← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Europe's Migration Turmoil
00:28:15
Europe's migration crisis from Prague and Vienna, and Azerbaijan locking up critics.
Loading summary
Transcript15 lines
- [00:00]
Kate Adie
You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.
- [00:04]
Narrator/Presenter
You can hear the version of the
- [00:06]
Damian McGuinness
programme we make for the BBC World
- [00:07]
Kate Adie
Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
- [00:16]
Narrator/Presenter
Today, as Europe agonises over how to deal with the flow of migrants heading westwards, we hear how in Vienna they've been shocked into action. While in Prague the the loudest message is keep out. Azerbaijan is spending millions on trying to improve its image, but our correspondent says it should save its money and just stop locking people up in Ireland. It's speed, skill and passion that are the order of the day on the pitch, and having a put in like stare helps. While on America's Amtrak network, it's less a question of velocity and more a matter of finding your moment of Zen. Europe's biggest migrant crisis since the Second World War. David Cameron says Britain will act with head and heart and that the UK will be accepting thousands more refugees. Germany and Sweden have been praised for agreeing to take in large numbers of Syrians in particular. Others argue that this will do little to solve the crisis and will encourage more people to try to get to Europe. The Czech Republic, like the uk, has been refusing to accept binding quotas of ref. And as Rob Cameron found in Prague, the rhetoric has become increasingly hostile.
- [01:31]
Kate Adie
If Hitler rose from the dead and promised to rid Europe of migrants, would you vote for him? It's an odd question for a country that suffered six years of brutal Nazi occupation, but someone at the popular Czech news weekly Tiden clearly thought it worth asking. 48 hours later, Tiden pulled the online poll from its website, and the magazine's editor in chief was left offering profuse apologies for what he admitted was a regrettable lack of judgment. But most startling of all, more than half the respondents had answered yes. Critics said the magazine was asking for trouble. Such a survey was bound to attract neo Nazis and trolls. The Czech Internet is an ugly place to be these days. One local politician resigned this week over his response to the grim discovery of 71 decomposing corpses in a Hungarian van. My God, are we supposed to cry over them? He wrote on his Facebook page. Apparently the world is mourning them. I'm not. They're scum, dirt, and they don't belong here. The politician, a member of the Christian Democrats, blamed his UN Christian outburst on the demon of alcohol. But sadly, such rhetoric is commonplace at the moment. One mother of two, not a politician but still a human being, wrote on her page. The only people I feel sorry for are the ones who have to clean up the van. Which is not to say there isn't sympathy here for the migrants. Many Czechs are sympathetic and many disgusted and ashamed at the callousness and hostility of some of their countrymen and and women. Collections of clothes, food and money have been organized. Universities have offered free tuition to refugees. But why so much fear and loathing? The official rhetoric at the very highest levels is at least partly to blame. Take the country's president, Milos Zeman. As Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, was throwing open the doors to all Syrian asylum seekers, Mr. Zeman was saying he wants the army deployed to protect the country's borders from migrants. No one invited you, he told one newspaper. He compared himself, and by extension Europe, to a tourist standing on a beach in Thailand before the 2004 tsunami, taking photos of a wave in the distance. If we open the floodgates, in other words, the tide of refugees will engulf us. The numbers too, speak volumes. Germany expects to take in 800,000 asylum seekers this year. The Czech Republic, which lies outside the main overland route to Western Europe, has so far received just 800 asylum requests. Only around 30 of those have been granted. I sat down recently with the leader of the Czech Republic's newest political movement, something called Block Against Islamic. The man, a rather nervous looking entomologist from Brno, has managed to garner 150,000 likes for a Facebook page called We Don't Want Islam in the Czech Republic, a country with a Muslim population of less than 0.1%. He's now considering political office. One thing he said in our 30 minute interview stayed with me. You know, we so looked up to you in Western Europe after the fall of communism, he told me. Then we started traveling. We went to London, to Paris, to Berlin, and we saw the mosques and the headscarves and we were disappointed. This wasn't the Europe we imagined. So the continent faces a showdown between east and west, between largely white former communist states that had almost no immigration in the 20th century and postmodern multicultural societies and that have been transformed by it. It would be wrong to suggest that Czechs would really vote for a reanimated Hitler or his solution to the biblical scenes unfolding on our doorstep. The far right have no presence at all in the political mainstream. But neither do Czech seem ready to accept even a watered down version of the Merkel Doctrine. For the overwhelming majority, refugees, especially Muslim refugees, are simply not welcome.
