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From Our Own Correspondent
Cities United and Divided
00:27:45
Dispatches from reporters across the globe, presented by Kate Adie. Chris Morris in...
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BBC Narrator
You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.
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BBC Correspondent
You can hear the version of the
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BBC Narrator
programme we make for the BBC World
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Craig Jeffrey
Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate
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Presenter/Host
Ady today, meeting the musician who left his guitar behind on his desperate flight to safety. It may be a hot topic in Scotland, but in Barcelona, some find it hard to even talk about independence. Don't call us ingenious. The Indians who believe their government's offering complements rather than development. And a huge new gas find brings dreams of prosperity to an African city more often associated with poverty, corruption and foreign intrigue. European leaders have moved closer to creating a single regulator to oversee the 6,000 banks in the Eurozone. It's the first step in setting up new support mechanisms for troubled banks. 17 nations were involved in the discussions in Brussels, but the two that really mattered were France and Germany. And it's often said that Germany, as the Continent's biggest economy, holds the key to solving the Eurozone crisis. It's come in for plenty of criticism from abroad, either for not acting decisively enough, or for demanding that excessive austerity be imposed on other European countries. But as our Europe correspondent Chris Morris observes, the view from Berlin is more complicated.
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Chris Morris
The late afternoon sun throws long shadows across the austere Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernaustrasse. Sections of the Wall, covered in fading graffiti, stand next to posts of rusting metal, the same colour as the autumn leaves in the graveyard next door. Between 1961 and 1989, at least 136 people died at the Wall, most of them trying to cross into the enclave of West Berlin from the Communist East. So this is a city that knows a thing or two about Division. For 50 Cold War years, Germany itself was divided and therefore politically weak. But history has moved on. Berlin is now the capital of a united country that has emerged from the Eurozone crisis as indisputably Europe's predominant power for decades. That is not an accolade that would have sat comfortably on German shoulders. Twice in the 20th century, the city was the crucible for devastating wars that ripped Europe apart. But now, as Europe's paymaster, it's where the future of the Eurozone will ultimately be decided. Leading from behind, the default position of a generation of German policymakers is no longer an option. Many European allies would like things to move much faster. There's plenty of frustration that Germany has been reluctant to embrace a comprehensive solution to the Eurozone's complex problems. A year ago, Poland's foreign Minister, Radek Sikorski, came to Berlin to make a speech that was much remarked upon. I fear German power less, he said, than I'm beginning to fear German inactivity. The billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros has been even more emphatic. Germany, he said last month, should lead or leave. Its challenge is no longer division between east and west in Europe, but between north and South. But leadership is a tricky business. Where does the right balance lie between offering help in the Eurozone and dictating terms? As the German model of fiscal rectitude has spread across the continent, so have the cliches of a Fourth Reich in the German jackboot. When Angela Merkel visited Athens earlier this month, protesters dressed as Nazis took to the streets. Old fears and prejudices lie close to the surface. To put it bluntly, Germany has a bit of an image problem. Abroad. So does Mrs. Merkel herself. home, things are rather different. They rather like her cautious deliberation and her unflustered style of crisis management. That was clear at a meeting of her party faithful a few days ago in Potsdam on the outskirts of Berlin. They gathered in the Metropolis hall, named after the famous Fritz Lang film, on the site of the oldest large scale film studios in the world. There were photos on the wall of Marlene Dietrich and other stars of a bygone age. Outside, as the Chancellor's motorcade swept in, there was an advert for Horror Night, although on closer examination, it was referring to a Halloween celebration later this month. Angela Merkel doesn't do trick or treat. She does slow and steady, not shock and awe. But over the past year or so, she's made greater efforts to reach out to countries where strict austerity measures are being imposed to persuade them that, yes, she does care, Germany cares, and she's trying to make the same case to her core constituency. In Potsdam, she was firmly on home turf. But even here, she was on a charm offensive for the euro. It's more than a currency, she said, and I want all countries to be part of it. For a while earlier in the year, it wasn't clear that that was still the case. She appeared to be wavering on Greece. Not any longer. Mrs. Merkel now says explicitly that she wants Greece to stay in the eurozone. What's left unsaid is who's going to pay for that privilege? Because Greece doesn't really need to be lent more money. It needs to be given some, either in the form of direct transfers or by writing off some of the debts it owes to countries like Germany. Neither would go down well with the audience in Potsdam as Germany heads into an election year. So these are difficult questions. In Parliament this week, Angela Merkel's main challenger, the Social Democrat Per Steinbroeck, accused her of bullying Greece and allowing a European neighbour to be abused for domestic political reasons. But Mrs. Merkel will, I fancy, go at her own pace, the pace she believes her country is comfortable with. And that means all eyes should remain on Berlin. A city defined for decades by division, now has the fate of European unity in its hands.
