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From Our Own Correspondent
End of Era
00:27:56
Global insight and colour. In this programme: Russians or locals? Gabriel Gatehouse to...
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Transcript13 lines
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This is a download from the BBC. It's from our own correspondent. We make one version of the program for the BBC World Service, but this is the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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It's introduced by Kate Adye.
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Hello. Today, are they Russians? Are they locals? We talk to some of those still occupying government buildings in Eastern Ukraine. The end of an era in South Africa where there's mounting bitterness and as a long running miner strike drags on. On Easter weekend in Rome, we find a non Catholic corner of the city. A place of birdsong, memories and the scent of flowers. And our man on the river Ganges enjoys a colourful centuries old ceremony. Or was it actually invented quite recently just to bring in the tourists? So the multi party talks in Geneva on Thursday do not seem to have eased the crisis in Ukraine. The pro Russian activists in the eastern city of Donetsk say they are not bound by a deal they didn't sign. The agreement between Ukraine, Russia, the United States and the EU said that illegal armed groups in Ukraine should leave the places they've been occupying. They must disband and disarm. But the occupiers are insisting they won't leave until what they call the illegal government in Kiev resigns. So who exactly are these protesters? Gabriel Gatehouse has been trying to find out.
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Don't film. Shouted a man dressed in black, his face covered with a mask. He was enormous. He had five or six friends with him. Their eyes stared at us through the slits in their balaclavas. Western journalists, they said, were not welcome. What's on your camera? The big man asked as he pulled open the door to our van. We showed him the innocuous shots of country roads we'd filmed on our way into town. Slaviansk, the place was called. It translates as Slav Town. Gimme your tapes. He demanded. I tried to reason with him. He cut me off. Give me your tapes or you'll lose your camera. He looked like he meant it. Tony. The cameraman reluctantly ejected two quite chunky memory cards made of metal and plastic. With apparently no effort at all, he crunched them up in one clunking fist. Now get the hell out of here, he ordered. We did. We returned to Slavyansk the following day and received a slightly less hostile reception. I met Slava, a gruff, burly man in his 50s, wearing faded military fatigues. He introduced himself as the man in charge. After a brief negotiation, we were allowed through the barricades of car tyres, bits of wood and Russian flags, past the men with the helmets and the baseball bats. Into the police station, which had been seized by the protesters. Slava was not wearing a balaclava. In fact, almost none of the men inside the compound were even the ones who were openly carrying guns, mostly Kalashnikov rifles they'd requisitioned from the armoury. Inside the station, it was cold and wet. Kolya, a local carpenter in his mid-30s, was warming his hands over a bonfire, chatting to some friends. He told me he'd heard about the takeover of the police station on tv. I jumped straight in a taxi and came down here to take part. He said. He had a 12 year old daughter. He told me, when she comes home from school, I look at her school books and they're all in Ukrainian. We speak Russian here. He said. I don't understand Ukrainian, so how can I help her with her homework? We want a referendum on autonomy, he added. We just want to be left alone to live our lives in peace. Their concerns were mostly cultural. They identified with Russia, even if they didn't necessarily want to be part of Russia. Clearly, many of the pro Russian demonstrators are exactly what they say they are. Local men and women concerned about their families and their futures. But not all of them. The following day, we were back in Slovyansk. But something had changed. On the central square, alongside the ragtag vigilantes, a dozen or so men in combat fatigues stood guard outside the main government building. Locals called them the Little Green Men. They'd appeared as if out of nowhere. No one knew who they were. They weren't, in fact, very little at all. They patrolled with military discipline and they were heavily armed. I approached a group of them. They weren't exactly friendly, but nor were they aggressive. I asked them where they'd come from. They insisted they were all Ukrainian citizens, military men, though they wouldn't say whether they were still serving or where they'd got their sophisticated weapons. Then it was my turn to answer questions. Since I worked for the BBC, they decided I must also be an MI6 spy. But they were more interested in my religion. Was I an Orthodox Christian? I got the sense that admitting to being an atheist was not going to go down well. So I told them I'd been brought up in the Anglican tradition. Ah, said one. So that means you don't believe in God. Mmm, said another. You must be a pederast. I asked him what he meant. The Anglican Church, he replied, was full of gays and female priests. He wanted to live in a world where men were men and women were women. The pro Russian protesters seemed generally quite preoccupied with sex and sexuality. Earlier we'd been invited to attend a session of the Donetsk Republican Soviet on the top floor of the city's main government building, a group of self appointed people's representatives sat around a long table discussing their plans to seize control of more police stations and military installations. You're either with us or against us, said one man, a heavy smoker in a black leather jacket with a scar across his cheek. He outlined what he saw as the cultural rift at the heart of this battle. On the one side the traditions of the east, on the other the degenerate West. The audience nodded. It's one thing or it's the other, the speaker continued, wagging his finger. We don't do group sex here. Not like over there. I don't think he meant group sex literally, but clearly in his mind the values of east and west simply do not mix.