- [06:13]
Narrator/Presenter
Rob Cameron in Prague. As we've been hearing, the migrants who are stuck in Hungary have now reached Austria. The Austrian Chancellor has been an outspoken critic of Britain's refusal to take part in a common European asylum program. He even threatened to block David Cameron's renegotiation of the UK's membership of the EU. Frederick Baker in Vienna says Austrian policy and public opinion have been galvanised by recent distressing events.
- [06:42]
Frederick Baker
I was walking down the Pilgrim Gasse in Vienna when a group of women with placards caught my eye. They were sitting outside a pharmacy. Curious, I crossed the street to see that instead of slogans, the placards bore words like nappies, tampons, toothpaste and toilet paper. It wasn't a surrealist joke, but citizens shopping for the Syrian refugees in Treiskirchen Trieskirchen reception centre was built to hold 450 people. It currently has around 5,000. Austria's strong federal system allows local mayors to block the distribution of refugees across the country. With rampant not in my backyardism. With the far right Freedom Party on the up, the Grand Coalition hoped the refugee crisis would stay off the front pages. That was until a policeman opened the doors of a poultry refrigeration lorry. Inside were not chickens, but people. 71 dead Syrians, including children. Austria was in shock. This was not the Mediterranean. This was Central Europe. Not the sea, but a motorway lay by. The Internet lit up and 20,000 Viennese turned up all dressed in white for a march calling for action. Utopian white, like John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their Imagine video singing and the world will live as one. And that night the church bells rang out as one all across Austria. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban had said he was building his country's anti refugee razor wire fence to defend Christ Europe against Islam. The Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Schonborn disagreed. The leaders of left and right filled the front rows of St Stephen's Cathedral and said Christian prayers for dead Muslims. Prayers for above all dead human beings. The next day the mood changed. Thousands of lucky refugees arrived by train at Vienna's Westbahnhof. From Budapest, volunteers pushed bottled water, toys and deodorant into the hands of veiled women and sunburnt children, tottering on the shoulders of their weary fathers. Only six of them wanted to stay in Austria. Germany was the word on their lips. Munich, their destination. In 1938, this station was the departure point for the Kindertransports of Jewish children fleeing Nazi persecution. Then the destination of choice was across the Channel and England. This time it is different. Germany is the haven and England is hidden behind barbed Wire and the Channel Tunnel. The historian Eric Hobsbawm made this journey in his youth. I made a film with him in Vienna 15 years ago. His words came back to me the next day. Hungary's Victor Orban had returned to acting tough. No more trains to the west, even if the refugees had valid rail tickets. Germany, Germany. The crowd of people at Budapest Station chanted as if this was some sort of football match. But it was not. It was history in the making. Erich Hobsbawm always insisted on differentiating between two kinds of nationhood. The one defined by blood, as in Nazi era Germany, and the other by citizenship, as in France and the us. But here was a new Germany, no blonde hair or blue eyes in sight. Erich would have chuckled to see these Syrian wannabe Germans chanting Merkel. Merkel, the German chancellor herself from former East Germany, once said that multiculturalism was dead. But now she's refusing to build a new Iron Curtain and is opening up to one of Hobsbawm's key observations of European history. I can still hear Eric telling me, in Central Europe, the money moves east and the people move west. It was the east that showed that the power of Solidanos could help end the Cold War. But now solidarity is in short supply. Besides Britain, it is the Polish, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian governments that are reluctant to take on a larger share of of the refugee influx. Austria is confused. Vienna took in thousands of Czechs and Slovaks in 1968 as they escaped from the Russian tanks out to crush the Prague Spring. The fatal refrigerated lorry was found on the very same border that over 200,000 Hungarians escaped across in 1956 and 1989. Yet on Austrian TV, the Hungarian ambassador rejected any link between the Hungarian refugees of the past and and Assyrians of the present as being unhistorical. He's clearly no adherent to Hobsbawm's law. Sitting in a sweltering Vienna, it is hard for cooling not to seem a positive thing. Yet there is something especially foreboding about the fact that it was an airless refrigeration lorry in which the 71 refugees died. It is a similar angst of asphyxiation and the return to the airless days of the Cold War that makes many Austrians nervous when they see their neighbors building new fences.