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Presenter/Host
And that's Chris Morris in Berlin. Next week sees one of the major events in the Muslim calendar, the festival of Eid Al Adah. It's a time of feasting as well as devotion, and several nations have taken the opportunity to call for a ceasefire in Syria for at least the four days of the holiday. Among those is Turkey, which has been involved in a series of clashes with its southern neighbour and which is sheltering thunder thousands of Syrians displaced by the fighting, most living in refugee camps just inside the Turkish border. Fergal Keen has met some who have fled even further to the Turkish city of Izmir.
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BBC Narrator
When a city is destroyed, what can we say of the buildings that rise in its place? Are they a completely new metropolis? Or must something of the spirit of the old, no matter how fragmented, always haunt the present? It is a question which must occur to any sentient traveler in the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, where great civilizations have risen, glittered brilliantly, then vanished into kingdoms of broken stone and dust. But I don't think it has ever occurred to me with such poignancy as in Izmir, the city the Greeks once called smyrna before their 3000 year old living presence in Asia Minor was all but expunged. I had not come here to reflect on the sorry story of international intrigue and massacre which led to the death of Smyrna. I was following the story of a different group of people fleeing a contemporary conflict, whose own cocktail of international intrigue and massacre had displaced more than a quarter of a million people. But it was not possible to hear the stories of Syrian refugees without thinking of what befell the substantial populations of Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna in September 1922. In the aftermath of World War I, ancient empires had collapsed. The Habsburgs and the Ottoman Turks, who between them had dominated Central Europe and the near east, were consigned to fast receding memory. The victorious British and French appointed themselves guardians of the Middle Eastern territories of the defeated Ottomans and helped bequeath to modern generations no end of troubles. But it was the Greek invasion of the Ottoman lands of Asia Minor that set in train the disaster of Smyrna. With British support, they invaded Anatolia in 1919 and marched inland. There were massacres of Turks and these helped infuse a powerful nationalist response. When the Turkish army defeated the Greeks and descended on Smyrna. The there was wanton killing of tens of thousands. Pillage and rape and the great fire whose effect is measured now in absences gone. The streets in which the voices of Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Arabs and Jews mingled lost the rich mix of cultures that drew inspiration from the great philosophical and religious traditions of east and west that traded and prayed and made music and told stories in the narrow lanes of the bazaar and by the glittering waters of the Aegean on the on summer evenings. The Crisis ended in 1923 with the treaty providing for the mass exchange of populations across the region. Muslims were forced to go to Turkey by the Greeks. Christians were forced to go west by the Turks. More than a million and a half people were uprooted. To the traveler wandering through modern day Izmir in search of the past, it is as if the Greeks had never been here. A handful of old buildings remain, but there is a squat ordinariness about the architecture of the place, wonderfully friendly though its people are and golden though the light remains. As you walk the quayside, I was watching the sunset in the company of a young Syrian man who gave his name as Mehmet. He'd fled his country three months ago. He deserted the army and fled west. Last month he. He tried to reach Greece, the first step on a journey he hoped would take him to Germany or Britain, where he might begin a new life. But the smugglers had sent him to sea on a dangerous boat. There were as many as 100 people on board, most of them women and children. The boat struck rocks and overturned. There was a boy I'd befriended, he told me, a child of about 12. And I told him that when we got to Europe, I would look after him. The boy drowned along with 60 other refugees as he tried to save his own life by swimming to shore. Mehmet remembered a woman and her child both fighting to cling on to him. He didn't say what happened then, and I did not ask him. His face was contorted in pain. I did ask him what he would do if he got to Europe. I would study guitar and then teach it, he said. Mehmet was a classical guitarist. He his favorite pieces of music were the preludes of Johann Sebastian Bach. But in the escape from Syria, he'd left his guitar behind. The music in him had been silenced. But still, like all those numberless refugees before him in other wars, he kept his eyes fixed on the sea, on the idea of another life that was surely waiting. If he could only cross the water.