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And that's Gabriel Gatehouse there's increasing concern in South Africa over the strike in the country's platinum mines, which has now dragged on for nearly three months. From the owners, there's talk of closing down the pits and moving operations elsewhere. Amongst the 80,000 strikers, deep divisions have opened up. Many are determined to continue fighting for higher wages. Others are desperate to go back to work. It's two years now since scores of striking miners were killed in clashes with the security forces in what's become known as the Marikana Massacre. This is a country rich in diamonds, gold and platinum. Mining these valuable resources was once at the very core of its life and culture. Today, though, Hamilton Wendy says the ongoing dispute has serious implications for all South Africans.
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My telephone rang early in the morning. It was a contact from the platinum mining area near Rustenburg, whom I shall call Sipo. My house has been burned, he said. When we arrived at Sipo's house, the damage was shocking. His bedroom and kitchen were nothing but a blackened, charred mess. The police had cordoned off the area and were investigating a case of arson. This is the third time I've been attacked this year, sipo told me. The strikers have beaten me and now they have burned my house, all because I want to go back to work. Sipo and his wife and 15 year old daughter have been living in hiding, so they were not at home the night their house was set alight. But the ongoing fear and intimidation are taking a terrible toll on the family. After I was beaten on 8th March, Sipho said, My wife had a miscarriage because she is so scared of these people. Later that day, a police spokesman confirmed that the Attacks on SIPO are not an isolated case. They are part of a growing trend across the northwest province of South Africa. Those who support the strike are targeting those workers who have had enough. They have no money and are desperate to return to work. Since the terrible massacre at Marikana in August 2012, there have been more than a dozen murders of mine workers on the Platinum Belt. The cycle of violence and desperation is growing more brutal by the day, and it is symptomatic of what has happened in other mining strikes in recent years, especially since the Marikana massacre. South Africa, it seems to me, is heading for a watershed moment similar to the violence and rage that seethed when Margaret Thatcher broke the coal miners strike in Britain in the late 1970s. I have never been directly involved in mining, but the industry here has always been an accepted part of our lives. I will never forget the moment when, as a teenager at boarding school in those very same years that Margaret Thatcher was battling the coal miners, we heard the news that the gold price had spiked and was hovering at nearly $1,000 an ounce. For the first time in history. We were standing in the common room, the African sun shining in through the tall paned windows. We talked excitedly about the gold price rising. Looking back on it now, I see it was an assumed inheritance, one of limitless privilege that we believed in without questioning would secure our lives and careers because South Africa would always be rich with its abundance of minerals under our soil. Ironically, in the villages all around us in the Eastern Cape were living the families of many of the poor black workers who toiled for low wages underground, far from home, forced to migrate to Johannesburg to live in soulless men only compounds on the mines for months at a time. Nonetheless, despite the deep structural unfairness of the South African mining economy, for nearly a century and a half, millions of people, black and white, have believed that mining in some way or another would better their lives. Over the years, the fight for better working conditions for mine workers became an intrinsic part of the struggle against apartheid. Cyril Ramaphosa, the deputy president of the ruling ANC today, rose to prominence in the 1980s as leader of the National Union of Mine Workers. He and his powerful union were crucial factors in forcing the apartheid government to begin negotiating with Nelson Mandela. Mining is an ugly business, but it has always been at the core of South African life, from the poor rural villages to the mansions of the great mining magnates among the jacaranda trees on the beautiful ridges of Johannesburg. But now it is dying, or at least becoming a much smaller industry, and we as a society don't know what to do. Some, like on the platinum fields, are turning to greater and greater violence as they see their lives and jobs disappearing. There is a desperate end of an era feeling in much of South Africa today a sense of incredulity that this is happening to us. This platinum strike is a key moment for the country. No one knows how it will end or even whether the mines will survive. The mine bosses have been saying for weeks that irreparable damage is being done. Many miners like Sipo risk their lives agreeing with them. It is a place that South Africa has never been in before.
