← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Destruction + Regeneration
00:28:06
Alan Johnston's been to the Italian towns shaken by a series of earthquakes and...
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Hello, this is the from our own correspondent office at Bush House in London.
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You can check out what we're up
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to by signing up to our Twitter feed, but here's a download of our latest program on BBC Radio 4, introduced
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as ever by Kate Ady.
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Today, Italians living through frightening times as their homes and towns are shaken in a series of earthquakes, contradictions and lies. In Pakistan, as the country braces itself for more disastrous flooding, we join bus passengers praying out loud as they negotiate what may be the most dangerous road in the Himalayas. And where's your dog? Holidaying. This year, we learn Japan has much to offer man's best friend. The last few days have seen a series of earthquakes and aftershocks in central and northern Italy. Eight more were reported overnight. The most serious shook communities along the Adriatic coast. Yesterday it measured 4.5 on the Richter scale. But there was little damage and no one thought to have been injured. This part of Italy is not far from Emilia Romagna, the province where there were two other quakes at the end of last month. This is Italy's agricultural heartland, and the tremors have led to a loss in production worth millions of pounds. You may have seen the pictures of piles of ruined Parmesan cheeses. The earthquakes left more than 20 people dead. At least 14,000 others have had to leave their homes. And Alan Johnston's been finding out that many are still too frightened to return because of the continuing aftershocks.
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The towns and villages north of Bologna lie on the flatlands of the Po Valley. For thousands of years, the great river has laid down layer after layer of fertile soil. And now the country roads that wind across the plain take you through some of Italy's finest farmland. All around, fields stretch away, lush and green and thick with crops. And the people who live in the old farmhouses normally count themselves lucky. They've prospered here for generations. They've looked after the land and it's looked after them. But now, suddenly, this rich earth beneath their feet has delivered a series of shocking blows. In the hours after that first quake, in a little place called Finale Emilia, it was immediately clear that the ground was yet to settle. We'd only just arrived in the main street when there was a powerful aftershock. The strangest juddering sensation and a kind of groaning sound. Easy to imagine that it rose from the restless earth itself. But perhaps it just came from the buildings rocking on their foundations, walls grinding, doors shuddering, windows rattling. Then we could hear masonry crashing into nearby streets and walking through them. Moments later, we picked our way between Mounds of ro strewn across pavements. In a corner of a piazza, a fine old clock tower had been split in two, sliced right down the middle. High up on the ancient bricks, you could still see the clock face with its Roman numerals, but only half of it. The rest had fallen away when much of the tower collapsed. Then suddenly, there was another hammering aftershock. And right in front of us, all that remained of the building came down in a torrent of bricks and timbers. A tower had stood on the edge of that piazza for almost 800 years, since the days of the Crusades. The slightly modernized version that I'd seen in its last moments had been there since 1526. A bit of history had disappeared in a matter of moments, just turned to dust on the wind. And all across the region, some 600 older, weaker buildings, churches, fortresses, monuments lie cracked and batter or half collapsed. It's true that many are treasures from the Middle Ages, but in the end, they are just buildings. And meanwhile, the people who live around them have been enduring some of the most frightening moments of their lives. Laura Ferrari is an older woman, a cleaning lady, and she was unlucky enough to be standing on a chair doing some windows when the second quake struck. It was, she said, like a bomb. In the heaving, lurching chaos, she couldn't reach the door. The room was dancing, she said, and I danced too, like a ballerina. When it was over, the phone network was down, and there was a long, desperate wait before she could make sure her children were safe. I met Laura that evening as she sat under some trees outside her house, and that night she wouldn't be going up the steps lined with flowers to her front door. Maybe there'll be more tremors, she says. Maybe the house will collapse. Maybe we'll all be trapped. She'd rigged up a bed in a shed in the back garden, but she won't have slept much. A colossal machine armed with a huge claw began tearing down a nearby office block. It was so badly damaged that it was safest to demolish it fast. And so far into the night. In her shed, Laura will have lain, listening to the town echo, to the pounding and crashing as the wreckers went to work. A little earlier, in the gathering darkness of the evening, I'd watched a tall, thin chap called Daniele come walking down a street. He was wearing a yellow helmet. He was covered in dust and he was exhausted. He was from an alpine rescue team. He'd come from the faraway mountains to help and worked all day alongside firemen searching the rubble of a collapsed house just up the road. It belonged to a woman of 65 called Liviana Latini. She'd stayed away from it after the first quake and only gone back to pick up some clothes when the second one struck, bringing the building down around her. The rescue workers found her trapped in her sitting room beneath the wreckage of the floor above. Danieli was smiling as he told me that they'd managed to bring her out alive and conscious. But it would turn out that those 12 hours buried in the ruins of her home, had been too much for Liviana Latini. She died some days later in hospital.
