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From Our Own Correspondent
Folly of Empire
00:28:15
Rumours and conspiracy theories swirl around Egypt; the Greeks fed up with being for a...
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BBC Correspondent
Hello, this is the. From our own correspondent office at Bush House in London. You can check out what we're up to by signing up to our Twitter
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Programme Presenter
feed, but here's a download of our
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BBC Correspondent
latest programme on BBC Radio 4, introduced
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Programme Presenter
as ever by Kate Ady.
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Narrator / Reporter
Today, the army's still in charge. Parliament's been dissolved, there's no new president. But 16 months after the revolution, Egypt is undoubtedly a very different place. Eagles, cormorants, kingfishers, dragonflies. They're all part of an argument about the River Danube, as it was, winds its way through Central Europe. We contemplate the folly of empire halfway up a volcano in Indonesia, and at last can reveal how love cakes and trolls have helped the Swedish government balance its books. Tensions are running high in Egypt as the nation awaits the official announcement of who won last weekend's presidential election. Both Mohammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood and the former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq insist they won. Their supporters say there'll be serious consequences if this isn't reflected in the official result. The former president, Hosni Mubarak, meanwhile, remains in hospital amid speculation about how ill he really is. Lise Doucet in Cairo says the country is engulfed in the sort of rumours and conspiracy theories usually only found in fairy tales.
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Lise Doucet
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a king who lived in a castle high above his people. And this man had so much power, it was said he would always live happily ever after. But then one day, a journalist wrote an article about the king's health. He was slapped with a prison sentence for threatening national security, for scaring investors away. How could anyone suggest the king was, well, not immortal? That was Egypt four years ago. A country where even to mention President Hosni Mubarak's failing health was a crime. Newspaper editor Ibrahim Issa was sentenced to six months in prison. Now Hosni Mubarak has gone to jail and Egyptian journalists are again writing about his health. But the once upon a time fairy tale of a powerful man who never had health problems has become the story about a man who was, well, both alive and dead. That was the satirical headline in the Egyptian Independent Mubarak Dead and alive. Their second headline read. Shafiq and Morsi President. So Egypt's former leader was hovering somewhere between life and death. And the two candidates in a presidential runoff to replace him were both saying they won the election. As one post on Twitter put it, everyone is happy in Egypt today. It's a win win day. Egyptian media called it a Shakespearean drama but a tragedy and a comedy all in one. In the last month, Hosni Mubarak was reported as dead more than once. Even state television and the official news agency reported him as clinically dead. There's no doubt the health of the 84 year old Mr. Mubarak is deteriorating, and he's said to be depressed. No wonder. But in a country where there's been a huge surge in media post revolution, and where trust in the ruling military has all but broken, there's deep skepticism too. Many believe the health scares are just a ruse to get the former president out of prison, where he's now serving a life sentence, and back into more luxurious surroundings and unlimited visiting hours of a military hospital. But his lawyers and supporters tell anyone who'll listen he'll die in jail if he doesn't get better care. One Egyptian editor told me it was like watching the excitement and drama of a Euro 2012 football match. It was just a game, a ball going back and forth. Mubarak doesn't matter to Egypt's future any more, she said. But who takes over from him does. And as the days dragged on without an official announcement from the election commission, rumours and conspiracies filled that vacuum too. Future president in the realm of the unknown, wrote the Al Akbar newspaper. A group of independent lawyers called Judges for Egypt released results of what they said was 100% of the ballots, a win for Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. But they cautioned it wasn't the official result. So what was? As Egyptians waited, ostensibly while the election commission dealt with complaints, tensions grew. Both camps proclaimed they'd won, and people started asking why was it taking so long? Was the army maneuvering behind the scenes, unwilling to hand over power to the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative religious movement and rising political force the military has battled for decades. In Egypt these days, there's always a sensible answer, a speculative one, and a silly one, too. This is, after all, a significant Arab nation with a distinguished history, extraordinary talent and a wicked sense of humor. It's also a nation stuck in a political maelstrom post revolution. And perhaps that revolution, which changed Egypt and captured the world's imagination, just wasn't a revolution after all, just the toppling of a president. The army still runs the show, the first freely elected parliament was just dissolved by a court, and the new president may be transitional too. There is no fairy tale ending, reflected veteran journalist Hisham Qasim. We didn't know how to make a revolution, he said, expressing the same regrets now voiced by many activists. There's a hard road ahead, he warned. But there's no denying Egypt is a different country. Two years ago, it would have been unthinkable to imagine Hosni Mubarak in prison, an unfettered press and public criticism and protest against the ruling military. Egyptians never expected to live happily ever after. They're too savvy for that. But they do expect promises to be kept, democracy to mean something, daily lives to improve. Finally, given the chance to write their own history and tell their own story, they're still not sure what it is.
