← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
June 23, 2011
00:27:58
A voice from Croatia's war-torn past is recalled by Allan Little in Zagreb as the EU...
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You're listening to from our own correspondent from the BBC.
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You can also hear the World Service
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edition of the programme on the BBC
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iPlayer, but this is the latest program
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from Radio 4, introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today we must all learn Chinese now. The Greeks hoping for a bailout from the economic giant of Asia. A voice from the past as the European Union prepares to welcome in Croatia how a global passion for lobster is leaving some Nicaraguans in wheelchairs and on crutches. And hearts break on Malta as islanders bid farewell to a colourful part of their transport history. European Union leaders are gathering in Brussels today for a summit expected to be dominated by the Greek debt crisis and the future of the euro. EU leaders are thought likely to reaffirm their determination to defend the single currency. Confidence has been undermined by doubts over whether Greece can continue paying its international debts. There seems little that the EU leaders can do at their summit while they wait to see if the parliament in Athens approves austerity measures needed to qualify for more bailout funds. Chris Morris has spent the last few days in Athens trying to work out if anyone has a solution to the Greek problem.
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The port of Piraeus is best known as the tourist gateway to the Greek islands, Route 1 to the sun. But as you drive down through the industrial outskirts of southern Athens, it's not the passenger ferries which catch the eye. It's the line of orange cranes which loom above the container port. That's Chinatown, says Soteris Polykuyanis as we sit in his office close to the water's edge. Last year, China's state owned shipping company Cosco took control of most of the port, Greece's largest container facility. It's also probably China's largest investment in Europe. So could this be one way out of Greece's economic crisis? Not loans from Europe, but investment from the rapidly growing economic giants of Asia. With the Greek government promising a privatization programme worth billions, there are certainly opportunities for countries and companies with money to spend. But union leaders like Soteris worry that Greece may be forced to sell off the family silver at knockdown prices with we're all trying to learn Chinese now, he says with only half a smile. We all have to do it. All of Europe. You too. There is no union recognition in the Chinese run port. And for the mechanics and metal workers whose lives have been built around the ship repair yards, times are hard. As Greece struggles with the sovereign debt crisis which is threatening the stability of the entire Eurozone, austerity is biting deep and the shipyards of Piraeus are on the front line. About 20% of union members have had their electricity cut off at home. Some have had their water supplies cut off as well. Rather like their country, they're struggling to pay the bills, but there are no European loans on offer here to bail them out. The union says more than 6,000 people used to work in the repair yards before the economic Crisis began in 2008. Now there's only enough work for about 300 people a day. Many Greek owners, they say, are sending their ships off to be repaired in China. We get €90 a day, including overtime, sotaris says, pointing at a handwritten chart pinned to the wall. And if people get five days of work a month, they think that's a good month. In the past year, we've taken a very bad hit. There's no activity. Never mind all this water, it's like a desert. Outside his prefabricated office, four dogs are asleep in the shade and there's a monument portraying a mechanic holding a spanner in his outstretched hand. This is a communist union and its monument is dedicated to comrades who've died in industrial accidents, murdered by employers, the inscription reads. On the altar of profit. The employers, naturally, would beg to differ. If the union didn't go on strike so much, they say, maybe more investment would actually arrive. The government too, is keen to encourage further interest from China and elsewhere. Railways, ports, utility companies, hotels, beaches and the sprawling site of the old Athens International Airport, complete with abandoned terminal buildings and rusting planes. All of them are to be put up for sale. But on one issue, the government and the unions agree. What we want to avoid is selling off our primary assets for nothing, says one close advisor to the Prime Minister. I'm afraid that that is what's about to happen. And if that's what the inner circle thinks, who can blame the rest of the country for wondering what comes next? If the revenues from privatisation aren't going to be quite as high as hoped, and if austerity pushes Greece deeper into recession, it is rather hard to see how the growth the country needs is ever going to materialize. So from Piraeus to Parliament, there is an overwhelming sense of frustration. I just think everyone's feeling really stressed, said a middle aged woman among the crowd which now gather outside Parliament almost every evening. She put a whistle to her mouth and blew it hard to add to the general cacophony. I'm not an economist, she said, but I have to balance the books at home and I can see this isn't working. A man walks past carrying a homemade gallows in one hand and a Greek flag in the other. Thieves. He shouts, and wanders off. It suddenly feels rather tempting to head back down to Piraeus, to board one of those ferries and disappear onto a distant island. But getting away from it all isn't an option for Greece at the moment. The eyes of the world are upon it. Next week, Parliament will debate and vote on a further package of austerity measures in in which no one really seems to believe. Those are the days, says Soteris, as he gets up to leave his empty union office. Those will be the hot days on the streets.
