← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
God Bless Hungary!
00:28:17
Hungarians fight the floods! This collection of despatches from radio correspondents...
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Transcript14 lines
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Hello.
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This is a download of from our own correspondent.
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We make one edition of the programme for the BBC World Service, but this is the one broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Here to introduce it, Kate Ady.
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Hello. In this programme, Hungarians achieve something magnificent as old foes bury their differences and the swollen river Danube is kept within its banks. The cherries are harvested in the Golan Heights, while the bitter conflict in Syria rages on in the valley below. Croatia prepares to join the European Union. But the ethnic tensions which took it to war in the 1990s are far from buried. And at the zoo, donkeys were painted like zebras. It's an example of how the people of Gaza get creative to overcome adversity. The River Danube has broken all records sweeping through Central Europe this week, causing widespread destruction and some 20 deaths. Rivers across the region overflowed. The Elbe, the Vlatova and the Danube were all affected. Tens of thousands of people had to leave their homes. Extensive damage was reported in central and southern Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria and Slovakia. But Nick Thorp tells us there were sighs of relief in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, when the level of the Danube finally started to fall back after reaching a record height on Monday.
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It all began as a sort of political beauty contest. The Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, like a British bulldog striding purposefully down the dikes, followed by a gaggle of flustered AIDS and press poodles. Two former prime ministers, Ferencjochan and Gordon Bainai, not to mention the socialist hopeful Attila Meshtorhazy, were also out in shirt sleeves on the flood barriers, slinging white sandbags from hand to hand. But then it got serious. The green grey Danube, like a symphony orchestra, reached its crescendo. We will not give a centimetre, roared the premier, the conductor of the choir. We will not lose a single life. Despite the hip flasks and the hype, the spin doctors and the cynics, the people of Hungary this week achieved something magnificent. The efforts of 16,000 firemen, police, soldiers and volunteers building and maintaining flood barriers, and tens of thousands more supporting them were successful. The Danube was kept more or less within its banks, just like in wartime. I often had the feeling that these were the best days of many people's lives. The sunshine was glorious at Nodge Marosh on the Danube bend on Sunday, scantily clad Amazonian women laboured in a human chain beside uniformed soldiers and firemen, while a tubby barefoot fellow in Bermuda shorts tirelessly wrestled a pyramid of sandbags off the back of a Truck in the mayor's office, army divers went into a huddle with local disaster management commanders for their next underwater repair mission. The National Guard, the paramilitary formation of the far right Jobik Party, had a field day on the dikes. It was their chance to prove to the nation that instead of slagging off the Roma, they can actually do something useful. Jobbik have built their political base in the countryside by launching a racist discussion of what they call gypsy crime. So imagine their amazement when they found themselves working shoulder to shoulder with some of those layabout good for nothing gypsies that they talk so much about. Florian Farkasz, head of the pro government section of the Roma community, proudly proclaimed that there were a thousand gypsies on the dikes. In the heat of the sun and the sudden thunderstorms, the mud, the sweat and the driving rain, it grew harder and harder to differentiate who was who. Anyway, Budapest became a sea of tourists and sightseers inspecting the war effort. After a history of defeats in war, this may have been the first time Budapest withstood a siege. On Margaret island, in the middle of the river at this time of year, normally a feast of sunbathing female flesh, firemen and soldiers defied gravity to keep a river which flowed visibly higher than the island at bay behind a triple wall of sandbags. I bumped into the Prime Minister here too, despite the best efforts of his press secretary to keep us apart. Viktor Orban, I realised, was not motivated by votes and vanity alone. He was genuinely enjoying himself, sleeping in firemen's barracks, disturbed all night by sirens and shift changes, borrowing T shirts from the fire chief when his own supply of underwear ran out, he was in his true element. Viktor Orban gets very little praise in normal times in these columns, wrote Istvan SaaS in Naipsova, the former trade union daily. But now is not the time or place for political struggles. Early on Monday morning, I persuaded the elderly janitor of a block of flats on the Budapest shoreline to let me plug my laptop into his broadband Internet so I could broadcast live from the embankment. He even brought out an old Turkish carpet to lay over my cable and stood guard, slowing down flocks of passing cyclists. As the peak of the floods passed Budapest, I followed the river down to Scholt, 70 km south of the capital. Here, firemen and volunteers struggled to contain localised flooding as the so called summer dike right on the Danube shore leaked. In many places, forked lightning cracked the sky and the rain fell in torrents. But the men worked on regardless. Outlined along the White surf of sandbags on the dyke like cormorants in their long raincoats. A man with a military moustache distributed the Hungarian staple greasy bread, they called it, hunks of white loaf smeared with pig's fat, ice, onions and paprika. In peacetime, what upsets me most in this country is when politicians claim a monopoly on representing the nation. The beauty of this Hungarian achievement was that everyone on the dikes was equal. In the broadcast version of my interview with him, I cut three words off the end of the prime minister's comment. They seem too sentimental, but I reproduce them here. God bless Hungary.