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Hamilton Wende in Johannesburg. Cary Gracie, you may remember, was one of our Beijing correspondents in the 1990s. Well, she's just arrived back in the Chinese capital as our new China editor. Now it won't be long before we hear her reporting on those inevitable stories about economic growth and national security. But in the meantime, she's been sketching some first impressions of the changes in a city that was home 15 years ago and is now home again. As she gathered her press credentials, she was reminded that thousands of years of civil service bureaucracy create habits and that neither the Confucians in the past nor the communist mandarins today are that keen on prying outsiders.
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When I went to pick up my press card at the monumental new Foreign Ministry building, the staff couldn't have been kinder. And half an hour round a slow moving ring road, the police officer who dealt with my residence permit hoped that we could always meet as friends. But we all know there are bigger forces in play. China is not famous for press freedom and at the same time, it's the world's second largest economy and has 600 million Internet users. So that's puzzle number one and everyone in China has to navigate it. The taboos and anxieties of the one party state, it all makes for a politics of red lines, most of them hard to define and only some of them converging with the letter of the law. How long can this go on? Well, arguably your guess is as good as President Xi Jinping's, because we've never been anywhere quite like this in human history. But let's worry about that another day because today the peach blossom is is magnificent. Beijing's willows are in leaf and the sun is shining. Well, almost. There's a silver grey haze in the sky and I'm wondering whether it's a danger to my lungs. So in order to find out, I download a smartphone app and try to make sense of the numbers. The Beijing government's air quality reading is mustard colored. It says it's a lightly polluted day. The American Embassy reading is red unhealthy. Whichever you believe, it probably makes sense to wear a face mask, but I'm still finding that a really hard adjustment. We never worried about air quality in the old days, Beijing was a blue sky city. When I first came here in the mid-1980s, it was all brick alleys, mule carts and vegetable markets, and even when I came back as a reporter in the early 90s, people were still burying cabbages in the winter because they didn't have freezers. In those days, the BBC bureau had four staff. Now, though, Beijing is a city of shopping malls and ring roads, and we've tripled the bureau headcount in an attempt to chart China's transformation. As the latest recruit, I need to get back to identifying those complexities, if not solving them. So here is puzzle number two. Why does every dinner conversation veer so suddenly from upbeat to foreboding? It all starts with lively debate between roughly equal one side of the table singing China's achievements while the other mutters that the country's going to the dogs. But by the time rice bowls are empty, every Beijing and native or incomer is telling tales of injustice, corruption, and a rush for foreign passports. So I'm wondering, is this just the lurch that comes with headlong change, that feeling of leaving your stomach behind when you take off in a high speed lift? Or are my friends just too old now, too risk averse to handle the uncertainties of the age? I simply don't know. But metaphors and images might offer some clues. For example, one friend in the music business told me China was an ocean liner with shiny new German engines but key parts held together by duct tape. And an architect suggested I start spotting two levels to everything here a surface level where all proceeds unruffled, and a boiling cauldron of life beneath. Well, anyway, you're beginning to get the picture that I've got far more questions at this stage than answers. And before I finish, here's one last puzzle. We often think of China as a tightly controlled place, but perhaps it's under regulated. Well, certainly that's what one of the country's top Internet bosses told me. I won't name him, as the conversation was off the record, but he said Chinese officials are deeply lazy. Unless something's on their list of duties, they'll ignore it. Even a very large elephant in the room. He insisted the days of centrally controlled information are numbered. That The Internet is destroying traditional business models much faster than in the West. So shopping moving online, entertainment moving online, and banking online as well. Nowhere, he said, is the transformation faster than in the media. Everyone is getting their information from their smartphone, and I can certainly confirm I haven't seen people clicking on that Communist Party message. So that takes us back to our first puzzle, how the party enforce its red lines. Will it someday just give up locking people up for trying to exercise their right to freedom of expression? When I go back to collect my residence permit, perhaps I'll ask that friendly police officer for answers to all my questions. And in this land of puzzles, I really have no idea what he will say.
