an exasperating evening ahead of the Supreme Court ruling in London on whether Julian Assange should be extradited. I hung around an unlovely shopping precinct with my microphone, asking for opinions. Every person I spoke to gave an almost identical response. Two women had accused Assange of molesting them and justice demanded that he should come back for police questioning. That was all there was to it. Did no one suspect an ulterior motive to bundle him off to the United States, as Assange's supporters claimed? I tried a floppy haired teenager wheeling a bike, same story. Julian Assange was not special, he said, and should be treated just like anyone else. But how could he be so sure there was no political skullduggery involved? He raised a pierced eyebrow. This is Sweden, he said. Swedes are statistically some of the most trusting people in the world. They trust each other and they trust the state. Perhaps it has something to do with Sweden having been the first country to ban censorship and guarantee freedom of the press back in 66. 1766. That is no wonder. Julian Assange had been interested in applying for residency before it all kicked off. You know the next bit of the story. The judges decided in favour of extradition and Assange fled to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he remains a virtual prisoner, unable to go out for fear of the consequences. I was struck by the parallels with Sweden's very own controversial champion of free speech, who has also forfeited his freedom. An arch provocateur with a mop of white hair, artist Lars Wilkes has built his career on needling the authorities. But they go out of their way to protect him all the same. His troubles began five years ago when he drew a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog. Al Qaeda in Iraq announced it would give $150,000 to anyone who slit his throat. He was on Jihad Jain's hit list and was named in the suicide note of a man who blew himself up in a busy Stockholm in the run up to Christmas two years ago. Wilkes now lives under 24 hour police guard. You'd think in the circumstances that he might be a difficult man to track down, but, well, this is Sweden. I started the hunt near Niemies, a famous driftwood sculpture he created. I wandered into a hotel. Do you know where Lars Velkes lives? I asked the receptionist. She looked me up and down and then drew me a map. You'll know you found the right place by the caravan in the garden, she said. That's where the police live. Sure enough, a uniformed officer stopped me as I approached the house. I told him my business. He spoke into his walkie talkie and moments later a sleek black car swept into the drive. Out leapt three bulky men, followed by a wiry, bespectacled older man with the wild hair of a Bohemian. He drifted over, hand outstretched, while his guards laid theirs on their holsters. Yes, I'll give you an interview, he said. I need a voice and an axe. Apparently it was propped up against the wall in his living room. Last line of defence, he remarked. He took me into the kitchen. One curtain was missing and the rail singed where someone had tried to burn down the house. He went to the fridge and took out an egg, which had been thrown at him but which hadn't broken. He'd drawn on it a bearded man wearing a turban. That's what my attacker looked like, he told me. It's a process work, you see. Everything that has happened as a result of that cartoon contributes to the same art project. Even the death threats are part of the game. But why did he start it? To expose my fellow artists for accepting limits to free expression, he replied. Did he set out to offend Muslims? No, but anyone who's offended can defend themselves. They also have free speech. I glanced at the man in the doorway, armed and alert, primed for action. Was it all worth it? I wondered. Art is not easy, came the response. If you want to avoid trouble, paint flowers. I wonder if Julian Assange, languishing in his gilded cage in Knightsbridge, shares folks's philosophical approach to his predicament. Or if ever, in his long dark nights, he wishes he'd taken up painting flowers.
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Joe Fidgeon, there the Crimean Peninsula, now in Ukraine, has seen More than its fair share of comings and goings, its Tatar population could once boast of being one of the strongest powers in the region. Crimea was a center of Islamic civilization, but from the beginning of the 18th century, its people increasingly faced massacre and exile. It was a pattern which was to continue into the Second World War, when the entire Tatar population of Crimea was deported on the orders of Stalin. Today, some quarter of a million Crimean Tatars have returned to their homeland. But as Robin Banerjee's been finding out, rebuilding their cultural heritage is far from easy.
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Ruste Maminov, now in his mid-40s, was sent into exile when he was just three months old. His family was forced to leave the Crimea and was resettled in faraway Central Asia. It wasn't until he was in his 20s and the breakup of the Soviet Union that he was finally able to live in the land of his birth. Over cups of green tea, in a room shaded against the fierce sun, he tells me his story. Aminov is now a specialist in the history of the Crimean Tatars. He's the director of ethnography at the Historical and Cultural Reserve in the old Crimean town of Bacchuseray. A handsome, clean shaven man with a smile on his face and an open manner. My wife and I meet him in his little office across the moat from the palace of the old Khan, the Crimea's last Muslim ruler and one of the few remaining monuments to the history of the Crimean Tatar people. Despite his exile, Aminov acknowledges that he is one of the lucky ones. Many Tatars suffered much worse treatment. In 1944, Stalin decided to send the entire Tatar population of the Crimea into exile. The excuse for the collective punishment of old men, women and children was that they had collaborated with the occupying German forces. During the war, 200,000 people were pushed onto trains and sent, for the most part, to Uzbekistan. It was disastrous. Almost half the population died within a year. They were forced to live in what I mean ironically calls reservations. It wasn't till the 1960s that the Soviet government softened its stance towards them. The charge of collaboration was dropped and in 67, the Crimean Tatars were pardoned. But they still weren't allowed to go home. In 1987, as the Russian president, Mikhail Gorbachev, introduced his reforms, the Tatars were finally allowed to return to Crimea. But in the previous 40 years, their homeland had changed. Their homes were now lived in by others, mainly Russians and Ukrainians, who had no wish to give them up. To make things worse, few Tatars had brought back much from Uzbekistan. Just imagine what 200,000 people trying to move at the same time does to the price of flats, says Amino. Families had to start from scratch. I heard one such story from a man called Ruslan. He was born in Uzbekistan. When he was 10, his family somehow moved back to Crimea. Ruslan worked as a shepherd in a collective farm. When the Soviet Union Split up in 1992, the farm simply collapsed. Without much