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Narrator / Reporter
Lise Doucet in Cairo, the leader of the party that narrowly won Sunday's general election in Greece, has promised to do everything he can to overcome the economic crisis in his country. Andonis Samaras of the Centre Right New Democracy Party has now been invited to talks with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Football probably isn't on the agenda. Last night at Euro 2012, it was Germany 4, Greece 2. The match was played amid growing tensions between the two nations. Manuela Saragossa says that most Greeks insist they belong in the European club, and they are annoyed at some of the criticisms levelled at them.
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Greek Journalist / Interviewer
It's a hot, humid evening in the student district of Greece's second city of Thessaloniki. I'm having dinner with a group of Greek journalists on a pavement table outside a taverna. The air is still disturbed only by the sound of banging plates and crockery from inside and the noisy cicadas in the trees lining the street. Across from me sits Kaki, who speaks fluent German after spending nine years as a correspondent for a Greek newspaper in Bonnie. Georgios sits to my side, a fluent English speaker with his own website, he translates books on Greek philosophy in his spare time. Yiannis, another fluent English speaker, is there too, as is Sophia, keen to practice her language skills. This is the generation of educated, well traveled Greeks who've grown up accustomed to thinking of themselves as European. For them, the debt crisis is not just about the economy and numbers. It's also about identity. How much do Greeks feel part of Europe? Are Greeks really European? And if so, is continued membership of the euro a prerequisite to their European identity? They are not easy questions to answer. Europe is named after the ancient Greek mythological princess Europa. When Greece joined the single currency, they chose to emblazon their 2 Euro coin with an image of the Europa legend. It shows her being whisked off to Crete by the God Zeus disguised as a bull. The message it sent out was that ancient Greece is an inextricable part of European history and culture. But contemporary Greece's relationship with modern Europe has been far more ambiguous. The country's economic crisis has evoked painful memories of the Nazi occupation during the Second World War and the civil war which followed it when a communist insurgency was crushed with the help of Britain and the United States. As we tuck into sesame covered cheese balls, falafel, tabboula and stuffed mushrooms, the conversation inevitably steers towards the country's economic crisis and whether the election result, which saw the pro euro New Democracy Party win the most votes by a small margin, is a good thing or a bad thing. Eh? Says Khaki, narrowing her eyes as she takes a long drag on her cigarette. I haven't decided yet. Yes, they're relieved. The country chose to stay anchored to the euro, but Greeks are paying a high price, says Yiannis. The austerity demanded by the EU and IMF in exchange for emergency funds has meant falling wages, declining standards of living and, for some, outright poverty. But the humiliation has also been hard to stomach. A government in Germany, Europe's paymasters, which insists on ever more painful austerity and a foreign press, particularly in Germany, and that pillories Greeks as lazy and corrupt. We are such a misunderstood people, says Georgios. It's a feeling he shares with Christos, a 34 year old shop owner in Thessaloniki. Unlike Georgios, Christos doesn't hide his anger. I have no problem with the German people, christos says, raising his voice. But the German government. He shakes his head in frustration. It bothers him that Eurozone leaders want to create what he describes as a European union of economic numbers. What about the European people? We're supposed to be one, he says, and for a moment I think he might slam his fist on the shop. Till I meet Emmanuel Vlakodianis of Thessaloniki's Chamber of Commerce in the cool of his air conditioned offices on the town's main shopping road. Does he think the election's result amounts to Greece choosing a European destiny? He sighs and takes a sip of his iced water. I'm deeply influenced by Western culture, so I feel very comfortable being a European citizen, he answers. Other Greeks might not feel so comfortable. There's Greece's location, for example, at the borders of the east and the West. In Thessaloniki, many members of the business community are the offspring of refugees from the Istanbul of old Constantinople. There's also the Greek Orthodox Church, its clergy's salaries and pensions paid for by the Greek state. So very different from the traditions of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches in Western Europe. And then there's Greece's political history. It's only been a parliamentary democracy since 1974, when the right wing military regime was toppled. Outside the doors of the Chamber of Commerce, bold black graffiti proclaims, yes to being unemployed, no to being fascist. In other words, better to suffer than to succumb to extremes. That may be the prevailing mood for now, but if the price of European membership keeps rising both in terms of the economy and political humiliation, Greeks might well change their mind.
