← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Hirsute History + Desert Verse
00:28:14
Kate Adie introduces correspondents' stories from around the world. Today, Jamie meets...
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- [00:00]
Kate Adie
You're listening to a download from the BBC.
- [00:02]
Stephen Mulvey
This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition broadcast on
- [00:13]
Kate Adie
BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
- [00:16]
Programme Narrator
Hello. In the programme today, we take a hirsute look at history in Crimea and in Ukraine. People have been protesting, sometimes violently, in Venezuela for a month now. We hear why deserts are wide open, quiet places, places where you can get lost in your thoughts, unless there's a dog race and a 4x4 rally going on. And please try to take your rubbish with you when you leave. What to do about Russia and Crimea? That's what Western powers have been grappling with all week. Both the EU and the Americans have agreed targeted sanctions against individuals. No one wants to go to war, though serious questions remain about the impact of any sanctions and what to do if President Putin decides, as he might put it, to defend the interests of Russian speakers in other parts of Ukraine. There are plenty of people in Crimea and Russia, of course, who support Mr. Putin's strong arm tactics. Jamie Kumarasamy recently met one of them, a man who might one day make it into the history books.
- [01:24]
Kate Adie
The offer was both flattering and fleeting. I just finished my interview with Yuri Mishkov, an avuncular law professor with neatly brushed white hair and a smart black jacket worn over a black woolen jumper. When he smiled and grabbed me by the shoulder, those were very good questions, he said, his moustache twitching with pleasure. I really think you should be a diplomat. How about becoming the British Consul in Crimea? A joke, perhaps? No, definitely. But it wasn't completely idle talk, because Yuri Meshkov was the first, and so far only president of Crimea. He was elected in 1994 by a landslide on a platform of reuniting the Ukrainian peninsula with Russia. Like an eager suitor, he had hopped on a plane to Moscow only to find his overtures to Boris Yeltsin rebuffed. The Russian president was far too concerned with building a relationship with the west to to stir up the kind of trouble that annexing Crimea would have brought. Times were very different then for Myshkov. Yeltsin's name is mud. He balked at using the Y word when we spoke, contrasting the late leader's actions, or lack of them, with what he called Vladimir Putin's officer's honour. Our meeting took place in a small private room in a restaurant on the outskirts of the Crimean capital, Simferopolis. Three of Its walls were covered with a painting showing a clear blue sea stretching out under a clear blue sky, and in the foreground, a landscape containing everything from swaying poplar trees to an incongruously placed windmill. It was, he told me, an imaginary country. Crimea's new political landscape, one populated with masked men in military uniforms, had sparked his imagination, prompting him to return from Moscow to the place he once ruled. Ukraine had banned him from the country until 2016 for encouraging separatism, but the arrival of Russian troops and Crimea's uncertain status had provided the COVID he needed to come back. As he spoke about his own experience, it became clear that this was an ironic reversal of fortune. As Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms patrolled the streets outside, he sipped a cup of strong black coffee and recalled how he had been removed by Ukrainian troops in 1995. It was just a year after he was elected that the authorities in Kiev put a stop to his political hopes and then passed a new Ukrainian constitution, which abolished his job the post of Crimean president. He began a sit in which was eventually ended on March 16, 1995, 19 years later to the day. The controversial referendum had provided the pretext for his dreams of reunion to be realised. When I asked him about the shortcomings of the latest vote, he brushed them off with a shrug. What about the official figures showing more than 100% of Sevastopol's registered voters had participated? I asked. Yes, there may have been one or two administrative problems, some miscalculations here and there, he conceded, but that doesn't change the overwhelming result. You can pay people to demonstrate, but you can't buy the joy of this entire region. His own joy, though, was slightly tempered. We met on the day after the vote in the brief 24 hour window between President Putin recognizing Crimea as a sovereign state and signing a treaty incorporating it into the Russian Federation. It was the one day that Crimea was, in the eyes of the Kremlin, at least a a nominally independent state, albeit one on the path to rejoining Russia. And although Yuri Mishkov deftly dodged the question when I asked him whether he'd like a second presidential term, I got the impression that he wouldn't have said no. In fact, as he reminded me, if a majority of Crimeans had ticked the second box on the referendum ballot paper calling for Ukraine's 1992 constitution to be reinstated, he would technically have been president automatically. It wasn't to be. The record will show that 97% of voters went for the simple choice to become part of Russia and a man who battled for that for two decades, surviving, he claims, political assassination attempts is both a witness and a footnote to history. The day after we met, President Putin signed the treaty with the recently installed Crimean leaders. In contrast to Yuri Myshkov, the current Crimean Prime Minister only got 4% of the vote when he stood for election. And while Yuri had been removed from power by soldiers, the new man got his job because of armed intervention. We left the former Crimean president with his imaginary landscape. As he put on his coat and flat cap and walked out into the street to hail a cab. His aides had disappeared together with his hopes of getting his old job back and mine of becoming the British Consul in Crimea, if only for a day.