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Chris Morris in Athens Another task for those European leaders meeting in Brussels is to tell Croatia that it's been given the green light to join the European Union. Some details have still to be ironed out, but talks are expected to be concluded by the end of this year, paving the way for Croatia to become the 28th full EU member in July 2013. It's 20 years now since the country broke away from the disintegrating Yugoslavia. More than 100,000 people were to die in the wars which engulfed the region. Afterwards, Alan Little tells us about one of the voices he remembers from his days reporting on that conflict.
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The town of Vukovar sits on the great sweep of the Danube river, where Croatia borders its larger neighbour, Serbia. Geography was Vukovar's misfortune. It probably suffered more damage proportionate to its size than any other town or city in the former Yugoslavia. It was reduced to rubble in three months of intense bombardment in the autumn and winter of 1991. I have a memory from that time that I can't shake off. I'm in a rented car on the road to Vukovar, just behind the Croatian front line. It's a damp autumnal day, and there's a mist rising from the fields of rotting, unharvested crops. On the car radio, I'm listening to a single voice from inside the besieged town, that of a young Croatian radio reporter called Sinisa Glavaschevi. His reporting is vivid, compelling, brave. As the siege nears its end, his voice becomes more desperate. He describes how those left in the town have moved into the hospital compound and are crammed into the labyrinth of narrow, low ceilinged concrete corridors. In the basement, the wounded are dying from lack of sanitation, and the town is about to fall. For the night. I pull back from the front to the neighboring town of Vinkovci. In the evening half light of the hotel lobby, I see a small group of young Croatian soldiers who have made it out of Vukovar at the last minute, none of them will talk. I look into their exhausted faces. They're bewildered, lost. Sinisa Glavashevi files his report as Serb forces move into the town centre. It is the 22nd hour of the 78th day, he says. An eerie calm has settled on Vukovar. Those of us who witness this will never forget it. We hope our torment is over. A Croatian friend with whom I'm traveling says to me, you know, they hate him on the Serb side. If they catch him, they'll kill him. When the town fell, hundreds were rounded up and taken to an isolated farm called Ovchura, not far from Vukovar. There they were shot and buried in a mass grave where their bodies lay undiscovered for five more years. When at last they excavated the grave, they found at the very bottom of the pit the bones of Sinisa Glavashevi, still wrapped in the clothes he was wearing on the day he filed that last desperate report. In the years after the war, a film was released about the siege of Vukovar. Sinisa Glavosevic is turned into a national hero in an epic designed to appeal to a prevailing nationalistic sentiment. He dies with raised fist and the word Vukovar bellowing triumphantly from his throat. But that is not how the real Sinischa Glavashevi died. For Sinischer, I learned this week, had a son, seven years old at the time of his death. I went to see him. He is a young linguistics lecturer at the University of Zagreb. Bojan Glavashevi bears a striking resemblance to his father. He shows me a photograph of the two of them together in September 1991, two months before Sinisha's death. Boyan has a little satchel on his back. It's the first day of the new school term. This is the last time I saw him. He said. He went back to Vukovar later that day. What kind of man was your father? I asked. He was jovial, funny. People liked him. Are you proud of him? Yes, he says. Proud of him as a father. He wrote poetry for me and I liked that. We shared that love of language. Are you proud of him as a Croatian national hero? That was not my father, he says. That image was created after the war. As he has grown up. Bojan Glavasovic could have exploited his father's posthumous national celebrity. But he has refused to buy into the ethnic exclusivity of Croatian nationalist feeling. Vukovar before 1991, he says, was a multi ethnic place, a town of Serbs as well as Croats and more than 20 other registered national minorities. I am glad to have lived the first seven years of my life in that kind of place. He says. Some Serbs killed his father, but that, he says, is no reason to demonize an entire nation. The Croatia he wants is a civic democracy that will be a natural home to all the peoples who live here, not just the majority ethnic Croats. Bojan Glasovic has not allowed the folk hero of popular myth to replace in his own mind the jovial poetry loving father he remembers. He has resisted nationalist myth making in a country where myths retain the power of to fuel division and even conflict. It is a remarkable living tribute to a father and to the young man whose desperate voice struck me with such force 20 years ago.
