← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Concrete Blocks and Opaque Glass
00:27:55
Micro-flats, wildfires and scenes straight out of Charles Darwin's travel journals.
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- [00:00]
BBC Announcer
This is the BBC.
- [00:04]
Margaret Bradley
Hello.
- [00:05]
Program Narrator / Presenter
Today we long for a hot summer. Not too hot, of course, but in Portugal, they want to know why their summers now bring deadly wildfires. Every year we meet a man in the Philippines who twice plotted against former presidents, but who's now a senator and a big fan of the current strongman in charge. Planning next year's holiday to Uzbekistan, perhaps don't rush. 2020's more likely. And for those who like distant destinations, we're in Tierra del Fuego, on the tip of South America. Hong Kong marked 20 years since the return to Chinese rule with fireworks, protests and a visit from China's Xi Jinping, who claimed the island's residents now have more democratic rights and freedoms than ever. He then said the Chinese government would not tolerate any challenge to its sovereignty or security. On the economic side, Hong Kong's now one of the world's most unequal cities, with mainland money pushing up property prices a big challenge for younger Hong Kongers as Gemma Newby found.
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Gemma Newby
Down a dark corridor, past an old security guard, into a rickety vintage lift, the sort you have to wrestle shut behind you. Up three floors and behind a door, live a girl and her cat. In this anonymous looking apartment building, into a room not much longer than a ping pong table, Jay has squeezed an entire home. She and her tortoiseshell cat live in Mong Kok in central Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Her tiny flat, where every scrap of space is utilized, is a microcosm of the city she lives in, where buildings are stacked on top of each other like Lego bricks and people jostle for space on the pavements. She shows me around. It takes less time than it does to complete this sentence and needs only the smallest of movements. Turning my head from left to right, we start with the kitchen, no more than three steps away. A shelf with a single hob, a miniature fridge, a kettle and a sink. There's no room to prepare any food, but J doesn't cook much anyway. She told me once she tried frying an egg, but the smell lingered for days. So now she sticks to boiling noodles. Perhaps this is why she's so painfully thin. Or perhaps being thin is the only way to survive in a flat that feels more like a Wendy House than a home for someone with a degree and a decent job. Next to the kitchen sink is the bathroom, a cubicle that doubles as shower and toilet. A slight head turn and I'm looking into Jay's bedroom. A short ladder to a raised single bed edged with Cuddly toys, the cat in the middle, imperiously claiming premium real estate. Under the bed is the sitting room. Sitting room only. A folded up mattress for a sofa and a small table where Jay eats, works and watches tv. When Jay and her boyfriend have an argument, she tells me, one of them goes up to the bunk while the other sits in the bathroom only an arm's length away. The room is impressively organized. Boxes are stacked all the way up to the ceiling. Every surface is filled. A curtain rail used to hang wet clothes, small tchotchkas, a bright yellow minion figure, a Lego model, a poster of a K pop band, give it the air of a teenager's bedroom. This is a subdivided flat, an illegal, unregulated and potentially dangerous space. The practice has burgeoned over the last few decades in response to Hong Kong's exorbitant property market. It's just one of the city's many creative housing solutions. Homeowners carve their flats into three or six or even eight smaller spaces and then let out the rooms as separate homes. The price of a box like this, with barely enough room to swing a cat? 6,000 Hong Kong dollars a month. That's roughly 600 pounds, nearly half of what Jay earns each month in her advocacy job at a housing charity. It's a situation now normal in Hong Kong, where space has become a luxury only a privileged few can access, and buying a property cost 18 times the average annual income. I ask Jay if she's ever seen into her landlord's flat. Yes, she says. When I peek inside, I see a long corridor, so I imagine there's a really huge apartment. How does that make you feel? I ask her. She describes her feeling when watching her landlady's children playing in a space larger than her entire home. Even though my landlady is friendly to me, jay says, I feel like she's not a kind person, because kind people don't divide flats like this. For those on middle and low incomes in Hong Kong, maybe more than anywhere else, greater wealth represents not only financial freedom, but even the simple physical freedom to move around in their own homes. Young people here tell me it's not just physical space they lack, but political space, too. Space in which to openly discuss Hong Kong's future as part of China and what that will mean. Space to criticize the government, which some feel is too close to China's Communist Party and a fear that the space which Hong Kong has carved out for itself over more than a century is slowly being eroded, losing its uniqueness and merging into just another Chinese megacity like Shenzhen, right across the water. Hong Kong used to be a city of strivers, full of optimism, with success a reward for all the hard work. But that optimism has faded, and it is a very different picture now for a girl and her cat, Gemma Newby
- [05:34]
Program Narrator / Presenter
Fighting between Islamist militants and the military continues in the Philippines. President Rodrigo Duterte, who imposed martial law in May on the island of Mindanao, has urged the army to crush the fighters. When I say crush them, you have to destroy everything, including lives, he said. Duterte is a controversial leader, to say the least. His violent war on drugs has prompted widespread international condemnation, but he's still popular at home. Humphrey Hawksley was the BBC's Philippines correspondent during the 1980s, a time of other strongmen leaders and at the beginning of the country's bumpy path to democracy. Recently he returned to meet Gregorio Hanasen, now a senator but once a young colonel intent on overthrowing his country's rulers.