- [06:25]
Programme Narrator
Jamie Kumar Sami still available for consular work. It's been just over a year since the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez died of cancer. He was a vocal critic of American foreign and economic policy and styled himself as a champion of the poor, building close relations with left wing leaders across Latin America, not least in Cuba. A year on, though, his chosen successor, President Nicolas Maduro, is facing Venezuela's worst political and economic crisis for decades. At least 29 people have been killed during daily anti government protests which began in February. The demonstration started in the western city of San Cristobal, close to the Colombian border, which is where James Menendez headed.
- [07:13]
James Menendez
I feel I've covered my fair share of protests over the years, including plenty in Venezuela. But I don't think I've been anywhere where almost an entire city is in open revolt against the government. Well, that's what's happening in San Cristobal in normal times. This is an attractive low rise city nestled at the foot of the Andes Mountains. A prosperous place with a population that prides itself on being honest, hard working and and self reliant. But these are not normal times. More than six weeks of anti government protests have turned this city upside down. For a start, most people are only working half days, if at all. They need to leave by lunchtime to ensure they get home safely. And that's because every afternoon the improvised barricades made of bed frames, tree trunks and in one case, a burnt out bus, reappear at major junctions blocking the city's steep roads and and whole neighbourhoods. When darkness falls, the violence begins. Groups of young people manning the barricades throw stones and homemade fireworks at the police. The police respond with tear gas and buckshot. Sometimes shady paramilitary groups on motorcycles appear out of nowhere, demanding the barricades be torn down. Sometimes those same paramilitaries open fire. Two people have been killed. Here already. But the violence hasn't deterred Clarissa. I met this educated, well dressed, 50 something grandmother at a barricaded intersection covered in glass and smouldering fires. She told me she was doing her bit for the protesters by bringing them regular supplies of food and water. Sometimes, she confessed with a smile, she joined in with the chanting, but not the stone throwing. So what did she think bringing the city to a standstill would achieve? We are going to bring down the government, she told me. Yes, the city looks like a disaster zone, but it was a disaster before and we will stay here as long as it takes. So why are people like Clarissa out on the streets? As the government's keen to point out, Venezuela must be the only country in the world where the rich are rioting while the poor stay at home watching tv. That's a sweeping generalisation, but like all sweeping generalizations, it's. It does contain an element of truth. Most of the protesters are articulate middle class students who use smartphones rather than pamphlets to organise their rallies. And they're furious about a whole host of issues, including soaring levels of crime. Venezuela has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and most acutely, the state of the economy. Although this country has the largest oil reserves in the world, here in San Cristobal there are long, long queues for petrol, which, by the way, really is cheaper than water in Venezuela. Much cheaper. Queues also snake around the block for the supermarket and pharmacies are running out of medicines. It doesn't make any sense, I say to my friend Maria Clemencia. No, it doesn't, she replies. But nor does the system that fixes prices so low. She explains that Colombians across the border can make a living by buying subsidized goods like flour and rice here in Venezuela to sell at a substantial profit back home. Of course, the problems aren't confined to this corner of the country. Caracas, the capital, is both one of the most expensive cities in the world and one of the cheapest, depending on which exchange rate you use. International airlines are now refusing to fly from there because they're not being paid the dollars they're owed by the government, which controls the whole system. If this is distorting the market, it's also distorting society. When I was based here As a correspondent 10 years ago, Venezuela was already a deeply divided country. There were huge marches, government and opposition almost every weekend. On the surface, the current economic problems and the violence seem to be exacerbating those divisions. Both sides behave as if they're fighting for survival, and the rhetoric grows more extreme by the day. Some even talk about the possibility of civil war. But the outcome of this confrontation is unlikely to be decided by those loud voices at the margins. It will be decided by those caught in the middle wondering which way to turn. At the moment, President Maduro's supporters seem to be sticking with him. But the danger for the government is that the longer this goes on, the more likely it is that those people will start to turn away.