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And that was Alan Johnston. A senior Pakistani official is admitting that not enough has been done to prevent flooding in the coming monsoon season. His warning came only shortly after government assurances that Pakistan was, in fact, better prepared than last year. Millions of people were affected by the monsoon floods in 2011, which led to an international aid effort for the second year running. And Alim Maqbool says there are now serious concerns that this year's monsoon rains, due next month, will bring more flooding and more suffering.
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We'd spent hours driving on poor roads and in the heat through the province of Sindh. Our mission, to find a man called Ahmed Khan Chandio and his family. We had no way of contacting him. In September, we'd been in a boat here on a rescue mission with the Army. Water had stretched to every horizon. We came across Ahmed, his wife, Bagel, and their two sons, aged nine and seven, stranded on a tiny bit of higher ground. They'd lost their home and belongings in the floods. All their livestock had drowned, though they had managed to save two chickens, which they'd been holding above the water for hours until the boat came. We filmed their plight and the last we saw of Ahmed Bagel and the boys was in a small relief camp in a tiny tent with around 20 other people trying to keep dry in another monsoon downpour. I wanted to know what happened next, how they managed to rebuild their lives. We remembered we picked them up close to where the top of a shrine had been visible over the waters. It was that fact that eventually led us to Emmett. He looked haggard and thin, but he and one of his sons welcomed us with other relatives. They'd returned to the place where their home once stood. There was nothing left. I asked about his wife, but Emmett told me she'd gone to a town some four or five hours away for medical treatment. I'd wanted to see her too. She'd been so articulate the first time. But Emmerd talked of the family's troubles since the floods and that since he had no animals left, he tried to make money by collecting wood and selling it in the nearest town, Pangryo. After recording a short interview, we said our goodbyes, but it wasn't to be. The last time we saw Emmerd some distance away, we asked a man for directions. He asked where we had been. When we told him, he shook his head and tutted. Isn't it terrible that she died? He said. We assumed he'd got his facts wrong or misunderstood which family we'd visited. It was getting dark and we had a long drive, so we had to go, but asked a local journalist to look into. Was late at night when we got a call to say other villagers were also saying Bargle had passed away. But why had Emma lied? What had he and his relatives got to hide? We had to go back. I didn't want to be confrontational and decided to take em at the side alone and and to play him the TV report in which he and Bogle had featured last year to watch his reaction. Of course, the moment his wife appeared, he broke down, his whole frail body shaking as he sobbed. He watched it seven or eight times in a row. Each time his wife appeared, he drew himself close to the screen and fresh tears tumbled down his face. I asked him again what had happened. This time he told me I they spent three months in the camp. They had not had much to eat, and that his wife became weak and then ill. When the camp closed, the family returned to their land, though by then Bargil could hardly move. He described how they sold their only assets, those two chickens, to buy medicine, but it soon ran out. And how he sat by Bargil for a month, caring for her until she did eventually die. And the reason he'd lied to us the day before. He was worried that if we had been bringing aid, we might not have handed over whatever small quantity of food may have been allotted to Bargle. He broke down again as he told me, and then kept on apologizing for lying. I put a hand on his back to comfort him and felt the bones of his spine jutting out under his tattered tunic. In the reporting of this story, we were confronted with something else that wasn't true. The claim that Pakistan is prepared and ahead of this year's monsoon season, nine months since we first met Ahmed, there are places where floodwaters are still standing, where drainage canals are blocked, and where flood prevention measures were supposed to be implemented but haven't been. And the rains are just weeks away. Some of this country's voiceless poor may once again be plunged into such wretched desperation, they feel they have to lie for the sake of a few cups of rice. But does anyone care?