- [06:23]
Humphrey Hawksley
Senator Gregorio Hanason, a bear of a man, greeted me with a huge, long lost friend smile, his handshake firm but punctuated with the gap left by a half severed finger, which he had lost while ripping it on razor wire during a prison escape. Call me Greg, he enthused, ushering me to a Senate conference table. Once he was better known as Gringo, the rebel colonel who in the late 1980s tried time and again to disrupt the Philippines early shambolic transition to democracy and bring in military rule. In February 1986, he had caught the country's imagination, a young, charismatic Special Forces soldier who had walked through massive crowds gathered against the rule of President Ferdinand Marcos. Hanasen and his fellow officers pledged the military's support and within days, bomb Marcos was gone. Hanassen became a cult figure. Part Che Guevara esque rebel, part Freddie Mercury style rock star, he wore his military fatigues and carried his weapons like a fashion statement. One of Hanassen's legends was that he'd once parachuted with a pet python wrapped around his waist. Partly true, he said. The python was in his pocket. I'd last met him in the middle of the night at the gates of a military camp in August 1987, when, just 18 months after ousting Marcos, he had led another coup, this time against Corazon Aquino, the democratically elected successor. He talked then about fighting for the future of his children and his children's children. But I asked him now what had really been going through his mind. Why had he done it? We'd expected improvements in the system he said. She sure. But that doesn't happen in months. I counted. You didn't give Corrie very long. She didn't represent the changes we needed, he argued. She set free members of armed insurgencies even though thousands of our soldiers had died fighting them. It was like the Arab Spring. You get rid of a dictator and you create more problems than solutions. That night in 1987, I'd been finishing dinner with colleagues at a cafe near the Malink and Yang Presidential Palace. We rushed there following an armored vehicle with troops loyal to the government. It stopped sharply when a rocket propelled grenade fired by Hanasen's men exploded in front of it. The body of a young man who had been selling cigarettes lay skewed in the road, almost cut in half and lit by a street lamp. Hanassen had been inside the palace, about to kidnap the president. I was looking at the bedroom of Corrie, he said. But if I had pushed on with the assault, we would have had to fight our way out and she might have died. Hanassen fled underground, was captured, escaped, captured again, while all the time stirring up unrest. In a twist that couldn't happen in many countries. He was eventually granted an amnesty by the next president, Fidel Ramos, who had been the armed forces commander. For his part, Hanassen pledged to stop planning coups. The innocent people who died. I asked, do you have any regrets? A defensive expression spread across his face. I'm willing to stand in front of a firing squad as long as they hold to account those who he began, reeling off stories of those killed by Islamic and Communist insurgents, the very people with whom Cory Aquino had tried to make peace. I interrupted him. No, I said. Let's separate things. Do you have any regrets for the people who died during your coup attempts? He stiffened. No regrets, but always a lesson. I was just a soldier. I had no experience. It takes patience to rebuild a nation after a dictatorship. There's been proof of that all over the world. As he spoke, he lay his hands flat on the table, his severed finger stark against the polished wood, and I spotted a small, worn tattoo on his right hand, just below the thumb. It was the symbol of the Guardian's Brotherhood, a shadowy military group founded in the 1970s and loyal to Marcos when he was at the height of his powers. Hanassen joined back then, as did the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, who wears a similar tattoo. Duterte has been rehabilitating Marcos's reputation as a strongman leader and carrying out an extrajudicial campaign against drug traffickers that's killed thousands. Hanassen might have made his reputation by attacking Philippine presidents, but he's a big fan of Duterte's. This president is for people who don't have a voice, he said passionately. You need someone who's feared, more than loved and respected. This is what we needed after Marcos. You can't have a wimp as a president.