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That was Alan Little. Now lobsters are big business, and Nicaragua is one of the countries which supplies this lucrative market. The USA alone imports at least 40 million pounds worth of its lobsters every year. But this gourmet experience doesn't come cheap. This isn't farmed seafood. It's harvested wild, straight from the sea. And when Connor Woodman visited the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua recently, he found that the high price of lobster isn't only paid by its consumers. The young divers who scour the offshore reefs for the crustacea often have little idea of the risk they're taking.
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I'm already feeling a bit uneasy. The sail of the 10 meter long skiff I'm sitting in is pulled tight to the wind and the huge logo emblazoned across it reminds me that this stretch of the Nicaraguan coast is prey to hurricanes. After Hurricane Felix devastated the coast in 2007, the American Agency for International Development sent emergency materials, food, clothes, tents and large tarpaulins marked USAID from the American people. Most of the tarpaulins ended up being used as sails for boats like this one. But the real reason for my unease is that I've agreed to make a deep water dive. This boat belongs to Wally, an indigenous Mosquito Indian who makes his living diving for lobster off Nicaragua's Caribbean coast. Wally is strong and muscular, with arms and legs as thick as the mast of his boat. His equipment consists of a mask and flippers, a a small black triangular plastic plate complete with Velcro strap for attaching the air tank and a long metal spike with a hook on one end. There are none of the usual dials and gauges a diver in the west would expect to see. No way of telling how deep you are or how much oxygen you have left. I'm a little more fortunate. I at least have a dive computer which will allow me to know how deep we are. Once we reach the reef, Wally and I descend together to around 16 metres. Wally moves along the reef, peering into rocky crags and stopping occasionally to deftly snag a spiny lobster hiding inside with his long hook. Eventually he gestures to me that it's time to head back to the surface, which by my dive computer's reckoning means we've been under for almost 45 minutes. Scuba safety manuals will tell you that with an appropriate rest period of an hour or so in between, a diver could safely make one or even two more dives to a similar depth the same day. But in less time than it has just taken me to say that Wally is under the water again. This time he's down for nearly an hour. In all, Wally makes 11 dives that day, a normal day, he says. No one has ever explained to Wally that diving 11 times in one day is not safe or how depth and air gauges are would increase his chances of survival. The main buyers for Nicaragua's lobster are large restaurant chains and seafood companies in the us. Knowing that diving for it is dangerous and that the people involved may well be injured or killed, these companies insist that they never knowingly buy lobster caught in this way, claiming instead to only buy trap caught lobster. It's a hard claim to substantiate. The problem is that one lobster looks pretty much the same as the next. They don't come with a sticker that tells you how they were caught, dived for or trapped. One recent study found that more than half the lobsters caught are being harvested by divers taking life threatening risks at great depths. Statistically, it's inevitable that some will find their way onto the shelves or menus of even the most scrupulous US company. Mosquito Divers are caught in a world of doublethink. We know deep dive lobsters are wrong, say the big companies, so we never knowingly buy them. Since we never knowingly buy them, the logic seems to run. There can't be a problem to solve. But back on shore, there are plenty of reminders that there is a problem. As I wander back along the road into town, I pass first one and then another young man walking with a pronounced limp. At the park in the centre of town, a group of men sit along a low wall, talking loudly and swigging beer from brown bottles. Unremarkable but for the row of crutches leant against the wall next to them, another man approaches in a homemade wheelchair that looks like a child's go kart, his black jeans hanging loosely over his withered legs. His name is Clevis, one Of more than 4,000 Nicaraguan men living with the consequences of repeated deep diving. The practice causes embolisms in the blood that lead to what is known as decompression sickness, or the bends. It can cripple you. At its worst, it can kill you. And each year, 50 young men perish along this coast doing it. This happened to me diving, says Clevis. Twelve years I've been diving on the boats for lobster. Then I got sick. Now I can't work, so I have to beg around. Someone gives me something. That's the only way I can survive.