- [12:07]
Narrator/Presenter
Frederick Baker in Vienna. It's oil rich and wants to improve its international image. But the former Soviet state of Azerbaijan has done further damage to its reputation. One of the country's most respected journalists was given A seven and a half year prison sentence. This week, she'd been accused of a range of crimes, including tax evasion and embezz. But human rights organizations say the charges are trumped up, all part of a savage clampdown on critics by azerbaijan's government. Damien McGuinness, who used to be our man in the region, remembers a woman he couldn't help but be impressed by.
- [12:45]
Damian McGuinness
Sometimes you meet people who make you feel slightly embarrassed for not being as brave as they are, or as courageous or as cheerful under enormous pressure. Khadija Izmailova is one of them. When we met, I had just been complaining about Azerbaijan's tortuous visa regulations. She was being threatened with actual torture if she didn't stop her investigations into state corruption. No wonder I felt lightweight. I met Khadija a few years ago at the radio station in Baku where she was working, expecting someone pretty ferocious. After all, this was a woman prepared to lock horns with a powerful government and accused of using brutal methods to deal with critics. Instead, I found a witty young woman always smiling and laughing, clearly refusing to give the frankly bizarre antics of Azerbaijan security forces any credibility. At the time, Khadija was in the middle of a smear campaign apparently organized by the Azeri authorities. She had recently received a package in the post with photos and an anonymous letter. The photos showed her having sex with her boyfriend in her apartment. They were stills from a video filmed with a secret camera installed in her bedroom without her knowledge. The letter warned her to stop her reports about the ruling Aliyev family stealing money from the state. Otherwise the video would be published in any country. This would be humiliating for a well known journalist, but in Azerbaijan, a conservative place with honour killings and strict codes about female sexuality, it was potentially also dangerous. So what did you do? I asked. The feeling that I gave up because of fear is just not something I can live with, she told me with a smile. So she carried on reporting. I honestly don't think any other option had even occurred to her. Within weeks, the video was online and pro government media was reporting the story in shocked tones, together with a handy link to where the video could be found. She refused to back down. But now they've got her more than seven years behind bars for an array of supposed crimes. Embezzlement, tax evasion and abuse of office. Oddly, these mirror the accusations levelled at the Azeri elite. But Khadija is not the only one. Dozens of journalists, human rights activists and bloggers have been arrested or imprisoned, including Rasol Jafarov, a clever and cheerful young human rights lawyer with movie star good looks. He's now in jail for the next six years on dubious charges. Over the years, I've asked Azeri officials why they jail critics. Just because they are journalists, it doesn't mean they're above the law, one government spokesman told me. If they've committed a crime, they go to prison. A fair argument, if it was true. Respected international human rights groups, from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch, are clear that government critics like Khadija are being jailed because the Aliyev family, which has ruled Azerbaijan for decades, wants to keep its grip on power. And it has to be said that there are in fact, many Azeris who want that too. Oil and gas wealth has transformed the capital Baku, and from a dismal post Soviet backwater to a glamorous boom town. And for some Azeris, the chaos in much of the Middle east is proof that authoritarianism is preferable to anarchy. But Azerbaijan's government is a strange beast, desperate to court international opinion by spending a fortune on public relations, advertising and high profile international events, while at the same time not doing the things that actually would convince the west of Azerbaijan's credibility and like freeing the press and clamping down on official corruption. You almost want to tell them to save their money, ditch the glitzy PR campaigns and just stop locking up journalists instead. It would be much more effective and a lot cheaper. Khadija, meanwhile, still refuses to be intimidated, but she's now behind bars. So the country's corrupt leaders have won. Or have they? When the judge sentenced Khadija, she laughed in his face. That's what my girl is like, her mother has written. She always smiles, always laughs. And in a statement released after the sentence, Khadija said, I might be in prison, but the work will continue. If I felt embarrassed before, well, now I'm truly humbled.