- [11:46]
Programme Narrator
James Menendez In Venezuela they may be dry, sometimes dusty and hot, but deserts are also beautiful and romantic, at least in fiction, if not always. In fact, they're places where religions have been born, places of mysticism, places of poetry, and of much more modern and noisy pastimes. A Shahida Bari discovered hers was that
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Shahida Bari
subtle sort of Bedouin beauty, a dark doe eyed gaze flickering thoughtfully under thickly matted eyelashes, a dusty blonde, lithe, leggy, faintly knock kneed. She had bumps in all the right places and an earthy whiff about her every man longed to get his leg over. The only problem was the grapes of dung dangling from her bottom. She was the headline act of the annual Sultan bin Zayed al Nayan Heritage Festival, which takes place in the deserts of Abu Dhabi. And I was there not for camels, but for verse. Yes, really. I was recording a documentary on Nabati poetry, a vernacular form of Arabic concerned with every subject of any importance, including love, war, religion and, yes, the affectionate praise of camels too. Yet, as I soon discovered, modern Abu Dhabi is a far cry from those old romantic ideas of deserts and dromedaries. The largest emirate of the uae, Abu Dhabi lies on a T shaped island jutting into the Persian Gulf. Today it houses a population of nearly a million, many of whom are struggling migrant workers. The Sultan bin Zayed festival is part of a larger program of cultural events and in some ways a reactionary reflex, an attempt to shore up traditional arts in the face of the enormous migrant influx of upon which commercial Abu Dhabi depends. Central Abu Dhabi consists of glassy skyscrapers, luxury hotels and sprawling shopping complexes. But drive about 70 km east through indifferent patches of arable and scrubland and you hit a desert town called Swehan. There you can hear the wind and hardly see a soul. The desert is eerily quiet even during the festival's two week extravaganza, whose highlights include a sook traditional music, drummers, dancing girls and saluki dog racing. Set across a sprawling campsite of racing tracks and enormous marquees dangling with chandeliers strewn with plush rugs and plastic chairs, there is hardly anyone there. Smiling gamely, like a guest at a badly attended wedding, I listened as Muhammad, my smiling chaperone from the Sultan's media team, promised me an Arabian night's fantasy of campfires and starlit poetry. He plied me with Styrofoam cups of coffee before dashing off yelling instructions into a headset. Around me, the creamy sand dunes loomed silently in the distance. The empty media tent was air conditioned, WI FI enabled, and full of the contradictions of modern desert life. Large banners emblazoned with familiar social media logos fluttered in the breeze. The festival's media team were feverishly documenting Bedouin life with Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, and dedicated Instagram accounts. Four bars flickered on my phone. Here I had a better WI FI connection than at home. In the Suk, a traditional market reconstructed under a marquee, local people displayed Bedouin handicrafts and antique daggers. Children in bright gowns and beaded headpieces scuttled around. I chatted with a young woman whose English was fluent and confident. She pulled out a smartphone from the pocket of her floor length abaya to exchange emails. Maybe I was wrong to think that traditional culture meant no technology. Maybe Bedouin life could be new, not nostalgic. As if on cue, crowds gathered outside. An entourage of battered 4x fours rolled into view, ready to hurtle around the dusty racetrack, windows down, camera phones at the ready, in hot pursuit of the racing Salukis, a breed of Bedouin hunting dog, spare and wiry. I leapt into Mohammed's car to follow the fleet of 40 all terrain vehicles, beeping and blaring, speeding through the desert sand, hands in a heady swirl. At the end of the track, we ran out to catch a glimpse of the winning dog. Then somehow, amidst the hustle and afraid, Mohammed had managed to corner the Sultan himself. And suddenly I was being ushered forward alongside the winning dog owner to shake hands with a bearded man in a leather jacket and mirrored Ray Bans. I hadn't washed my hair in days and there were holes in my ratty cardigan, but the Sandhurst schooled Sultan was too polite to mention it. At dusk, watching the sun sink into dunes, I sat under a waterproofed canopy of camel hair listening to poets sing under darkening skies, drinking from delicate porcelain thimbles, the kind of coffee that can keep you awake for years. Desert life is impermanent. Things blow away with the winds and are buried in the sands. Cultural memory lives in poetry and art, in the affectionate regard you might have for camels and hunting dogs. I worried that the digital noise of the desert would become deafening, that phone signals and Facebook accounts would fill its empty spaces. And I wondered for how long can we keep a desert deserted?