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Connor Woodman in Nicaragua the Harlem Renaissance was a period in the 1920s when black literature, art and music in New York started to gain a wider audience. These days the term might be used to describe the gentrification of an area which some years ago was regarded more as a neighbourhood of crime and poverty than as a desirable address. But Reggie Nadelson says that while the moneyed classes may be moving in and the property prices going up, there are worries that the unique character of this part of Manhattan is being lost forever.
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Norman Skinner is well into his 80s and he's both resident and historian at 409 Edgecombe Avenue on Harlem's Sugar Hill. Up here, up at 155th Street 409 is one of the grand old buildings. Seven room apartments with parquet floors, chandeliers and servants, rooms with views over Jackie Robinson park and out across the whole city. Some of them are a little shabby, but all evoke the great days of Sugar Hill, so called because here all was sweet and expensive. Here is where W.E.B. du Bois, the distinguished African American reformer, lived. Here Gershwin first played Rhapsody in Blue on a grand piano. The apartment where Walter White, the great civil rights leader, lived was known as the White house of Black America. 409, a palatial 1917 apartment house built for middle class white people, had by the 1920s as more and more black families moved to the area, become one of the centers of the Harlem Renaissance. Up the road at number 555 lived Count Basie, Lena Horne, Joe Lewis, Paul Robeson. Down the street, Billy Holiday. Norman Skinner, handsome, charming and a brilliant storyteller, has lived in Harlem all his life. He remembers playing stickball with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte and basketball with Sugar Ray Robinson. Norman also recalls How Harlem was in the 1950s when, as the only African American graduate of Harvard Business School, he could not get a job anywhere. With its musicians and athletes, glamorous as Sugar Hill sometimes sounds, this was still a different America. Harlem is black America, says Norman Skinner, and black America is a different country. Sugar Hill is only a small part of Harlem itself, a vast chunk of uptown Manhattan that runs from 110th street to 156, from the east river the to the Hudson. And from the Depression on, much of it went into steep decline, so that by the 70s it was mainly known for poverty, crime and crack. Gradually, though, with an eye for all that real estate, the grand old apartment buildings and the fabulous brownstones, developers began to move in. Once this was the very center of the bad times of heroin, crack and crime. Now it's home to the likes of Melba, a cafe where brunch might consist of rum punch and fried chicken with eggnog waffles. A riff on the old jazz musician's breakfast eaten at dawn after all night sessions. Over at the Livemore, a brand spanking new condo, young couples, many of them white, are exclaiming over pristine million dollar apartments, some of which overlook a crumbling storefront mosque and an old time grocery store. There is real concern that people on modest incomes will be pushed out by the new rich. During the financial crisis there was a lull, but Harlem has begun to hum again with new business. There is Starbucks. There's a fancy supermarket. This is good news for most. For decades, none of this existed. But the prices are soaring at 409. Edgecombe. Norman Skinner, who has lived in the building for decades with his wife Odessa, worries that all these hedge fund guys, all these developers, black and white, will make life impossible. A real estate ad in the New York Times describes an apartment at 409 as beautifully renovated in a historic building. Apartments that feature full dining rooms, six large closets. The ad concludes, no pets. I wonder what will happen to Skinner's beloved pooch. Norman Skinner worries about his neighbors, some well into their 90s, who have lived in the building for decades and are now threatened by rising prices. They want to push up rents 10 times, says Norman. They want to move us out and resell. I have to fight them every step of the way, adds the feisty Skinner, who then takes me up onto the roof at 4:09. You can see the moon rise up here, he says. You can see the whole of the city in all directions. Downtown is the skyline, uptown, the George Washington Bridge over to the east, Yankee Stadium, and at Dusk. This feels like the very heart of New York and its soul.