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And that's Nick Thorpe in Budapest. We don't want to get involved. Don't force us. Don't provoke us. Those words of warning for Syria came this week from Israel's intelligence minister. Yuval Steinitz told correspondents in Jerusalem he thought the Syrian president could succeed in crushing the uprising against his regime. President Assad, he said, was now getting very significant support from both Iran and Shiite Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon. But the Syrians should be very careful not to allow any provocation, as he put it, on the Golan Heights. This strategic plateau which borders the two countries, was seized by Israel during the Six day war of 1967 and later annexed. Bethany Bell says people living there are more than conscious the fighting in Syria could come their way.
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It's cherry season in the Golan Heights. On the lower slopes of Mount Hermon, trees are heavy with sweet red fruit glistening among the bright green leaves. A Druze friend had invited us to come and pick some cherries in her family's orchard near the village of Majd al Shams in the far north of the Golan, a woman stood on a step ladder, handing down bunches of fruit. Spread under the trees was a picnic rug with a large thermos of coffee. You must try the ones from this tree, my friend said. They're really good. How far are we from Syrian controlled territory here? I asked. Not far, she said. It's just there. She pointed at a barbed wire fence a few meters away. It was hung with a sign saying Danger Mines. That's Syria, she said. You can hear the bombing from here, she told me Some of the bangs are just the Israeli army training, but others are from the civil war in Syria. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which. It's getting close, she said. Israel and Syria are technically still at war, but for almost four decades the Golan has been quiet. Now, though, there's a sense of growing tension. Last week, Syrian government and rebel forces fought over a nearby UN monitored crossing point, and Austrian peacekeeping troops there decided to pull out. Israeli troops have begun conducting military training exercises among the houses in the heart of the village of Majd al Shams, something the locals say didn't happen before the war. For many of the Druze here, the conflict in Syria is personal. We're Syrian, one man told me. Syria is our country. We live under Israeli occupation here, and most of us have relatives over there. Traditionally, the Druze have had close religious and political ties to the family of the Syrian leader Bashar al Assad. The secretive druze religion, like Mr. Assad's Alawite sect, draws on branches of Shia Islam, and strong Syrian nationalism has tended to mean loyalty to the Assads. Bashar is the legitimate president of Syria, the owner of Majd al Sham's butcher shop told us as he watched the news on Syrian national television. He's a good man. The rebels are just terrorists, but others in the community are horrified at the accounts of brutality by Mr. Assad's army. I am very pro Syrian and absolutely against the Israeli occupation of the Golan, one woman said. But what Assad is doing is wrong. He's destroying the country. The Israeli army is tough, but Israeli soldiers don't rape people. She smiled wryly. Assad is managing to do what Israel never could. Even after 40 years of occupation, he's managing to divide us. Sitting in his home with a picture of Che Guevara above his desk, Shahadi, an anti Assad activist, said attitudes towards the Syrian government are slowly changing. It's about freedom, he said. But lots of people in the Golan are still in the middle, and they're too frightened to take part in protests. We've seen here the because they're worried that could hurt their relatives in Syria. A little later, we hiked up Mount Hermon, through the dry runs of Israel's only ski resort. At the top was a group of young ultra Orthodox Jews. On a day out, they'd come to see the view of Syria in the valley below. It looked quiet and absolutely still. I couldn't make out a single car moving around the roads and villages. Did you feel worried about coming so close to a war zone? I asked one couple who were on a visit from Alaska. The man smiled happily. Not really, he said. I believe God looks after Israel. But other tourists are becoming more cautious. At her cafe in the village of Masadeh, near Majd al Shams in the Israeli occupied Golan, a woman served us kunafa a cake made of sweet cheese, delicately scented with rose water. I'm Syrian, she told us, but I speak Hebrew as well as Arabic. It's useful because we used to get lots of Israeli tourists coming here, but these days they're staying away. What do you think will happen in the war? I asked. She shrugged sadly. I'm not very political, she said. But we want peace.