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And that was Cary Gracie. It's a big weekend in Rome with Pope Francis due to address the faithful in St. Peter's Square tomorrow. And there'll be further excitement later in the month when but two popes are to be canonized, the Polish pontiff John Paul II and Pope John xxiii. It's hard to imagine a more significant occasion at the Vatican, indeed hard to imagine a more Catholic moment in that profoundly Catholic city. But Alan Johnstone has discovered that there is one corner of Rome that lies just a little beyond the world of Catholicism, a place where a range of other faiths is united in death.
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In the winter of 1821, in the heart of Rome, in a house by the Spanish Steps, a young Englishman lay dying. This was the poet John Keats. He had tuberculosis, and with death approaching, he asked a friend to go and inspect the Protestant cemetery where he'd be buried. His companion was able to report back that it would be a fine place for the poet's bones to lie. And all these years on, it remains a rather beautiful setting. As soon as you step through its gates, the clamor of the city traffic starts to fade. And as you walk further in, the air fills with the sound of birds and the scent of flowers. The sun slants through tall trees and falls on the ranks of headstones. They rise up a slope towards a wall that's nearly 2,000 years old, a wall that was once part of the defenses of ancient Rome. This place is now known as the Non Catholic cemetery, and when I visited just the other day, early on a fine spring morning, it seemed to be sunk in a deep peace. I took the path that leads to a far corner and to John Keats's grave. On the grass around it, there was a bright carpet of white daisies. But the words on the gravestone captured the gloom and sense of failure that engulfed the poet in his last days. He was only 25, and the world yet to recognize his genius. He felt he'd made no mark. And the epitaph he asked for on his headstone reads, here lies one whose name was writ in water. Keats friend and fellow poet Shelley called the cemetery the most beautiful he'd ever seen. And soon he'd lie there too. Just a year after Keats death, Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy and his ashes are buried just beneath the Roman wall. Above the tomb, a ruined watchtower rises towards the blue of the sky. Perhaps up on the broken ramparts, the ghosts of legionnaires still stand guard. And in the earth all around Keats and Shelley, in the thousands of greys, lie other poets and painters, writers and sculptors. Along with them are diplomats, soldiers, tourists and many others. For centuries, Rome, with all its history, its past glories and ancient faith, has drawn all kinds of people from every court corner of the world. Of course, not all of them were Catholic, and at one time if they died here, that could be a little awkward. They couldn't be buried in consecrated Catholic ground. But nearly 300 years ago, Pope Clement XI decreed the establishment of the Protestant cemetery lying just within the sacred city's walls. Some of the first to be buried there were English visitors struck down in Rome while on the grand tour of the sites of Europe. Others in the cemetery had come hoping Rome's Mediterranean climate might be good for their health, but then been fatally disappointed. Malaria and cholera sometimes lay in wait on the banks of the Tiber and some met death in Rome in violent ways. Among those in the graveyard is an early victim of the city's traffic, a traveller who died as he tried to fling himself clear of an overturning horse drawn carriage. There were victims of hunting accidents and an assassinated Iranian dissident also lies beneath the cypress trees. Some in the cemetery will have felt very far from home as they drew their last breath. But many will have chosen to die here. They'll have loved Rome, adopted it as their own, and live long and happy lives in this place. Now all these people lie together. Americans and Swedes, Russians and Irish, Serbs and Japanese, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists. A great international community of the dead. And in this mix of peoples and traditions you see a range of ways in which they try to mark and make sense of death. Some do it very simply, with just a few lines on a headstone. One captures the feelings of a mourning relative with the words I shall remember while the light lasts and in the darkness I shall not forget but some have tried to express their emotions in much more elaborate ways. Standing on one headstone is a sculpture of an almost naked angel. Tall as a man and with stone wings rising high above his head. He looks as if he's just landed. And he stares across the graveyard, watching the butterflies flicker through the shadows and between the tombs.