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Alim Maqbool in Pakistan. Downtown Johannesburg over the past couple of decades has been notorious for its high crime rate and extensive urban decay. White businesses and residents left the city centre and set up instead in the suburbs. Foreign visitors were warned to stay away, but the last few years have seen a remarkable transformation. Hamilton Wende says that while there's still a long way to go, the city's being rejuvenated.
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I grew up in Johannesburg. Joey's, as we used to call it. In the 60s and 70s, I lived in what were then the whites only suburbs. But as a child, during school holidays, my friends and I would catch the bus from leafy Park Town north to the downtown terminus at Loveday street. At age 10 or 11, we would roam the city street safely, going ice skating at the Carlton or perhaps watching a movie at the Cunnay Center. I came to love the smell of the streets as they baked in the African heat. The towering skyscrapers and the magnificent colonial office blocks, all built on the wealth of the gold mines, seemed to embody the grandeur of human ambition. There was something deeply exciting about being a part of this vast city that had taken less than a century to grow. From the barren felts. The buildings were real and the money that flowed through them was all defining. But the true inner life of the city was an illusion. It was the height of apartheid, and privilege was reserved for whites. Different races were not allowed to share restaurants or even watch a movie together. So while people shared the streets, jostling shoulder to shoulder as they hurried from one place to the next, their lives were kept apart. So when apartheid began to end in the early 1990s, Johannesburg lost its way because its people didn't know each other. When largely poor blacks came to the city to live, whites left en masse. And in the words of property developer Gerald Olitzki, the abandoned buildings created a vacuum. Soon, like in many cities in the world, much of the vacuum had become a slum. Over the years, I watched in dismay as large parts of the city I loved fell into ruin and became dangerous ghettos with block after block of derelict buildings ruled by gangsters. The lowest point was reached somewhere around the early 2000s. I remember accompanying police patrols into the city, which for the most part resembled something out of a Mad Max movie. The police were terrified of entering the rundown buildings for fear of being ambushed on the stairwells by thugs wielding AK47s. Things really seemed hopeless then. Somehow the worst of South Africa's brutal past and horrifying poverty caused by apartheid seemed to have been distilled into the streets of Jo'. Burg. But all the while, there were people who didn't give it up for lost. The authorities never failed to clean the streets. Before dawn every morning, the local provincial government moved its offices into the centre. Most of the mining houses and the big banks stayed and put security guards on street corners. A vast network of surveillance cameras was installed and the metro police watched and patrolled constantly. Investors like Gerald Olitsky began to buy derelict buildings and renovate them slowly, in a grinding, nearly invisible way. At first, things began to change. Fittingly, perhaps it was in the old gold mining area in the west of the city that the first meaningful signs of a safe, clean environment began to emerge. Block by block, the regeneration process moved east. Crime began to drop, and a few years ago, the first restaurants, offices and flats began to emerge in the reclaimed areas. Slowly the process has gained momentum and now there are significant areas of the city where middle class people of all races sip coffee and type on laptops at sidewalk cafes. There is still a long way to go. There are many places that remain slums and too many dangerous alleyways, but the city is rejuvenating rapidly. Every month now, art galleries, a couple of boutique hotels, restaurants, cutting edge fashion stores are opening. Apartments are being built or restored. Buildings that only months ago were derelict shells where people lived, separated by rough partitions, without water, sewerage or electricity are now gleaming office buildings with marble floors and brand new lifts. Johannesburg is being reinvented. It will never again be the old city of white privilege, where an illusion of Western culture was maintained by the oppression of apartheid. It will never be Paris or even Cape Town, and there is still much work to be done. But the old despair has vanished. It has been replaced by a growing sense of excitement and renewal. The city I remembered as a child is gone forever. But today I regularly take my children downtown to the new art galleries, markets and restaurants that are springing up. The city they are growing up in is becoming a modern African metropolis for the 21st century. A place where people are coming together, forging something new. A city that mirrors the vastness and diversity of the mighty continent.