- [17:08]
Programme Narrator
Shahid Abari, with camels, poets and four by fours away from the deserts. The world as we know, can be a very crowded place, so sometimes we just want to get away from it all and end up joining the crowds on holiday. Modern tourism has brought those once exotic places and unspoilt beaches within easy reach of millions. Unfortunately, as Rajan Datta has found, when the holiday ends, they don't just leave their footprints on the sand.
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Rajan Datta
It's peak season in Goa. The sun is high, the temperature pleasant, and the tourists are arriving in droves. The Brits and Germans, yes, but young and middle aged, but also now Scandinavians and Israelis. And Significantly these days, 75% of chartered flights to Goa now depart from Russia. Increasing numbers of domestic holidaymakers wend their way through the crowded beaches of Calangute and Anjuna. These are India's growing consumer class, professionals with enough disposable income to make travel a lifestyle choice in a country which has never really got to grips with the nuts and bolts of modern tourism. Goa stands as the most successful exponent of the mass variety. But these days it's serving as a warning to the rest of India too. Because on the busy, bumpy main road from the state's biggest town and capital, Panjim, towards the packed beach resorts of Anjuna and Mapsa, there are a number of ugly landmarks to behold. They become such fixtures that most locals have become blind to them. I'm talking trash heaps that dribble out into waste trails, eyesores that every day accumulate, piles of food wrappers, plastic bottles and other debris from passersby signs warning of penalties for littering have become defaced, corroded, illegible, or all three. When I pull up alongside one of these garbage heaps on a 15 meter stretch of lay by, I'm greeted by two cheerful guys in their late twenties wearing rubber gloves. Oh, and by a cow too, which turns to register my presence briefly before continuing to forage through the rubbish and chew on bits of discarded plastic. I'm told that chances are when she dies, her body will gradually decompose, but the plastic will remain intact in her decaying stomach. Or do I mean stomachs? Then the plastic will float off and then another cow will find it and the same process will continue. Nice. The two refuse collectors are website designers by day but they also have another cause close to their hearts. They are the pioneers of the Goan trash mob movement. Lorries rumble past and scooters phut phut their way around the bend in the road. Most seem oblivious to this mini trash mob. Although there is the occasional toot of support. I assume it's support rather than irritation. Milind and Axel offer me a pair of gloves and we get to work separating plastics and other non biodegradables from the organic waste and placing them in black bin liners. I sift through condoms, syringes, nappies and broken glass amongst dense layers of plastic packaging. Every time I get warned to step away from fragments of glass on the ground, I seem to step onto some more. I begin to feel like I do at home in the way when trying to be helpful. Still, the community spirit is stirring. On the last trash mob, 15 people helped out, including one 60 year old lady originally from Europe. Between them they collected 50 extra large bags of rubbish which were picked up by rickshaw and then taken to the nearest recycling plant. The tip reeks. I'm forced to borrow a handkerchief to wrap around my nose and mouth to limit the foul stench. Millin says after two hours you get immune to it. The main cause, he tells me, is a severe dearth of street bins, official refuse sites and waste disposal facilities. The Panchayats, the village councils are not doing enough, he complains, and neither is the state government. I've just come from the beach and chatted to Sebastian, a shack owner for 30 years, who complains that Goa doesn't know what it is, where it's going and where it wants to go. And the fact is, bad sanitation is becoming a statewide embarrassment now, especially amongst younger locals. It's a far cry from the halcyon days of hippies dropping in, dropping out, but not on the whole, dropping litter in a virginal paradise. I have to ask them if they don't worry. They're fighting a losing battle and sure enough, they concede the rubbish will be as high again on this tip within four weeks. But that is not the point. It's a war, Axel tells me. And while they might go down in one battle, they're here for the long game and the prize is worth the graft. He says there'd be fewer mosquitoes and far less chance of food poisoning. The aim now is to keep hammering away at the consciences of Goans and visitors alike. And on that score, slowly but surely, it might just be working. Old ways are being challenged in India right now, from attitudes to women, to corruption and sanitation. This election year could see the blossoming of a nationwide coalition of causes, all operating outside the usual party channels. Because just like here on the coastal roadside, it seems ordinary people have seen enough and are willing to pick up the pieces themselves.