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Program Narrator / Presenter
Humphrey Hawksley Huge wildfires in Portugal this week, with 400 firefighters and eight water dropping aircraft deployed and 64 dead in the past few weeks. Small compared to its neighbours in southern Europe, Portugal had more wildfires in two decades than any of them, a reason for people to seek for any kind of explanation, says Margaret Bradley.
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Margaret Bradley
Wildfires happen every year in Portugal. Though destructive of property, they're rarely deadly, even though people take terrible risks. Take Last year, while we were away, one came roaring down the mountain behind the hamlet where we live, finally stopping at a small vineyard only 30 meters from our home. That unplanned firebreak saved us. We were lucky. On our return, appalled at our narrow escape, I said to my neighbour Joaquin, but of course the fire service came to put it out. He gave me a quizzical look and muttered something about more important people. He had held the fort alone, armed only with his garden hose. Thank goodness the fire came no closer, since his natural instinct to protect his property had been stronger than the common sense decision to flee. So all last summer our hillside was just a mass of charcoal. When the autumn rains came, the ash and earth flowed like black lava down the slopes onto the road. A sticky ooze clogged the drains and crept under our gate. If the invading gorse and broom burn again and more earth washes away, there'll be nothing left but bare rock. The cooling, pollution, removing oxygen producing trees will never be able to return. The owner of the local cafe, Signor Alberto, a small, jovial man in his 80s, tells me there used to be fewer fires in the past. When I was a boy, people grazed their animals under the trees that kept the brushwood down, and there were resident wardens to monitor the forests in houses there, there and there. He pointed in three different directions. He has little time for the government. Now they spend money trying to put out fires instead of preventing them in the first place. One problem is the prevalence of eucalyptus, which are popular because they grow fast enough to make an income from them. The government restricts the planting of these highly flammable trees, but all too often those with money to invest in forestry are those with friends in local government who can sidestep the regulations One man's income can come at a price. For many others. This year's losses have been worse than anyone can remember. Friends living nearby saw planes flying overhead with cargoes of water against a backdrop of a blood red sun glowering through billowing black smoke. Luckily for them, the sirens warning people to leave never came because the fire turned away. But it was touch and go for a while. Others weren't so lucky. The fire came from all sides, the survivors say, and it moved so fast people were trapped in their villages. They couldn't get away. Some tried to escape in their cars, but were blocked by falling trees and exploding concrete telegraph poles. The pictures of the burnt out vehicles in Pedrogon Grande where they died are devastating. That catastrophe was accidental, caused by a lightning bolt hitting dry undergrowth, a not unknown phenomenon in Portugal. But the rumour mills are full of alternative explanations for wildfires. Senor Alberto believes 90% are man made. He tells me that he has a pine plantation near where we live. A car drove up there last year, turned round, came down again and took the road towards Praguel Minutes later my trees went up in flames. And almost immediately afterwards the forest round Proger was on fire too. It was that car, he insisted. The law is too soft on arsonists. For over 30 years I have been hearing similar stories. Jealous folk destroying neighbours forests, pyromaniac firefighters who enjoy the thrill of their work setting them deliberately. A friend assures me these terrible tales are true. But I can't understand why anyone would deliberately put so many lives at risk. What is clear though, is that Portugal needs a forestry policy that takes on vested interests. Never easy politically. Perhaps there should be subsidies to encourage the planting of slow growing, more fire resistant trees. Maybe it would be a good idea to start employing resident fire wardens again. Or what about just putting satellite images online and getting locals to police their own areas by picking out rogue eucalyptus stands, areas without firebreaks and trees planted too close to escape routes. Periods of intense heat with temperatures of over 40 degrees centigrade are becoming more common, and the fires that accompany them correspondingly more dangerous. As well as the lives lost. This year, over 26,000 hectares of forest around Pedrogon Grande were burnt. And it's still only early in the summer. During last year's fires, a total of 115,000 hectares were destroyed. Half of the total lost in the whole of the eu. When it seems other larger, hot countries lose far less forest to wildfires, it's hard to understand how so much can be burnt in tiny Portugal. No wonder there are conspiracy theories.