- [17:34]
Narrator/Presenter
Damian McGuinness. It's bruising, it can be bloody. And it's played with 15 on each side. Yet it's not rugby. In the Middle Ages, the Irish sport of hurling was banned by the English. But in the 1880s, the Gaelic Athletic association was formed. Soon after, hurling experienced a rapid resurgence alongside the growth of the nationalist movement. The culmination of the hurling calendar is the All Ireland Championship final in Dublin. That's happening tomorrow at Croke park. More than 80,000 people will be in the stadium and many more outside across the world watching to see if Galway can overcome the hurling powerhouse of Kilkenn. Dermot Fleming will see the action close
- [18:16]
Dermot Fleming
up to its disciples. Hurling is as much a sacred cultural jewel as it is a sport. The finals are epics which unveil or confirm the nation's sporting heroes. It's a fusion of legend and history, from mythology, when the boy hero Satanta faced two teams on his own and won. To the modern game, developed in the 1880s by the Gaelic Athletic association to help rally Ireland's youth in the drive for independence a century ago. Trying to describe hurling in words is a bit like attempting to explain a performance at the Bolshoi Theatre to someone who's never seen ballet. But I'll try. 15 men on each side lash a small cork and leather ball, or slither distances of up to 100 yards and more with ash sticks. On a pitch a bit bigger than a soccer or rugby field, the ball can fly at speeds of over 100 miles per hour. In what the artists proclaim is the fastest team field sport in the world. Games are high scoring. A point is awarded for hitting the ball between two goal posts, with three points for a goal scored under a crossbar into a net between the posts. Sticks clatter and break in battle. The clash of the ashes, it's called, greeted by roars from the stands. But those gifted with the skills to play carry the flame of the sports code of honour. Using the timber, as they say on an opponent, renders you an outcast, and serious injuries are rare. The ball can be caught in the hand, but can only be lifted from the ground with the stick, an art in itself. Carrying the ball any distance means you must balance it on the end of the stick while sprinting. An astonishing skill on its own, but more so with rivals tearing after you in hot pursuit. While it's a tough sport, it's embodied by a grace and elegance in the execution of mesmerizing and instinctive skills learned from childhood, driven by fierce local rivalries. Hurling is rooted in certain parts of Ireland, though not all. But the dazzling wizardry of its players is a source of great national pride. A trip through Kilkenny, a county still defined by its heritage as a Norman stronghold, will tell you why they've won more all Irelands than anyone else. Take a drive through its villages and towns in the late afternoon and you'll see streets filled with children with hurling sticks, some balancing the ball in classic hurler pose as they run home from school. The sport defines the only county in Ireland which refuses to field a football team. Calling someone a footballer is the worst thing you could say to a Kilkenny man, a local woman told me. Disgust etched on her face. A friend who was a student teacher along with Kilkenny's team manager, Brian Cody, said his hurling stick was like an extension of his arm, the future All Ireland winner, rarely without it, refining his ball skills in spare moments just as others play with mobile phones. Today, with an appearance not unlike Vladimir Putin's, except taller and with a steelier and more scary stare, he's become the sport's most successful manager of all time, ruling his players with military discipline. Those who might dare to enjoy a beer during the season, rumour has it, must travel afar to drink in secret their anonymity in different counties, their insulation from the glaring gaze of Mr. Cody and his retired schoolteacher's red pen. Kilkenny's dominance means most of Ireland will probably be cheering on Galway, the sport's great underdogs and romantics. They've won before, too, but to their fans they're hurling's great heartbreakers, beaten in finals they should have won, sinking in glorious defeats in swashbuckling style rather than basking in workmanlike victory, while Kilkenny play with the confidence, history and solidity of the Norman castles which pepper their county. The hurling of Galway is like its wild, untamed Atlantic fringes and mountains, the grace of our hurlers, an echo, perhaps, of the county's richness in Irish music and language, or the Connemarla landscapes beloved of Ireland's greatest artists like Jack B. Yeats. All the players tomorrow are amateurs and will become folk heroes for life, their names chiselled into the eternal legend of Irish hurling history as the sporting pilgrims converge on Dublin. And heroes of hurling of days gone by will hold court in bars full of sporting chatter, revered like retired generals by those who've never seen war, recounting the rivalries and battles of old which have forged into the lifelong friendship and respect which defines the hurling family. Football is much, much more important than a matter of life and death once, said the late, great Liverpool manager Bill Shankly. It's clear he'd never seen a hurling match.