education or many marketable skills, there isn't much call for sheep shearing these days. Ruslan moved down to the coast and now works as a driver. Crimean tatas are starting small businesses, but reviving their culture is a much harder task. One of the great difficulties is just how little of it has survived. The Crimea has always been a contested land, Russian armies twice devastated by Csaray. All that now survives are a few private houses and mosques crumbling away in the town's back streets, and the magnificent palace of the khans. In the 1820s, some 40 years after the end of the Crimean Khanate, the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin visited this palace and wrote a poem about the unhappy love of a Crimean Khan for his Polish concubine. The poem's called the Fountain of Bakyasaray, and the white marble structure he described is still there, dropping a single tear like droplet of water again and again. The association with Russia's national poet seems to have helped preserve this sad little fountain. A big black bust of Pushkin now stands next to it and indeed helped to save the entire exquisite complex of halls and courtyards, gardens and belvederes. The Crimean Tatar revival is real, but it's still fragile. Aminov talks of the religious pressures and is concerned, despite Ukraine's secular constitution, that in practice, the state favors Christianity and even builds churches. An Islamic revival is underway. But will it be the Islam of old Crimea or of modern Arabia? Many Crimean Tatars fled to the Ottoman empire in the 19th century, and the Turkish government is currently paying for a new madrasa or Koranic school and what it describes as an archaeological reconstruction, which sounds rather like a contradiction in terms. There is a great risk of an artificial version of the Crimean past. As I sit on the terrace of a Bakya Sarai restaurant, enjoying its hearty Central Asian food. Lagman shorpa, that's noodles and stew. Under shade cast by the vines above my head, my worries about an ersat's future drift away. The Tatars are home.
- [21:30]
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They're clearly survivors, and that was from Robin Banerjee. In Crimea, the Chinese have unveiled a plan to transform their railway system within three Years they they aim to create completely separate freight and passenger networks. It will mean building four new lines running east to west across the country and another four from north to south. They reckon it will give them, in terms of numbers of travellers anyway, the busiest passenger railway in the world. Now, the Chinese are no strangers to superlatives, are they? They do, after all, have the biggest population in the world. And whenever we hear news from there, it seems to contain words like biggest, longest, tallest or simply the most expensive. Martin Patience wonders if the Chinese, even with their newfound economic muscle, might just be a little insecure.
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China can often feel like a land of superlatives, a society that likes to supersize. Let me explain. China, of course, is the most populous nation on earth. It is the world's biggest political party, the Communists. The and its economy is on track to become the biggest in the world in the next decade or so. But I sometimes wonder if the Chinese push superlatives, well, a bit far. I was thinking about this last month when I checked into a hotel. There, in the centre of the lobby, as out of place as a meteorite that had crashed through the roof, was an enormous jade stone, roughly the size of a small car. But what on earth was it doing there? The plaque attached to the stone offered an explanation. It was the biggest gemstone in the city of Dandong. Reason enough, it appears to give the one ton hulk of jade pride of place. But again, really, why would you put it there? Well, one reason, of course, is publicity. In a country of a billion plus, it's not always easy for people, products or even places to stand out from the crowd. And China's turbocharged economy in the last decade has meant that the country can afford to go big. It builds not just a railway station, but the biggest railway station in the world. It also has the longest sea spanning bridge and in case you didn't know, the highest and fastest sightseeing lift in the world. With so many people, things, naturally enough, are built big here. But that doesn't explain the whole story. The country's National Museum is a good example. When it opened last year in Beijing, it was hailed as the biggest museum under one roof anywhere in the world. But according to news reports at the time, Chinese officials had rung up museums in Europe to inquire about their floor measurements in order to break the record. Talking to colleagues, they tell me that the speed, the size, the height, the width apparently does matter. And in recent years, these measurements have come to matter more. Part of the reason is the Chinese social concept of face the need for honour and prestige. If you get the biggest whatever, it's empirical, it can't be argued with. In short, it's impressive. Well, if you're impressed by these sorts of things, it can work at all levels, though. The government can use it as an indicator of progress and friends can use it to impress each other. But some in China have come to view this trend, big for big's sake, as an example of how society has become more vulgar in recent years, of how, during the economic boom, people here are more interested in the material world than traditional values of, say, modesty and taste. Superlatives, of course, need raw data to back them up. And as a reporter in China, statistics are impossible to avoid. Of course, every government department employs stats to inform and sometimes prove a point. But I've never come across anything like I've seen in China. I heard my personal favorite when my bag was stolen, I asked a policeman, what are the chances of getting it back? With barely a pause, he said that the highest rate of recovery for any city in the world was 37.8%. I wasn't sure if he was referring to Beijing, but in any case, I joined the 60% or so who don't get their bags back. But there's a serious point here. While statistics can be used to demonstrate progress, they can also be used as a weapon to silence critics. Usefully, from the government's point of view, they are almost impossible to check. It's little wonder, then, that most statistics here are viewed with a skeptical eye. What's undeniable is that much of China's development has been breathtaking. But I sometimes wonder if China, with all its remarkable economic progress and its seemingly unstoppable rise in the world, is actually short of confidence. And if that's not part of the reason for hiding behind all these stats and superlatives, I'd love to turn up somewhere, just once, and be shown something that isn't the biggest, the widest, the highest, but simply the best. Now that would be impressive.
- [27:17]
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And with Martin Patience pondering China's super sized superlatives, we've reached the end of another edition. I'll be back on Saturday with more from our own correspondence. Not necessarily the biggest, but I'm sure the best. Goodbye.