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Narrator / Reporter
And that's Manuela Saragossa. A fierce debate is going on in government circles in Zagreb about a plan to tame the mighty river Danube, the Croatian transport ministers being told the waters must be controlled if cargo is to continue being shipped efficiently along the river. His counterpart at the Environment Ministry, however, is hearing that letting the engineers do their thing will cause huge damage to precious wetlands and wildlife in the northeast of the country. Nick Thorpe's been to this borderland between Croatia and Serbia to take a look at the area said to be under threat.
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Programme Presenter
So how did this stretch of the Danube survive like this until now? I ask Arnaud Mohl, conservation expert of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, as we paddle our orange canoe downriver, we let our craft glide almost effortlessly with the current past a shore thick with willows, up to their willowy wastes in the flood waters. A rare white tailed eagle arches lazily overhead, then flaps away slowly upriver, its mind on higher things. Hook necked cormorants, soldiers of trouble their name means in Hungarian, stand sentinel on bare branches, immune to the noonday sun. The river in Croatia and Serbia escaped massive regulation, mainly due to the collapse of Yugoslavia in the war in the 1990s, Arno says. But now the Croatian Inland Waterway Agency wants to turn its banks into embankments, build groins, t shaped barriers out into the river and straighten its course to discipline the river, to stop it daydreaming on the opposite bank. The Serbian authorities have similar ideas and and awaiting to see the fate of the Croatian project. In short, they want to make the same mistakes we made in the 1970s and 80s, Arno the Austrian, explains. Earlier this year I watched bulldozers at Grimsing in the Wachau region upstream of Vienna on the Austrian Danube, removing the rocks and re digging the meanders, the oxbows and other beautiful words in the English language, reconnecting the Danube to its hinterland. The argument between the river transport lobby and the environmentalists is a simple one. If the river is allowed to wander to and fro like a child's mind on the last days of school before the summer holidays, argue the engineers, forming new islands one day, destroying them the next. The main navigable channel silts up. The barges stand idle, unable to travel. Give us one, ideally two lanes of motorway down the middle of the Danube, argue the barge boys. And the only way to do that is to complete river regulation work which began in the 19th century. Stop meddling, reply. The environmentalists allow the river to swell from March to August, loaded with the spring rains and the snow melt of the mountains of Austria and Italy, of the Engadine in Switzerland, of Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine. Let the floodplains absorb the floods, clean the nutrients from the waters, allow fish to spawn, attract birds to feed on the fish, and flocks of tourists to admire them. Furthermore, argue the Greens, few barges actually travel this river. Adapt those that do to the river. Don't adapt the river to the barges. After paddling for three hours, we turn off the main river into a sidearm which feeds the floodplain forest. Even the sounds change here, and the shadows deepen. Branches overhang the swirling brown waters, and through the binoculars, I watch my first kingfisher, a miracle of brilliant red and green. Darker patches on the tree trunks show that the flood is slowly receding. Bright blue dragonflies patrol the stems of grasses which snails climbed to escape the waters. This was once the jealously guarded preserve of the hunters and foresters. Dinko Pesic, an environmentalist from nearby Osijek Habsburg princes, then the Communist elite, hunted wild boar and red deer to their bloodthirsty heart's content. No doubt that also helped prevent the suburbanisation of the wilderness. But now the hunters have to move over and make way for the nature conservationists, says Tibor Mikuska of the Croatian Society for the Protection of Birds. Caught in the middle of the debate, the new Croatian environment minister, Mikhail Zmalovi, must decide in the coming weeks whether or not to approve the river regulation. Simultaneously, UNESCO, the scientific and cultural organization of the United nations, is expected to agree to Hungary and Croatia's request to link a string of nature parks and protected areas, including Kopakirit, into a single biosphere reserve. The Croatian state appears to be in the strange position of trying to preserve the nut with one hand and hitting it with a hammer with the other. On my last morning in the wetlands, I get up at dawn to watch white tailed eagles inspect the sunrise and record the din of a colony of grey herons feeding their impatient brood. For all the abundance here, some species dangle by a fragile thread. There are just 70 pairs of eagles left. The last of one particular kind of sturgeon was caught on this stretch of the Danube in 2009, after roughly 200 million years on the planet. It's very close to extinction. Isn't there a contradiction between preserving this as a wilderness and opening it up for ecotourism? I ask. Tibur Mikushka, the local boy smiles. People like their comforts. It's too hot and humid here and there are too many mosquitoes. They love to come here, but they don't stay long. They soon retreat to civilization.