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Presenter/Host
Fergal keen in Izmir, the president of Catalonia in Spain dropped a line to David Cameron this week. Congratulations, he said, for enabling the people of Scotland to take part in a referendum on independence. The Prime Minister, of course, was in Scotland on Monday signing a historic deal with First Minister Alex Salmond, which paved the way for the vote to take place before the end of 2014. The Catalan President, Senor Arturo Mas, hopes the central government in Madrid will authorise a similar referendum for the people of his region so they too can decide whether they want to go it alone. But Nialo Gallagher says it's a subject which some there find difficult even to talk about.
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Nialo Gallagher
In Barcelona, people have no problem talking to strangers. But then there can't be many better ways of drawing attention to yourself than carrying a camera and tripod around around the city's underground railway system. And if, like me, you have a kind of Celtic complexion that goes red under a 60 watt bulb and have made the mistake of packing only dark suits to wear in the unseasonable autumn heat, people are curious to know where you've come from and what you're doing there. I've been a regular visitor in recent years and can get by in Catalan, something most locals regard as unusual for a foreigner but tend to approve of, making them still more willing to open up. I had one such conversation with a middle aged couple on the yellow line from the broad boulevards of the city's 19th century Eixhampo district to the port of the old fishing village of La Barceloneta. It began with the back slapping and jokes about bad weather that seemed to accompany Scottish travellers in southern Europe. And then we got on to the reason for our visit. I'm here, I told them, to report on the Catalan independence debate. At that point, the atmosphere changed. There was no hostility. Our couple didn't seem to resent foreigners poking their noses into their business. But while the husband had been taciturn, though smiling from the start, his warm and elegantly dressed wife, so gregarious just a moment ago, suddenly seemed to have trouble finding her tongue. It's difficult, she told me. It's very difficult. That was something I came across again and again among the ordinary Catalans I spoke to, particularly those over 50. They are old enough to remember a time when it wasn't possible to speak freely here, particularly not in Catalan, and certainly not about an issue like this. In the Santa Catarina food market, a former convent now dedicated to satisfying hunger of the corporal rather than spiritual variety, I put the question to two ladies who must have been in their 70s, as they haggled over the price and size of the shining cuts of fish being chopped and wrapped before them. What do you think, senores? And about independence for Catalonia? One laughed while the other turned to me, smiled, and drew her two fingers across her lips, zipping them shut. That's a neat image, I think, for the legacy of the dictatorship in Catalonia. Memories of the Franco period hold many people back from speaking openly about independence from Spain, but the written law also stands in the way of any consultation with the people as a whole. The post Franco constitution calls upon the armed forces to defend the unity of Spain. There is one place where no rule or reticence inhibits the overt display of pro independence sentiment. We squeezed our kit onto another crowded metro train to the home of FC Barcelona for their first league clash of the season against their rivals from the Spanish capital. Just a few weeks after the September demonstrations, which saw an estimated 1.5 million people take to the streets to demand independence from Spain, campaigners used the classic confrontation with Real Madrid to give their arguments a global audience. At exactly 14 minutes past 5 that afternoon, supporters inside the stadium raised red and yellow tiles, creating a mosaic of the Catalan flag, La Senyera. They were commemorating the fall of Barcelona in 1714, the year to which Catalan nationalists date the loss of their independence. We pay a lot of taxes to Madrid and we don't get enough back, said one young mother as she pushed her twins towards the gates in a Senera decked pram. If we had control of our own money, we could give our children a better education. How come the king doesn't speak Catalan if we are supposed to be part of Spain? Asked a lad in a Barca football shirt. We've tried to be part of Spain, but they don't want us now. We need independence. Regional elections are due in November, in which nationalist parties are expected to get a majority. In the midst of the economic crisis, the Spanish government seems in no mood to negotiate a compromise that might lessen demands for independence on the Catalan street. And so the scene is set for a confrontation with no clear sense of when travelers on the Barcelona metro will get to have their say.