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At its heart, that's Hamilton Wende. China's increasing political influence in Nepal, a country now run by a Maoist administration, is starting to bring change in the form of brand new Himalayan highways. Up to now, Nepal's not been a promising place for road building. Lying amid the highest stretches of the highest mountains in the world and sandwiched between India and Chinese Tibet, it's faced geographical problems as intractable as its political ones. But now work's progressing on a number of sizeable highway projects. James McConachie, a frequent visitor to Nepal, wonders if some may be over ambitious. The country, he says, may be called the Switzerland of Asia, but that's not because of its engineering talent.
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Nepal used to be the country where everybody walked from schoolchildren in flip flops and barefoot porters to well shod foreigners like me. Since the former Maoist rebels formed a government in 2008, however, and started reaching out across the Tibetan border to the Chinese, scores of new roads have been blasted and bulldozed across the Himalayas. They are transforming the landscape and the lives of the people who live in it. From my seat on the bus, I was more worried about preserving life than changing it. I was traveling on the most notorious new road, which forces its way up the Kali Gandaki Valley in the west of Nepal. This is the deepest gorge in the world, and I seemed to be falling into it. The road had been obliterated by a landslide, and as we lurched on anyhow across a precipitous boulder field, our conductor hung out of the open door to check our wheels didn't fall off the edge. I want to walk. I want to walk. I found myself muttering. Other passengers were chanting the more conventional Buddhist mantra, Om mani padme hum. Clutching the arm of my guide, Ramesh Chowdhury, we optimistically leaned away from the precipice. This is the worst road I have ever been on, he told me. This is saying something. As a trekking guide, Ramesh has traveled all over Nepal. When we first walked in this region together 15 years ago, just two roads snaked out of Pokhara, the regional capital. Kathmandu, the national capital, had only a couple more. Even today, the entire country's road network is only double the size of the UK's cycle network, and half of it is regularly made impassable by landslides or lack of bridges. This road was certainly a borderline case for the British trek leader Anne Foulkes. The journey was 11 of the worst hours of my life. It wasn't just the danger that bothered her, but the desecration. I cried when I saw what they'd done to that valley, she admitted. The Kali Gandaki trek used to be one of the most celebrated walks in the World pilgrims would toil up to the shrine of Muktinath to pay homage at the natural gas flame there and the holy spring that trickles beneath it. Triumphant hikers would stride down as they concluded the Annapurna circuit, which encircles the vast Himalayan massif at Nepal's heart. Now Indian pilgrims were taking what they call the Muktinath Express, a piggyback ride on the back of a motorbike right up to the shrine. I met just one pilgrim on foot. As we sat together fighting dizziness at 4,000 meters, he told me that arriving under his own steam accrued greater spiritual merit. Actually, he said, the more you put in, the more you get out. Tourists, meanwhile, were all but absent in Tartapani, a village with hot springs that used to be a honey pot for tired trekkers. I spoke to a ponytailed guest house owner, Bhuan Ganchan, as we stood in the street outside his lodge. I could hear the hiss of pressure cookers making rice, the roar of the river, and the occasional clatter of a motorbike on the cobbles. Tourists were choosing Everest base camp, he complained, or other remote regions beyond the roads. Who flies thousands of miles? He asked me to walk beside a highway. Other local entrepreneurs were having better luck. Orchards flourish in the gorgeous upper reaches, and almost every passenger on my bus clutched a bag of apples. More, bigger bags lashed to the roof were bound for India. Perhaps Nepal will lose some of the trekkers who support its economy, but it might yet trade its way out of poverty instead. The great transformation, however, is taking place at the high northern end of the Kali Gandaki Road. The sensitive border with Chinese. Tibet is still closed to tourists, but every day tractors and four wheel drive vehicles bring trailer loads of Chinese goods. Political influence is pouring over the same passes. With the Maoists in government, Nepal is increasingly peering over its Himalayan shoulder into China. It may yet find its back roads become its escape route from historical domination by India. As long as it can maintain those heroic new roads, that is. When we came to a waterfall and a bridge hanging on one pitiful strut, even the fatalistic Nepalese passengers got out and walked, bags of apples and all. No one seemed too worried. Walking was something they were used to, and until someone fixes the Himalayas, they'll likely stay used to it for a good while yet.