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Narrator / Reporter
Nick Thorpe in Croatia now how on earth can a cash strapped government save money while still offering the welfare service its people have come to expect in these austere times? That's a question ministers in Britain and in other countries are having to consider. So they're looking at how budgets are balanced elsewhere. Sweden is well known for its high taxes and generous state benefits. But it's also managed to get rid of its deficit and now boasts the most competitive economy in Europe. Joe Fidgeon has been finding out how the Swedish model works and what trolls have got to do with it.
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Joe Fidgeon
Quite suddenly, a curtain of mist is drawn across the kitchen window. Ah, the fairies are dancing, says Pear. To listen to a Swede. There are all kinds of magical creatures outside. Trolls skulk around caves and can't be trusted. Occasionally one gets caught out in the sunlight and turned into an unusual rock. And every rural homestead should have a tomter. They look a bit like our garden gnomes. Very short with a red coat and long floppy hat. As long as you show them respect and leave them gifts of coins and cakes, they'll keep the place safe and sound. But woe betide you if you cause offence. They'll tie your cows tails together and smash your hen's eggs. We move from the kitchen to the living room warmed by an open fire. We had to tell the state when we put the fireplace in, says Pere. And when we tiled the bathroom. It all adds to the value of the property. You see, the state even knows that I chopped the trees down at my summer house and now have a view of the sea. But why did you own up? I asked him. Well, the state is us, after all. An image pops into my head of the state as a benign and helpful as long as you keep him happy with titbits of information and property fees. Just as no one would dream of not feeding the tomter, it wouldn't occur to your average Swede to cheat the state. Not content with having the run of the house, it Turns out the state acts as a sort of marriage counsellor too. This dawned on me when I went to meet Lars Tregord, a history professor in Stockholm. I wanted to talk to him about the secret behind the success of Sweden's welfare model, which is drawing admiring glances from the British government. But he wanted to talk about love. To understand how Swedish people behave, Lars explained, you have to understand how they love. According to his theory, if one person needs another, say, for money or confidence or to maintain a lifestyle, then the relationship is doomed because you can't be sure what's really keeping you together. So for true love to flourish, you must be totally independent of each other. A wife must earn her own money. Teenagers must support themselves as soon as they leave school. Elderly parents must not turn to their children to look after them. This desire to be free, Lars told me, was what motivated the building of the welfare state, aptly known as the Folkhemmet, the People's Home. The idea is only the state can guarantee an individual's freedom from dependency through through providing affordable childcare, good education and dignified care homes. And you see this theory of love in practice all the time. When buying cakes, for example, I could never understand why, when my partner and I went into a bakery for Matzarins traditional almond tarts, we would always be asked if we were paying separately. Now I get it. No one would think to treat us as a couple. That would be to insult our individuality. An eminent Swedish anthropologist who spent years studying his own people noted that Swedes hate to feel they're in someone's debt. Dinner bills are always split. When I was moving to new digs, a Swedish friend warned me not to drop in on the neighbours with an offering of homemade biscuits like he did once. They looked appalled, he told me. One said, but I don't have the time to bake cookies and bring them over to you. A survey posed the question, what kind of neighbour would you like to have one? I don't notice, came the answer after a lovely evening in front of Pears, officially declared open fire, the fairies stopped dancing and it was safe to drive home. I looked for the tomter keeping watch over Pears house. But they're good at keeping out of sight. Something startled the dogs, though, who all rushed barking into the gloom. On the ride back, I thought about the friendly plastic gnomes you see in English gardens. I wondered if we underestimate them. Next time I see one, I think I'll offer it a cake. And a floor plan of my flat with a note about the wall I
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Narrator / Reporter
took down just in case, Joe Fidgeon in Stockholm. The so called Spice Islands in Indonesia are well named. Once upon a time they produce more nutmeg, pepper, pepper and cloves than anywhere else in the world. Europeans started to get a taste for them in the late 1400s, and before long, Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish ships were bringing home the spices and banking massive profits. Simon Worrell made the journey the other way, not to restock his larder, but to see if he could find one particular tree with an extraordinary history.
