← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
March 17, 2011
00:28:09
Colossal forces of nature have devastated Japan and the country faces the possibility...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the programme broadcast on the World Service by following the link to the iplayer on the top of our website. To keep up with our latest reports and get a sneak preview of the stories, you can sign up to our Twitter feed as well. But now, with the addition Broadcast on Radio 4, here's Kate Ady today.
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Strength and stoicism from the Japanese as they face up to the catastrophe which has befallen their country. The tomb raiders wreaking havoc in the ancient burial grounds of Egypt. Italy's 150 years old today, but the birthday party's proving a bit of a flop. And 50 years after man was first blasted into orbit, we have the Russians finally won the space race. The Japanese authorities say it's now known that almost 5,200 people were killed in last week's huge earthquake and tsunami. About another 10,000 are still missing. Meanwhile, military helicopters have been dropping tons of seawater on the damaged reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The authorities are struggling to reduce the critical temperatures which could lead to the collapse of the core and massive leaks of lethal radiation. Almost 30,000 people have already been evacuated from the area. Rachel Harvey, who's been in the north of the country monitoring developments, has been struck by the resilience of the Japanese people trying to cope with the cris.
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It's the big numbers that tend to grab the headlines when a natural disaster strikes. How many people have died? How many are missing? How strong was the earthquake? How high was the wave? But it's the small details that for me, bring home the human tragedy and tend to stick in my mind. The family photograph lying in the wreckage of what was once someone's home. A child's shoe. A broken teacup. It's as if the human brain can't quite process the sheer scale of the devastation, so it concentrates on small things, familiar things that it can understand. But then there are the images I remember precisely because they just don't seem to make sense. There are things about natural disasters that just aren't natural. A white van wedged between two trees three metres off the ground. A fishing boat marooned halfway up a building. A dead fish on a bathroom floor nearly two miles from the sea. The fish, a sea bass for anyone interested, was lying next to an orange and a lump of timber in Kezo Scioto's house, or at least what was left of his house. The walls and roof were still intact, but the windows had gone, and every room was filled with debris and mud. And yet this sprightly old man was determinedly positive as he picked his way through the rubble, trying to find any belongings he could salvage. He told me he'd be moving back home as soon as he could. We can clean this up, he said. The structure of the house is fine. We can rebuild it. But, he added thoughtfully, I've never known anything like this before. Keizo is 74 years old. A lot of terrible things have happened in Japan in his lifetime. The bombs which landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the earthquake which destroyed large parts of the city of Kobe, and now this. An earthquake and tsunami that have ravaged Keiso's homeland. And yet he's counting his blessings. It's much worse closer to the shoreline, he told me. He wasn't exaggerating. Standing on a hillside, I looked over into a valley that had once been filled with houses, shops and businesses. I could see the ocean away to my right, the direction from which the tsunami waves had come. And to my left, about as far as I could see inland, there was nothing but wreckage. Part of the hospital and local government offices were still standing, but almost everything in between had been flattened by the force of the torrent of water raging up the valley. Here and there, I could see the foundations of buildings lying exposed. In between, there were piles of broken timber, pieces of twisted metal, wrecked cars, smashed boats, torn clothes. I had a horrible feeling of deja vu. I'd seen this before in the Indonesian province of Aceh in 2004. I really didn't think I'd ever report the aftermath of another tsunami. But there are some stark differences between what's happening here in Japan and what I witnessed in Indonesia. Aceh had been the scene of a long running separatist insurgency. There was a huge military presence there before the tsunami, but not much in the way of disaster relief. And the destruction was so extensive, the loss of life so great, it took days for the full scale of the horror to become clear. It took a full week before a major international relief operation was established. Indonesia and the rest of the world have learned valuable lessons since then. Japan was as well prepared for a natural disaster as any country could be. It's an industrialized, high tech, well educated nation. People are taught from primary school what to do in the event of an earthquake. There are public address systems and sirens ready to sound the alarm. The number of people who've lost their lives in this disaster is an unimaginable tragedy. The worst to befall this country for a generation but it's fair to say many more people would have died if those systems hadn't been in place. And I've been struck by the stoicism, patience and organisation of the Japanese people in the face of disaster. The danger isn't over yet. There are serious concerns about Japan's damaged nuclear power plants. Aftershocks still fray the nerves and petrol and drinking water are in short supply. And yet people are already talking of rebuilding their lives just as they did immediately after the tsunami in Aceh. Incredible resilience, incredible independence, incredible strength in the face of adversity. That's the image from this natural disaster that I would choose to remember.
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That was Rachel Harvey. Egyptian troops have been sent to one of the country's most important archaeological sites after reports of a rise in the number of tombs being looted. Abydos, some three hours drive from Luxor, was one of the most important cities in ancient Egypt. It's the site of several temples, including a royal necropolis where early pharaohs were entombed. The sacred head of the God Osiris was said to have been preserved there. Christine Finn has been finding out that the amount of tomb raiding has risen sharply during the current period of upheaval and insecurity which has accompanied the stepping down of President Hosni Mubarak.