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James McConaughey in Nepal, a team of university researchers in Japan, says the country needs urgently to address the question of its falling birth rate. It currently has one of the lowest in the world, and as a result, the population shrinking fast the academics are even suggesting that in a thousand years time, if those trends are not reversed, there may no longer be any Japanese people still with fewer and fewer babies around. The Japanese, it seems, are lavishing love and affection on their pets, as Roland Burke's been observing on the streets of Tokyo.
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It was winter when I first arrived in Tokyo with my family. Our previous home was balmy tropical Sri Lanka, so the cold came as a bit of a shock, particularly to our three month old baby who'd never known grey skies and drizzle. He didn't even have a coat, so we urgently needed to buy him some clothes. Just around the corner from our flat, we found a little shop. The designs were somewhat garish, the prices a bit salty, but needs must be thought the only puzzle just how would a baby fit into the garment we'd picked out? It looked the right size, but was a strange cross between a down jacket, a vest and a cape. Then we noticed the rows of diamante collars and leashes. This wasn't a kids clothes shop at all, but a designer boutique for dogs. People everywhere like dogs, but few are as indulgent as the Japanese. Around our way, a buggy being pushed along the pavement is as likely to contain a chihuahua as a baby. Pets that are not dressed are notable. Oh look, say my kids, there's a naked dog. There are nail salons where pooch and Ona can have matching manicures. Restaurants where they can eat the same food sitting side by side at a table. Dead dogs can be laid to rest with full Buddhist rites in thousand year old temples. This enthusiasm for granting dogs anthropomorphic privileges has coincided with increasing childlessness in Japan. The average woman has just 1.39 children in her lifetime and one of the lowest birth rates in the world. Parenthood always involves some sacrifices, but particularly so for the women of Japan. Gender discrimination in the workplace is still a problem. Women sometimes complain they are expected to make the tea. Many private companies make it uncomfortable for new mothers to claim even the maternity leave they are entitled to. Flexible hours and time off if children are ill are unusual. And it all contributes to 60% of Japanese women leaving work after the birth of their first child, a far higher proportion than in many other major industrialised economies. Many women face a choice between career and motherhood. The result is what amounts to a baby strike. Take my friend Jiro. He's in his 40s and keen to be a father. The only problem? His partner doesn't want to give up her job. She writes travel books and enjoys it. So after much debate, they settled for a dachshund instead. They called him Kotaro. It means little first born son. By Japanese standards, Kotaro is not unduly pampered. He's never liked being dressed up, so he's spared the embarrassment that must have been felt by the hound I saw the other day, dressed up as a hot dog in a harness, mounting two cloth bread buns along his sides and a squirt of fake mustard on his back. Kotaro has also never worn sunglasses, a cap or shoes on his paws. Common sights in Tokyo. But he does get carried around in a selection of stylish bags. The dog doesn't like walking much, Jiro explains, adding he sometimes forgets his pet isn't human. Kotaro, he thinks, has never realized. When the couple go on holiday, Kotaro is usually put up in one of Tokyo's many pet hotels. There's the Onsen hot springs in the city, where dogs can wallow in the water just like their human counterparts in traditional Japanese style. For more up to date dogs, one pet spa in a fancy area of Tokyo offers soaks in baths strewn with petals followed by a massage. Overweight hounds can be sent to dog boot camps to slim down. It all adds up to a pet industry that's been valued at a trillion yen a year, well over $10 billion and growing. But while companies make more and more money from animals, there are far smaller profits to be made from children. The human population of Japan is already in decline and is projected to fall by two thirds within a century if current trends continue. There are already more pets in Japan than kids, with pensioners making up nearly a quarter of the population and rising. The sanitary goods maker Unicharm recently admitted that it's selling more nappies for adults in Japan than babies. It has a line catering for what it euphemistically calls the comfort of pets, too. The Japanese are certainly alarmed by the demographic change already underway. No nation in peacetime has suffered a decline in population as precipitous as the one Japan has embarked upon. The Cabinet includes a minister specifically tasked with trying to arrest the declining birth rate. But initiatives so far tax breaks, allowances for parents, more nursery school places have all failed. It seems many Japanese are yet to be convinced that in the long run, man's best friend will be no substitute for man himself.
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Roland Burke Amid the pampered pooches of Tokyo and bringing this edition to a close.