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And that's Reggie Nadelson in New York. Malta's not a place where time stands still. A few weeks ago, they decided to change the law on divorce. Now they're about to introduce a new world of buses. On the way out, a collection of aged vehicles which weren't particularly economical, but were certainly not short of character. On the way in, a brand new fleet of probably rather soulless buses, which no doubt will prove drably efficient. Jake Wallace Simons in the capital Valletta has been to see what the Maltese will soon be missing.
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The island of Malta doesn't exactly have a central bus station. Instead it has the Fontana Tatritoni, an open air fountain in the middle of Valletta, the capital city, which is home to a frenzy of bus related activity from early morning until late at night. Fume belching buses sweep around the fountain, picking up passengers, negotiating log jams and stopping for the odd half hour rest. As well as the crowds of Maltese commuters that could be seen thrusting their way around the vehicles. Office workers, school children, elderly nuns. I also noticed a good number of nerdy looking tourists photographing the buses, recording mysterious details and little notebooks and generally getting in the way. I wasn't at all surprised. You see, Maltese buses are rather special. They run on a unique owner operator system, much like taxis in Britain. Drivers buy, and in many cases build or inherit from their fathers their own buses. They alone are responsible for running and maintaining them. At night, they park them outside their houses, in some cases actually inside them. The vehicles themselves are striking. Since 1995, they have been painted canary yellow. In the 80s they were green and before that they were colour coded by route. But there the consistency ends. Anybody can buy, build or adapt his own bus, apply for a license and take to the road. If it's yellow and it moves and you get a license, you're away. For this reason, the Maltese bus is the very definition of quirk. Each vehicle is as singular as the personality of the man who drives it. As the afternoon wore on and the heat rose, I saw oversized chrome grilles and bulbous headlamps, visors overhanging windscreens like massive baseball caps, hooters and shrines, and strings of stuffed toys, badges and symbols and patterns. I struck up a conversation with a couple of nerdy tourists. The average Maltese bus, I discovered, is 35 years old. Many have been around for 50 or even 60 years. After World War II, enterprising Maltese men purchased old British army vehicles, stripped them to the chassis and welded handmade bus bodies on top. Amazingly enough, many are still in operation today, but not for very much longer. Come July 3, they will be replaced by a modern fleet of Arriva buses under the banner of Transport for Malta or tfm. But enough of that. I'd like to linger with the old beautiful machines just a little while longer. No traditional Maltese bus would be complete without a collection of slogans hand painted on the back. I spent some time recording these in my notebook. Here is a brief Forever young Tracy Starr Speed of Light Chelsea Nigel Travel Magic Life in Heaven Reliance Baboz Zanzan Dominant get one free Eat my dust I wish you triple you wish for me. You're my own time lover Living dreams Simply the best. Thank God. Panorama Elite 3 and my personal favorite. I don't care what people say. Strong enough. I went to buy a cool drink at one of the stalls around the fountain. It was there that I met Charlie Sherry, a gentle grey haired bus driver with owlish glasses and a slight stutter. He pulled out a crumpled black and white photograph of a Maltese bus. This was taken in 1968, he told me. He pointed to a 16 year old boy posing next to the bonnet. That's me, he said. I was just starting out as a conductor and that's my dad. The bus used to belong to him. Like the other owner drivers, Charlie had received compensation from the Maltese government and the offer of a position at Areva, though he said Arriva won't pay very well. But being over 55, he was also offered voluntary retirement, which he accepted. Some of the younger drivers are very angry, he told me. But he just feels sad to see all this colour drain from the island. But it makes practical sense. The old buses were polluting, unreliable and uneconomic. As a result, most people drive. Malta is the most car dense and congested country in Europe. A modern bus system is sorely needed. Nevertheless, he said it will break his heart to see his old bus scrapped. He shrugged and said he had to get back to work. I asked if I could come along to see his bus. We walked out together towards the fountain. There she was, a shoddy and magnificent yellow bus, hand built in the forties by Charlie's father. He fired up the engine, waved and rattled off on his way. As he did so, I caught sight of the slogan on the back of a nearby bus. It read, all for nothing.
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Jake Wallace Simons on the end of a transport era in Malta. And that's it. I'll be here again with more from our own correspondence on Saturday morning. Do join us. Goodbye.