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Presenter/Host
And that's Nial o'. Gallagher. Now millions of people around the world have seen the car advert set in India, which features a young man smashing, squashing and banging his old car until it looks almost like the new model he dreams about. The short film, accompanied by evocative bhangra music, is a favourite on YouTube, and for many people it sums up the can do improvisational skills that Indians, often very poor Indians, employ to make their lives just a little bit better. The government in Delhi is making use of this image. It believes that if more of its citizens use their ingenuity and become innovators, it can only enrich them as well as the country's economy as a whole. But Craig Jeffrey says some Indians vehemently disagree.
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Craig Jeffrey
Pitam Singh is a low caste student studying for an engineering degree in the north Indian city of Meerut. He spent much of May and June perched high on his college hostel roof, moving pipes, gutters and buckets about in an elaborate attempt to harvest rain water. Several of my conversations inside the hostel were interrupted by the sight of Pittam's foot dangling next to the window, or the noise of him slithering around on the tiles. It was a ludicrously treacherous job, but it worked. By the end of the monsoon, he'd filled a large number of plastic bins. As his friends said, Pittam is good at improvising, mixing things up and making things work. These comments remind me of something I find fascinating about India the tendency for people from all walks of life to imagine themselves as improvisers. There's a word for this in Hindi, jugaad. Now, there are many meanings of jugaad. In some situations it's used to describe finding a way around things, like finding a way around the law, travelling through a red traffic light because there are no cars about. That's an example of jugaad. It's a creative adaptation to circumstances. But it's juga, in the sense of resourceful improvisation that features so prominently in my everyday conversations in India. Juga is replacing your broken fan belt with a pair of tights. It's building a vehicle out of an old motorcycle engine lashed to an ox cart. It's patching together a computer from electronic odds and ends. And it's also rainwater harvesting. Someone told me that Pittam is such a terrific, imaginative innovator, he should be called Jugaadu, the one who does jugaad. In a rather curious turn of events, the Indian government has now started to see jugaad as a development strategy. It set up a National Innovation Council who whose brief is to encourage jugaad. One of the leaders on this council said that India needs a million jugaads and numerous NGOs and consultancies have popped up promising to foster constraint based opportunism or frugal engineering. Jugaad is being mainstreamed in urban planning and there's even a website devoted to Jugaad clothing. It seems that the notion of India developing through high tech industry it's been gradually replaced by an image of barefoot entrepreneurs leading India's global rise to prominence. Instead of India Shining which conjures up images of India's metropolitan cities, it's now India improvising. A country full of high spirited Pitham Singhs. Now there are several ways of interpreting this government drive positively. We could see it as a sign that the powers that be in India and are at last recognizing the value of poor people's knowledge. The enthusiasm for Jugaad in India amounts to a celebration of ordinary individuals ability to problem solve in their own ways and through their own efforts. That's all very well, but there's another way to read this new enthusiasm for jugaad. We can see it as a type of smokescreen. If poor people have such creative genius, what need is there for state interference in people's lives? What need is there for decent education, for making cheap credit available, for improving infrastructure and for ending corruption? None of these things is really necessary because people can always pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. My student friends have other objections to the celebration of jugaad. There's a very serious student in Meerut University called Juginder who spends almost all his days giving short lectures on contemporary topics. And from a tea stall near the university's main gate, I thought I'd try out Jugaad on Juginda. What does he think of the concept? He left a dramatic pause before replying. I will tell you I am 100% against jugaad, he said. I have to do Jugaad to get hot water in my hostel. I mean do all sorts of tricks with a tank. But we should not be a Jugaad country. This is India in 2012 we're talking about. Why should we be embracing the cobble together? We should be doing everything properly, not in a roundabout way. Pittam agreed. It's true, he said. For my rainwater harvesting I need the pack that they make abroad which has all the right equipment. I can't get it here so I have to improvise. I have no option. But Jugaad there are surely good reasons to celebrate people's ingenuity in India, but it's difficult not to sympathize with Juginders and pittam. They want a future beyond Jugaad.