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Program Narrator / Presenter
Margaret Bradley during his 26 year rule, Islam Karimov turned Uzbekistan into one of the most repressive states in the world. Political opposition was banned, the media tightly controlled and protest violently suppressed. When Shavkat Mezhizoev became president last year following Karimov's death, he promised continuity. But there have been signs of change. One of his first announcements was for visa free travel for tourists from 27 countries, including Britain. That was supposed to begin in April. It didn't. Visa in hand. Peter Robertson has been a frequent visitor to Central Asia's most populous republic for over 15 years.
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Peter Robertson
Welcome to Uzbekistan. Or rather, not yet. Actually, not until 2020, so don't rush to pack your bags. This is disappointing for ordinary Uzbeks. The country desperately needs more tourism to bring in hard currency and create employment. A population youth bulge means half a million young people are joining the workforce every year. But with few job prospects. No wonder President Mirzi Yojev made his visa busting decree so soon after he was elected in December. It was a popular masterstroke, a clear break from the previous regime, a potential shot in the arm for the economy and a signal that Uzbekistan was opening up to the world. The existing big money earners like natural gas, minerals and mobile phones are already spoken for by the state and its friends. That leaves tourism as the great hope for urban middle class entrepreneurs trying to earn a living from hospitality. There's enormous potential, as I've seen in my travels around the country. The warm climate for a start. The rich heritage displayed in carpet weaving and intricately patterned ceramics. A history going back thousands of years in the ancient cities of Samarakhan, Bukhara and Hiva. Although landlocked, there are spectacular mountains near Tashkent with ski resorts in winter that morph into summer. Spasmodic. I love wandering around the slightly chaotic bazaars to admire the colorful and creatively stacked avalanches of fruit and vegetables while inhaling the mingling fragrances of spices, assorted nuts, pomegranates, apricots and plums. This abundance of fresh produce tastes incredible if, like me, you're more used to the output of supermarket chilled cabinets. There's a proud national cuisine, too rapid, richly influenced by the waves of traders and invaders who have traveled up and down the Silk Road. In the evenings, big towns have a wide variety of bustling eating places. Whether I'm dining in a humble cafe or a posh restaurant, the helpings are delicious and huge. There's often free entertainment in the form of songs about lost love performed with gusto by musicians on traditional instruments, accompanied by swirling dancers. Most of all, Uzbeks are a warm and hospitable people. They're as aware as anybody that their homeland has problems, but want to welcome visitors and enthusiastically share their culture and history. Currently, all this is enjoyed by only a trickle of intrepid European pensioners, willing to be carefully shepherded around in controlled guided tour groups. Unsurprisingly, with all this on offer, there was dismay on social media when a few weeks later, the government announced visa restrictions would stay in place until 20. The reason? Officially, it's because the tourism infrastructure isn't ready yet. This is partly true. Take the country's main tourist gateway, Tashkent Airport. Getting through customs can leave even experienced travellers baffled. First, you need to find two blank forms written in English on paper, almost as flimsy as tissue paper. Press too hard and it disintegrates. Second, declare and describe all your currencies, plus jewellery devices like tablets and phones on both the entry and departure form forms, even though you're going to be spending some of that money during your visit. Finally, when you're given back your completed and stamped departure form, don't be tempted to throw it away. Because when you leave, not only do you have to fill in a new departure form, you have to hand in your original departure form too. If you do lose it, expect a few extra hours at the airport for questioning by unsmiling customs officials. Oh, and don't forget to give in your temporary registration card too. Have you got that? The real reason for the delay in scrapping visas is probably political rather than technical. There's more to it than a date change or sending customs officials to charms school. It's symbolic of a number of the President's reform announcements where implementation is proving hard going. The suspicion among Western diplomats is that the president doesn't have complete control of the government machine and and is up against rival power blocs that profit from keeping things as they are. It's impossible to tell in Uzbekistan what's really going on behind the scenes within the political elite. One insider put it like former President Karimov was a concrete block and nothing budged. Mersey Yoyev has replaced that with opaque glass, where you can see figures dimly moving around. In Uzbekistan, that represents progress.