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BBC Correspondent
Buleigh. Bule. Shout the children excitedly as our jeep threads its way up a steep road on the side of the volcano. White man. White man. I'm on Ternate, one of Indonesia's fabled Spice islands. The midday call to prayer mingles with the mosquito whine of motorcycles above us. Smoke seeps from the side of Gamalama, the pyramid shaped volcano that dominates the island. It had erupted only a month earlier, sending a tongue of molten lava pouring down the mountain into the sea. This part of the world is not called the Ring of Fire for nothing. I'm searching for the world's oldest clove tree. Why it is called Apho, no one knows. Neither is it exactly certain when Apho was planted, but estimates suggest it's between 350 and 400 years old. For millennia, Ternate and the neighboring island of Tidore were the world's only source of those fragrant twig like herbs that h at the back of our kitchen cupboards. Clothes from Ternate were traded by Arab seafarers along the maritime Silk route as far afield as the Middle East, Europe and China. A Han Dynasty ruler from the third century B.C. insisted that anyone addressing him must chew cloves to sweeten their breath. Their origin was a fiercely guarded secret until the Portuguese and Spanish burst into the Java sea in the 16th century. Our hip young Indonesian driver is clearly baffled as to why anyone should want to see an old tree, and he clearly has no idea where Apho is. At a roadside stall selling everything from basketballs to jackfruit, we stop to ask directions. The stall holder points back back down the hill. With great difficulty and reeking brake pads, we turn round and drive back down the volcano. After a few hundred yards, we spot a sign board pointing to some steps cut into the hillside. The path winds upwards through groves of clove trees and bamboo. Below us, through the foliage, I can just make out the sea and beyond it, the island of Tidore. Huffing and puffing up one last flight of steps, I find myself Under a tree that was probably here when Shakespeare was alive. Apho was once 40 metres tall and 4 meters round. Sadly, today all that remains is a massive stump and some bare branches. A few years ago, villagers hungry for firewood, even attacked AFO with machetes. A brick wall now surrounds it. If the Dutch had had their way, AFO would not be here at all. The Netherlands United East India Company, or voc, was the world's first multinational corporation. And just as corporations today seek to monopolize plant genes in the Third World, the VOC set about seizing total control of spice production. In 1652, after displacing the Portuguese and Spanish, the Dutch introduced a policy known as extirpate extirpation. All clove trees not controlled by the VOC were uprooted and burned. Anyone caught growing, stealing or possessing clove plants without authorization faced the death penalty. On the Banda Islands to the south, the world's only source of nutmeg, the Dutch used Japanese mercenaries to slaughter almost the entire male population. Like OPEC today, the VOC also limited supply to keep prices high. Only 800 to 1000 tons of cloves were exported per year. The rest of the harvest was burned or dumped in the sea. Somehow, Affo managed to slip through the net. A rogue clove. A guerrilla plant waging a secret war of resistance. Apho would eventually bring down the Dutch monopoly on cloves. In 1770, a Frenchman appropriately named Poivre stole some of Affo's seedlings. This, Monsieur Pepper took them to France, and then the Seychelles Islands, and eventually Zanzibar, which is today the world's largest producer of cloves. As I stand looking up into its branches, I wonder who planted Apho and kept its location secret all those years? Or did it just survive because of its remoteness, high on the slopes of Gamalama? Either way, this ancient clove tree stands as a symbol of the ultimate folly of empire and the stubborn refusal. Refusal of nature to be controlled.
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Narrator / Reporter
And with that, From Simon Worrell, 6,000ft up a volcano in Indonesia, we've reached the end of another edition. I'm here again on Thursday and Saturday of next week with correspondence far and wide. Do join us. Goodbye.