- [22:50]
Narrator/Presenter
Dermot Fleming and the hurling heroes of Ireland. Now the views sometimes are superb, but no one would claim that rail travel in the US is an efficient or effective way of crossing that country's great expanses. Trains in the US can be a rocky ride. Those Amtrak passenger services share the lines with freight trains and rarely get priority, so punctuality is far from guaranteed. And many will tell you train travel no longer holds the romantic allure it once had. But Christine Finn came to the conclusion it was a route back to an old fashioned America.
- [23:26]
Christine Finn
The platform at Austin was buzzing. There were rumours that a long delayed train was now imminent. An elderly man, let's call him Chuck, was awaiting a special passenger. His girlfriend was returning from a shopping weekend in Dallas. I didn't ask her age. I can hear the whistle. He cried as the high note from the driver's cab hung in the evening breeze. I was pretty familiar with Austin station. By now, a 12 hour delay had divided the Amtrak sheep from the goats. Those inside the waiting room watching TV screens, heads down on laptops, updating on phones, but not chatting or particularly enjoying this considerable inconvenience. But Amtrak staff had brought in pizza and outside on the platform we were having a party. After two weeks of Amtraking, I was now familiar with the word channel delay. At first marooned for four hours somewhere in Arkansas, it was a case of, ah, this is the time. We were heading west, so we are here. But then later realising the timetable was little more than fiction, it was more we'll be there, we'll get there. After all, the distances here are colossal. And if we're behind a slow or broken down freight train, well, we're not going anywhere fast. This is not to dismiss Amtrak in any way. I see it as our moment of Zen. The slow and very slow amble across country is what we Amtrak aficionados get on board for a hark back to the old days of chance conversations, the serendipity of being in the next seat to a story. There's the sightseer lounge with its pivoting chairs and all round vision. Enter one at dawn or any time on, and encounter a carriage of stories, Amish people and their families. One entertained us with his accordion. Lone travellers like me, couples of all ages, single parents with children, a troop of scouts, students on a hiking trip. Headphones on, my gaze was resolutely out, out of the huge windows as my music background had the prairies, the swollen Texas rivers, the desert and the behind the scenes view of America, which the train ride exposes. Elsewhere in the train, people are hunkered down, watching films on their laptops, sleeping, playing catch up with their kids. Unlike the commuter trains, there is precious little WI fi. And that, I think, is to the good. I've been fascinated by these long distance trains for more than 30 years. I remember taking one from east to west and having a breather in Las Vegas. Not the gambling mecca in Nevada, this was the one with the railroad in New Mexico. I said to the server at the station coffee shop, how amazing you can choose to go to Chicago or to la. I've never been on a train, he said. I just drive. And three decades later I'm still meeting first time train travellers. I shared breakfast in the dining lounge with one, a Midwest rancher in his 80s who could barely focus on his over easy eggs for the view passing by. He was visiting family in the town called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. I usually drive, he said, contemplating the cows. But this, this is fascinating. But back to that platform in Austin. People had headed off to buy beer, leaving cell phone numbers to be called should the train miraculously appear. And as evening fell with a great big sky, suddenly out of nowhere, the sound of music wafted over from a derelict factory over the tracks. A few of us wandered down and peered in the window to find a band practising in a welter of sax and guitar and vocals. We applauded and they were astonished. They suddenly had an audience on the platform. It seemed a train was finally coming, relieved from hold ups, breakdowns, cars on tracks and driver shift changes. It was now just a toot toot away down the line. It came into view to just as the band started another drift of jazz in a film. You'd never believe it. A few of us Amtrak fans, wet eyed as ever at this grand dam of transportation stopping for us in little old Austin, in big old Texas on the way to la. I looked out for Chuck, wondering if there'd be a romantic moment on the track. But as the disembarking passengers fell away to no one, I saw him checking the manifest with a conductor. No, no one of that name boarded today. Ah, Chuck, never mind, he said, hiding his disappointment. There's another train tomorrow. There's always another Amtrak. I hope so, I thought to myself. I really hope so.
- [28:04]
Narrator/Presenter
Christine Finn and the train really should have reached its destination by now, as have we. Join me again next Saturday morning for more stories from our own correspondence. Goodbye.