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Program Narrator / Presenter
Peter Robertson, Tierra del Fuego. Distant, windswept last stop before Antarctica and a magnet for Magellan, Francis Drake and then Darwin, who spent weeks there aboard the Beagle studying the flora, fauna and the locals. Gideon Long has been following in his footsteps.
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BBC Announcer
Charles Darwin had mixed feelings about Tierra del Fuego. The botanist in him found it to be a dreary, uninspiring place. The zoology is very poor, he complained. The gloomy woods are inhabited by few birds. Two or three species of trees grow to the exclusion of all others. It was just a scathing about the locals. He could hardly believe that tribes of people had left warmer lands to the north and chosen to settle here amid the snow and freezing cold. In this extreme part of South America, he wrote, man exists in a lower state of improvement than in any other part of the world. One day he came across six locals in a canoe. These were the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld, he declared. He described them as stunted, hideous and filthy. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures and inhabitants of the same world. But beyond his 19th century prejudices, the adventurer in Darwin was fascinated by the raw, rugged beauty of the Tierra del Fuegan landscape. The mountains, the glaciers, the ice cold fjords, the rivers, the thousands of islands. As our plane cut through a grey sky to land on the airstrip at Puerto Williams, I caught a glimpse of the snow capped peaks of the Darwin Cordillera, the mountain range that bears his name. Like those mountains, Puerto Williams is named after a Brit, a sailor who claimed these lands for the fledgling Chilean state in the early 19th century. It's the southernmost town in the world, closer to Antarctica than it is to most of Chile. Its 2000 or so residents live from fishing and tourism, welcoming the occasional cruise ship that makes it this far south. I wandered around the local museum. It tells the sad story of the Egan, the local indigenous people who were all but wiped out when the Europeans arrived. There is now just one native speaker of the Yagan language in the entire world. A woman in her 80s. She lives in this town, the last guardian of her dying mother tongue. From Puerto Williams, I hitched a ride with the Chilean navy through the Beagle Channel, named after Darwin's famous ship. As we pulled away from the dockside, a huge whale arched out of the water just 50 yards from our boat. Again, it was a scene straight out of Darwin's vivid travel journals. On one occasion, he wrote, I saw two of these monsters, probably male and female, slowly swimming one after the other within less than a stone's throw of the shore. We sailed west to one of the most stunning spots on the archipelago. Here, even Darwin was impressed. In many parts, magnificent glaciers extend from the mountain side to the water's edge, he wrote. It is scarcely possible to imagine Anything more beautiful than than the beryl, like blue of these glaciers, and especially as contrasted with the dead white of the upper expanse of snow. On our way back to Puerto Williams, I chatted to the navy recruits on board our ship. Many of them spend months down here, far from their homes in mainland Chile. For although this is a remote place, it is strategically important for Chile. It offers a gateway to the Atlantic, for Argentina, to the Pacific. The main island of Tierra del Fuego is split between the two countries who back in the 1970s almost went to war over three tiny uninhabited islands at the entrance to the Beagle Channel. The Pope had to intervene to keep the peace. There are still a few anti personnel mines littered across Tierra del Fuego, an ugly reminder of those days. Tensions ran high once again over the Falklands War of 1982. The Chileans offered secret military support to the British, a move that rankles with Argentines to this day. It's hard to imagine a war here in such peaceful terrain, so far from the cares of the world, from the hurly burly of international politics. The only fury is in the raging sea that batters Cape Horn and the nearby islands. My last sight of Tierra del Fuego was of those waves pounding the fragmented coastline as our plane flew north again back to the mainland. Hundreds of ships have run aground here. Thousands of sailors have perished in the icy waters. There are so many breakers. Darwin wrote, one sight of such a coast is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about shipwrecks, peril and death.
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Program Narrator / Presenter
Gideon Long and that's all from us today. We'll be back with more from our correspondence on Saturday morning. Do join us. Goodbye.