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Bethany Bell in the Golan Heights on 1 July, Croatia becomes the 28th country to join the European Union. To win EU accession, Croatia was required to face up to its troubled past and its treatment of its biggest minority, the ethnic Serbs who've lived in parts of Croatia for hundreds of years. As many as 400,000, 2/3 of that population fled or left Croatia in the mid-1990s in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia since then, huge steps have been taken by successive Croatian governments towards a national reconciliation between Croats and Serbs. But Andrew Hoskins been finding out that as EU accession approaches, strident nationalist voices in Croatia are threatening to open up old wounds.
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There are some ghosts of the past that refuse to remain in the past. Nothing, it seems, not even the terrible things they cause. The ethnic hatreds, the pogroms, the wars shame them into calling it a day. Eventually they recede from view for a while, but almost as if immune to exorcism, rather re emerge when least expected or wanted. Take, for example, the unsettling incident the other day in the Croatian village of Kurnyak, a place dominated by ethnic Serbs. A group of Croat football supporters from Split stopped their coach in the village and broke into the small local municipality building. The fans got onto the roof, pulled down the Serb flag and destroyed it. These then were the men of the Tocida, the fanatical fans supporting the team and Hajuk Split, the same Torcida whose members once slaughtered a rooster before a fixture just because it happened to be the symbol of their opponents, Tottenham Hotspur. A memorial plaque at the stadium in Split bears the names of the 27 Torcida members who died in the wars for an independent Croatia in the early 1990s. On the other side in those wars in the former Yugoslavia were of course, the Serbs, the Serbs of Serbia, and the Serbs of Croatia, mainly in the Kraina region, where you find the village of Kurnjak. The flag these ardent nationalists desecrated in Karnjak was a Serb flag, but it was the one allowed by the Croatian authorities, the one without the Serb coat of arms. There has been little publicity about the incident and no arrests. I only found out about it later from a Croatian friend after my own visit to Cognac, I had been there a week or so before the Torcida had descended on the place in all their beery menace. I had interviewed the Mayor of Kurnjak, Mr. Radic Kosanovic, about the growing fears of Croatia's Serb minority, of a Croat nationalist revolt arrival. Mr. Kosanovic was indeed worried. He and his community know only too well where nationalism can lead if allowed to run its course. Along with other communities in the Kraina, Kurniak had borne the brunt of the Krat army's controversial offensive operation storm in 1995, which swiftly destroyed the short lived breakaway Serb republic of the Kraina and forced the exodus of some 200,000 Serbs to neighboring Serbia and Bosnia. Almost two decades after conflict, towns and villages in the area feel bereft. When we called on one Serb attorney, an old former Serb school teacher, Mr. Dimitar Radicic, he professed we'd been his first visitors for four years. Friends, family, pupils, all gone, even his school's old textbooks reduced to ashes long ago in Operation Storm. Such are the memories of atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo and the probrium heaped on Serb names such as Mladic and Karadic. It's easy to forget that many thousands of Serbs also suffered in the wars over the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and remain refugees across the region to this day. Two thirds of Croat's 600,000 strong pre conflict population of Serbs have not returned. Both the Croatian government and the UN refugee agency, the unhcr, are both encouraging Serb attorneys with with new homes and guarantees on human rights. Indeed, Croatia had to satisfy the European Union of its good intention to its own Serbs, particularly on human rights, before winning accession to the eu. But ironically, accession has also served to heighten ethnic tensions. Ruja Tomasic, leader of Croatia's tiny far right nationalist Party of Rights and every inch the former Canadian policewoman was elected recently as one of the country's 12 new members of the European Parliament. This was largely thanks to inflammatory comments she made during a television interview when she described the country's Serbs as guests and accused them of war crimes. The ruling center left Social Democratic Party fiercely condemned Tomasic and her views as worse than a natural disaster, but this only served to boost her popularity among nationalists. Many blamed tensions on Croatia's ailing economy and slowly evolving institutions, both of which should benefit in the long term from EU membership, or so say the optimists. For instance, as accession approaches to many Croats the nationalist alarum bells over the Serbs use of the traditional Cyrillic Alphabet for some, road signs ring increasingly parochial and tinny. Of course, Marshal Tito hoped his post war version of Yugoslavia would drive away the phantoms conjured up by ethnic tensions. But perhaps this time, leaving aside the antics of the Torcida, the exorcists may yet win the day.