- [22:39]
Programme Narrator
Rajan Datta with Goa's trash mobs so Crimea, to all intents and purposes, is Russian again. Earlier this week, President Putin gave a fiery speech defending Moscow's actions over the peninsula. To his faithful supporters, he presented a well articulated, reasonable and accurate account of Russian history. To others, particularly in the west, he presented a well articulated, unreasonable, inaccurate account of history. He repeated his view that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a great misfortune and a disappointment for many people in Russia and Ukraine. Stephen Mulvey, who was in Ukraine when it broke free from the ussr, remembers things differently.
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Stephen Mulvey
It was the moustaches that were one of the strongest signs that something was up. When I arrived In Kiev in June 1991, the Soviet Union still existed, but it was coming apart at the seams. The Baltic states had all but bolted from the Union. Georgia was getting restive and Ukraine, well, Ukraine's leaders were being a bit evasive, talking about sovereignty, but also talking to Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow about reshaping the Soviet Union, making it looser, friendlier, with more powers for the republics. The men in moustaches were the clue that Gorbachev's plan wasn't going to work. These whiskers were thick and bushy, reminiscent of Freddie Mercury or occasionally a walrus. They were already in parliament, many of them writers, theatre directors, lawyers, former dissidents. Sometimes you would catch them in a traditional embroidered collarless shirt. They saw themselves as descendants of the Cossacks, the Ukrainian army of free men who built a fortress on an island in the River Dnieper and for a while in the 17th century controlled a wide swathe of territory between Poland and Muscovy in the north and Tatar Crimea in the south. These besooted latter day Cossacks with briefcases were Ukrainian nationalists, a breed Moscow has always had problems understanding and has always been inclined to see as dangerous radicals. They'd had enough of the Soviet Union and so it would soon become clear, had millions of Ukrainians listening to President Putin. You might imagine that the west has always been pushing Ukraine to break away from Moscow. Not at all. In August 1991, US President H.W. bush came to Kyiv and delivered his famous Chicken Kiev speech, as it came to be known, in which he Americans will not support those who seek Independence in order to replace a far off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred. To anyone in Kyiv at the time, it sounded ludicrous. There was no sign of ethnic hatred, no obvious threat of despotism. But the message was clear. Bush wanted the Soviet Union and Gorbachev to survive. And they might have done had it not been for events. Two or three weeks later, at the height of the Ukrainian summer, Gorbachev was holidaying on the Crimean coast. I was at a rock festival near the Cossacks, former island stronghold in Zaporizhzhia, in the company of thousands of young pro independence Ukrainians. The sounds of rock and Ukrainian folk mingled late into the night. But the morning after, what a contrast. Dirge like classical music and a solemn voice on the radio announcing that power had been seized in Moscow by a committee who thought Gorbachev was preparing to go too far in decentralizing the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, in his Crimean villa on the shore of the glittering Black Sea, was under house arrest. The key events then took place in Moscow. Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Republic, stood on a tank outside the Russian parliament. The putsch was defeated. The Communist Party was discredited. Gorbachev returned to Moscow. A lame duck in the Ukrainian parliament. Not just the men with moustaches, but nearly all of the formerly loyal pro Soviet Communists voted for independence, including Russian speaking MPs in eastern Ukraine. In a referendum at the end of the year, 92% of the country voted to back that decision. President Putin says that Russia was going through such hard times in 1991 that it was incapable of protecting its interests in Crimea. But even in the peninsula itself, over half voted in favor of Ukraine's independence. And this was before many Crimean Tatars, who prefer Ukrainian to Russian rule, had succeeded in returning from exile in Central Asia. It's possible, of course, that some regretted it later. Many had high hopes for the new independent states in 1991, Russia as well as Ukraine. And few of those hopes have actually been fulfilled. Another of Putin's famous statements on Ukraine, reportedly made to George W. Bush, is that Ukraine is not even a country. But if Ukraine were not a nation, it would be hard to explain why. Stalin apparently felt threatened by Ukrainian nationalism and wanted to kill it off. In the 1920s and 30s, the cream of Ukraine's writers and intellectuals were executed. Millions of the peasantry died from starvation after their grain was taken away. The Ukrainian national idea is surely here to stay whether President Putin's assertions that he won't seize any more parts of Ukraine prove true or false.
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Programme Narrator
Stephen Mulvey, remembering Ukraine's Men with Mustaches, and he ends this edition. I'll be back next Saturday with more from our correspondence. Goodbye.