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Presenter/Host
Craig Jeffrey, back now from northern India. Not so long ago, Mozambique was a desperate case, trying to recover from a long and vicious civil war with an economy in disarray and a people living, for the most part, in varying degrees of poverty. Today, this former Portuguese colony in Southeast Africa is unrecognizable. They found huge reserves of gas off the northern coast. They are mining rich seams of coal. The economy's powering ahead. There's a construction boom in the capital, Maputo. The signs are clear. This is a country on the move. But as Hamilton Wende's been learning, it's also one where the past is always close at hand.
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BBC Correspondent
The British military attache had on one red sock and one tan coloured one that peeped out incongruously from under the cuffs of his dark trousers. He was sitting on the pale sofa, looking somewhat intensely at me under his wispy grey hair. Winston Churchill, he announced, gesturing vaguely around the room with his warm gin and tonic, the single ice cube clanking against the rim of his glass. Yes, I replied, somewhat mystified. Stayed here. The attache took a sip of his drink, surveying me carefully. I nodded and took a pull at my own glass. After he escaped from the Boers, the attache said. Outside, the warm, humid African night filled the tropical garden. The British High Commission in Maputu is a magnificent building, a white pillared and gloriously arched monument to a lost world that was once the Portuguese colonial city of Lorenzo Marx. It is a history of memories and rumors, a history that will probably never be fully written as it is buried beneath the layers of the Marxist revolution and independence of 1974, the brutal civil war that lasted from then until 1992, and now the ongoing poverty and underdevelopment that followed in their wake. Lorenzo Marx, or Maputu as it is known today, has always had an undercurrent of corruption and foreign intrigue running through its tree lined avenues. The old stone Portuguese fortaleza stands as a reminder both of the opening of trade routes between Europe and Africa and Asia, and the European greed and brutality that held them for centuries. Perhaps the most famous building is the wonderful, vast balconied Polana Hotel, where Graham Greene set some of his novel the Human Factor. It provided a fictional refuge for British intelligence officer Maurice Castle and his black lover, Sarah, who were fleeing from the apartheid authorities in neighboring South Africa with its strict laws of racial separation. If you weave your way north of town through the African vendors that line the long palm fringed marginal, you will come to the art deco Costa du Sol restaurant. The wine and the prawns here have been justly famous since the 1930s. During World War II, Portugal was officially neutral, so British author and intelligence operative Malcolm Muggeridge would meet his agents on the balcony here. The Germans had submarines stationed in the Mozambique Channel and were scoring a number of successes against Allied shipping. Their agents too would come to enjoy the cuisine and the old wooden sprung dance floor where young women danced in white dresses and the men in tuxedos in the sweltering African heat. Finally, Muggeridge and his cronies resorted to arranging the kidnapping of an Italian spy by luring him to a rendezvous outside the city with a young exotic dancer. Her angry boyfriend then beat up the spy and he was handed over to the British authorities in Swaziland. A sadder story of foreign deception and espionage in Maputu was in the 1980s, when South African anti apartheid activist Ruth first was killed by a letter bomb sent to her in 1982 by the South African Security Police. Mobutu today is finding a new African identity with a cosmopolitan flair. 20 years of peace have brought their rewards. Poverty remains a problem and income inequality is high. But economic reforms and the recent discovery of both coal and gas mean that Mozambique is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Business booms in the former ruined hulk of a city. But the old ways of bribery and even murder have been harder to change. In 2000, prominent anti corruption journalist Carlos Cardoza was gunned down near a park in the city centre. An investigation into the killing revealed that the son of ex President Chisano was involved. There have been efforts by the government to increase accountability. In 2010, the former Transport Minister was successfully convicted of dishonesty and the number of cases being prosecuted is rising every year. Still, bribery at all levels remains a serious problem in doing business in Mozambique. Earlier this year, the Attorney General admitted that the general perception that such offences went unpunished was legitimate. Maputu and Mozambique are moving forward rapidly, people. But the hidden truths of both past and present intrigues swirl whispered only half told through the streets of this growing new metropolis. It remains impossible to forget this history of anti colonial struggle. World war and foreign spies layered over the continuing high levels of often dangerous corruption. When you are sitting at the Costa do Sul, looking out over the windswept palms and the gleaming Indian ocean, Hamilton
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Presenter/Host
Wenday soaking up the atmosphere in Maputo. I'll be back next week with more from our own correspondents around the world. I hope you'll join us.