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Andrew Hoskin we heard earlier in the program about Israeli concerns that the fighting in Syria, to the north, could spill over into the Golan Heights. The Israelis also faced tensions to their south. Thousands of Palestinians marched from Gaza City to close to the Israeli border the other day to demand the liberation of East Jerusalem, which was occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle east war. Israel continues to impose sanctions on Gaza. Over the past decade, more than a dozen of its citizens have been killed in rocket or mortar attacks launched from this Palestinian territory. The blockade limits the movement of goods in and out of the Strip. Yoland Nell has been finding out how Gazans get by it took more than
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three hours for Khalil's fast food order to arrive, but he didn't mind. When he was handed his bucket of golden fried chicken in a carrier bag bearing the familiar KFC logo, it was still warm, and he savoured the smell. Workers for the delivery company Yamama, Arabic for carrier pigeon, had picked up dozens of orders from a KFC branch in Egypt's North Sinai, about 50 miles away. But they had to make the risky journey through a smuggling tunnel under the border to to bring them into the Gaza Strip. Not long afterwards, special deliveries came to a halt. Hamas, the Islamist group that governs the Palestinian territory, raised questions about food safety and clearly weren't happy with the image of Gaza that was being sent around the world. Most of the 1.6 million people living here endured daily hardship and receive food rations from international agencies, their struggles largely caused by border restrictions that were tightened by Israel and Egypt in 2007 when Hamas, which refuses to recognize Israel, took control here. The young entrepreneurs who founded Yamama took the KFC setback in their stride. Over the past three years, they've built a business that specializes in providing services that overcome the difficulties of everyday life in Gaza. On the streets of Gaza City, the firm's motorcycle couriers whiz past. They deliver anything from gas canisters to bank statements. As there's no local postal service, business here is risky, but we try to think in a different way, yamama's owner, Khalil Frangi, told me. The situation forces us to be inventive this small coastal strip of just 140 square miles has seen two fierce conflicts with Israel in less than five years. While border restrictions have been reduced, there are still regular power cuts and a ban on most exports. This constricts industry and unemployment is high at around 30%. Yet from the donkeys painted as zebras at a run down zoo to the classic cars repaired for everyday use, Gaza specializes in tales of creativity and in overcoming adversity. The glittering Mediterranean Sea is clearly visible from Bethlachia, so it's something of a surprise to find Aya del Arter here in a large plastic tent checking on some of the half million fish that he hatches each year in pools. The idea for my fish farm came after the Israeli naval blockade because of the limits on fishermen, ayad explains. At first, people in Gaza didn't know about freshwater fish, but now every household's tasted it. Ayad recently began experimenting with a system known as aquaponics and has herbs and vegetables sprouting from pipes fed by the wastewater from his fish. He's also helping a United nations agency train local families to keep fish on their rooftops and grow crops. But not all examples of Gazan ingenuity have a practical purpose. When I met the relatives of Mohammed Barakat this week, I recognized them immediately. Recently, they starred in a comic video that he shot on his mobile phone. Gaza Gangnam Style was yet another parody of the South Korean musical hit popularized on social media in contrast to the fancy lifestyles enjoyed in Gangnam. In Seoul, Mohammed showed Gazans resorting to donkeys when their cars ran out of fuel and playing football on a field partly obliterated by an Israeli airstrike. Some people outside think we just fight in Gaza, but that's not true, mohammad says. We wanted to show how we live here, but in a fun way. And now Gaza has a new hero when it comes to changing perceptions. A 23 year old singer from the Khan Younis refugee camp is through to the final stages of Arab Idol, the regional version of the Pop Idol TV contest. The story goes that he got stuck at Gaza's Rafah border crossing with Egypt and arrived late at the place in Cairo where the auditions were being held. The doors were shut. He called his mum, who told him to jump over the wall once inside. Another contender heard him singing in a corridor and gave him his own audition slot with his posters plastered across Gaza. Whether he wins or not, his experience is being seen as another triumph during tough times.