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Alan Johnston in Rome. Now, there's much we know already about the world's biggest election currently in full swing. In India, there'll be more than 800 million voters. The poll is in nine separate stages. Voting continues for five weeks. The result will be announced on May 16. Few doubt the loser will be the left leaning ruling alliance led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi. The commentators say that Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi's BJP will win most seats in the lower house of Parliament, but will still have to form a coalition to govern. So there's much we know, or think we know, but about India, there are always surprises, as Owen Bennett Jones has been reminded while out covering the election campaign.
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Varanasi. It was the obvious place to go for all sorts of reasons. First, it was hosting a high profile clash between the man who would be Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of a new party committed to fighting corruption. So a high profile electoral battleground, as you could tell from the fact that whenever he appeared in public, Mr. Khedriwal had ink, eggs and other stuff thrown at him. Secondly, it's known as India's holiest city, a place that exudes exactly the kind of Hindu cultural identity that Narendra Modi says he wants to protect. And just to shake it all up a bit, there was even a transgender candidate standing too, all very promising. And within an hour or so of reaching Varanasi, it was all going very much according to plan, with surprising speed. I ended up with a couple of other journalists and a local businessman on a boat being rowed down the Ganges towards a Hindu ceremony. There, in the fading evening light, six priests standing on plinths on the river bank were surrounded by thousands of people sitting on ancient stone steps that led down to the water. The priests were dressed in white robes from head to toe, some with long hair tied back behind their necks. They started by blowing into some conch shells, creating a low, timeless sound. And then came the bells and the incense swirling through the air. As the rhythmic chanting lulled the spectators into a state of spiritual relaxation, attendants produced lamps, each one with a thousand candles. On the Ganges itself Some candles in small bowls were launched on the calm, wide waters. They floated into the distance, diminishing specks of light. I'm surprised I've never seen these images on tv, I remarked to one of the journalists on the boat. Oh, there are festivals all over India, he said. They're happening all the time. Back on the river bank, the priests had started whirling some sort of ancient looking contraptions in the air. The bell ringing was more intense now, boys pulling on strings that made a whole row of bells high in the air chime in time with the chanting. And then, to my side, there appeared a convoy of wooden boats, a long procession meandering up the Ganges. All eyes turned to them, and on board there were children dressed as gods, their smiling, proud faces framed in swirls of gold and red braid. If ever there were a physical manifestation of the romanticisation of the east, which Westerners are so often accused of, then here it was before my eyes. You can see how Orientalism got under way, I thought. Probably started right here. I wrote it all up. The festival provided exactly the sort of colour I needed to brighten up what might otherwise have been a rather dry report on the politics of the constituency. I sent it off to London. My editor, a man who knows India well, having lived there for many years, sent me an email. A touch of the Bharat Darshan, he chided gently. Look it up. I did. Religion of the Ancients, Google said. I wondered what he meant. That it was all a bit ritualistic, perhaps in the context of modern India, a throwback rather than a look ahead. A couple of days later, I was sitting in the BBC studio in Delhi with a young Indian journalist who'd come in to comment on the election campaign. He heard my report on his headphones. You were in Varanasi? He asked. Yes. And you recorded something at the ceremony there they have on the riverbank. That's right. You were in a boat. Yes. It was wonderful. You know, the whole thing was invented by the manager of a luxury hotel in Varanasi about 20 years ago. He was trying to drum up the number of tourists coming to town. Oh, I see. Journalists get lied to so often, they generally end up fairly cynical, or perhaps, to put it more kindly, sceptical. And let me say straight away that I'm not accepting the journalist's account without question. Even if I went back to Varanasi and investigated the matter, I have no doubt that some people would insist. The ceremony has been going on for centuries. That's the way with these things. But still, it was a bit of a shocker. Perhaps you can never quite go far enough in questioning why things are happening, what purpose they really serve. I emailed my boss about that ceremony. I said, you might well have been right. I told him what the journalist in the studio had said. Ah, yes, he replied. The invention of tradition happens everywhere.
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Owen Bennett Jones trying to sift fact from fiction and bringing this edition to a close. There'll be more dispatches, dilemmas and stories from reporters around the world next Saturday morning, so do please join us then. Goodbye.