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That was Yoland Nell. Nepal is a nation still trying to move on. After a damaging civil war squeezed between India and China, it's one of the world's poorer nations. 30 million people live there, but each year hundreds of thousands leave in search of work abroad, mostly in the Gulf states and in Malaysia. Its economy is struggling. There are constant power cuts. Earthquakes are a common occurrence. As if this and the legacy of civil war weren't enough, Nepal is also having to deal with changes in its climate. Kieran Cook's been with a group of journalists who went to the Himalayas to see how the nation's coping.
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The woman is busy in the field, on her haunches, back bent, cutting cabbage plants. She pauses as the group of reporters approaches. The skin of her wrinkled, open face is like well tanned leather. Introductions are made. Where's your husband? Asks one journalist. She's doing a story on migration, how Nepalese suffer in often low paid jobs abroad, working 12 hours a day, six days a week, and only allowed home once every two years. There's a marked absence of young men in many villages. Is he in Saudi Arabia or in Malaysia? Asks the reporter, notebook poised, ready for that magic quote which will bring her article to life. No, says the woman, slashing angrily at another cabbage plant. Nowhere like that. Wish he was. At least he'd be sending money home. He's drunk, probably sleeping. He's hopeless. The reporter, deflated and still without her quotes, closes her notebook. Nepal is a country full of surprises. Kathmandu, the capital, was once, back in the 1960s and 70s, one of the main stops on the global hippie trail, where travelers would spend months, some even years, sampling the local hashish and generally relaxing into a quiet state of mindlessness. Now the city is a bustling metropolis on most days, covered in a thick blanket of diesel fumes and smog. The original hippies have long gone on to be bankers, surgeons, even journalists. Yet go down an alleyway and turn into one of the city's little squares, and the old atmosphere is still there. A group of old men chant Buddhist scriptures by a temple door. A mangy dog howls. Kids run by flying kites in the red evening sky. And maybe it's a dream. But is that a fair, complexioned, lined face in the corner, a faded set of beads around his neck, a hippie who never left? The Himalayas, the mightiest range of mountains in the world, are formed by the collision of two enormous tectonic plates, one pushing from the south, the other from the north. Everest and other peaks are still growing, the earth's pressures pushing them ever upwards. The trouble is, we can't See those mighty peaks? They're keeping themselves hidden under a dense veil of cloud. It's like being invited to the palace but failing to catch sight of the beautiful princess. Nepalese are composed of countless ethnic groups. Proud people with their own quiet dignity who have suffered a great deal over the years. The revolution by Maoists which ended seven years ago killed thousands. The majority of people live on or below the poverty line. Politicians seem more interested in squabbling amongst themselves than in running the country. For several days our group of journalists had walked up and down valleys talking to farmers, eating curry after curry, even at one stage joining in the dancing at a village wedding party. We had heard about how changes in the weather here on the so called Roof of the World were threatening crops. How the monsoon was arriving later each year. The rainfall was less frequent but more intense when it came. How glaciers were melting, the climate becoming increasingly unpredictable. I'd given up on the idea of actually seeing the Himalayas. Probably about as close as I'd get. Was drinking a bottle of the local Everest beer, then pulling back the curtains on the morning of our final day. There they were. A stretch of jagged white peaks etched against a dark blue sky. As the sun came up, one after the other was turned a brilliant pink. Lights turned on in a magical fairground. The wind blew feathery clouds of snow off the summits. I walked up a nearby hill. There was a temple. And out of the dawn light emerged a white robed Hindu priest. He had lived at the temple for years. Had he, I asked, noticed changes in the weather? There's a long pause. He lifts his large dark eyes to the Himalayas stretched across the horizon. It is man who is the problem, says the priest. He takes his energy and warmth to the mountains and melts the snows. He tramples the grass. He should never go there. The mountains are sacred, the home of the gods. They should be left alone.
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Words from the wise. And that's it. Kieran Cook in the Himalayas, bringing us to the end of this edition. There'll be more from our correspondence around the world in our program on Saturday morning at half past eleven. Why don't you join us? Goodbye.