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It was such a tiny bandage package, nut brown, the size of a hen's egg. It was nestling in the broken ribcage of a child. This was a mummy ripped apart for valuables. Now there were only bones and the little package containing the child's vital organs strewn across the desert sand. How sad it seemed. Robbed of its life then robbed of its afterlife. The looters left overs had been abandoned to the jackals and feral dogs. I came across this scene as I walked the funerary fields of Abydos, two hours north of Luxor, with Kevin Wiles, an Englishman who is building a home not far from this ancient burial ground. Crossing it nearly every day, he used to see maybe two illegally dug graves a month. Since the revolution, there have been dozens every day. I had read his reports of grave looting on a website and so I travelled to find him, taking the slow train from Luxor. Abydos has been an important cult centre, drawing pilgrims and and tourists since antiquity. The plundered ground is not far from the main attraction here, the spectacular Seti temple, dating back to 1300 BC. Kevin told me that the gangs of looters descended on this site, rich in tombs at night, firing guns to scare off police and unarmed guards. The Villagers here are proud of their heritage, and most of their homes do have small surface finds on show, but pieces of pot or turquoise beads. But this looting, they said, was serious work by outside gangs. Kevin told me he had been offered three intact pots. As he walked over to his land, the looter asked for 800 Egyptian pounds. That's around 100 English pounds for each pot. When I refused, he told me he smashed them together. I was so appalled at such a malicious act. He it just breaks my heart to see the destruction and the loss to archaeological knowledge. Now, he went on, the locals, who are fiercely protective of their ancient domain are taking up the fight. One night, he said, a man helping his buffalo give birth in the early hours heard digging and pursued the looters with guns. We walked out of the village to a fading backdrop of music from a wedding, and started at the sharp stink of a dead dog. Beneath our feet, the ground was covered in mounds of pot shards left from Victorian archaeological digs. Soon we saw the first of many roughly dug pits. The sand was filled with freshly smashed pottery fragments, pointing to the precise cut marks into another tomb, its ancient mud bricks scattered. Kevin said the way they operated suggests they knew what they were doing. It disgusting that there are plenty of people guarding the main temple site, while out here in the desert there are unarmed guards facing increasing numbers of aggressive looters. We met one of these guards, a local man, at his simple reed guard box overlooking an official dig site. He told me how scared he'd been one night when looters, 15 or more, plundered a tomb only meters away from him. With no way to defend himself, all he could do was hide. They dragged out the mummy, he recalled, and ripped it apart as they searched for amulets on the ground nearby lay fragments of bone bound in tightly wrapped cloth. Elsewhere, lumps of glassy black bitumen used in the mummification process lay mingled with the modern day detritus of plastic bags and foam rubber flip flops. At sunset, I sat alone, my back against the village walls. To my left set his magnificent temple, its security lights coming on. To my right, the desert of graves disappeared into the mountains, named in antiquity after gods and goddesses. Lord of Offerings, lady of the Dawn. I returned in the early hours, walking to the desert's edge as a call to prayer rang out. There was a full moon, enough, I thought, to put off any looting close to the village. And at this time in the morning, the pock marked land seemed peaceful enough. But it was all too easy to imagine the sound of digging the final indignity wrought on those laid to rest thousands of years before. The irony is these were not the lavish graves of rich and noted men and women, but those of ordinary people for whom the pot smashed in the quest for valuables would have contained simple offerings grain, beer, milk, incense, meat, a little bit of luxury and comfort for the afterlife. Kevin's thoughts returned to the tiny package he'd held in his hands, and as I left him, he returned to the
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desert to rebury the child Christine Finn in the nile Valley. Exactly 150 years ago, on 17 March 1861, the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed with Turin as its first capital and Victor Emmanuel as its sovereign. A public holiday has been declared this week to commemorate the anniversary. Official celebrations marking the founding of the modern Italian state are to continue throughout the spring and summer. Yet David Willie tells us that many Italians have decided to sneak away to enjoy a four day long holiday weekend, turning up their noses at the whole idea that the state of Italy today is any reason for a public fanfare.
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Little tricolour flags, green, white and red, are suddenly fluttering from every lamp post in the small town just north of Rome where I live. Municipal junketings and parades and concerts have been organized all over the country, including at the Rome Opera with rousing performances of Verdi's patriotic opera Nabucco, the one with the famous chorus about Jewish exiles lamenting the loss of their homeland. Oh mea patria, oh my country so lovely and and so lost. A sense of patriotism isn't an emotion that comes easily in Italy these days, nor is it often publicly displayed under the tawdry leadership of Silvio Berlusconi. Any visitor knows the marble and bronze plaques decorating public buildings in most Italian cities, towns and villages, marking in grandiose prose the events of what became known as the Risorgimento, or the resurgence that was the 19th century political movement, which culminated in the reunification of Italy and its Mediterranean islands for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. So why is there such little enthusiasm for the current unification celebrations? Is modern Italy a republic since the ignominious fall of fascism and the departure of the monarchy at the end of World War II, really anything more than it was, in the famous words of the 19th century Austrian statesman Metternich, a mere geographical expression. Part of the story is the apparently irresistible rise of the Northern League, the separatist northern political party which aims at a return to northern Italian rule as at the time of the founding of the new Italian state. 150 years ago. The League, in alliance with Silvio Berlusconi, has steadily increased its share of the popular vote in recent years and is diametrically opposed to the idea of celebrating Italy's century and a half of nationhood. They want to pull the country apart again, to put an end to paying their taxes, to support millions of what they regard as lazy, corrupt and mafia infiltrated southerners living off government benefits. At this week's meeting of the right wing led regional government in Milan, councillors stood up and sang the Italian national anthem known as Fratelli d'. Italia. Brothers of Italy, in honour of the start of the anniversary celebrations. Brothers of Italy, the words go, let us unite. Some 20 Northern League members refused to join in. They ostentatiously left the chamber to drink coffee in the bar. Cowards. Shouted other councillors. The Northern League, which began life 20 years ago as the Lombard League, sings to a different tune that famous vapenciero chorus from Verdi's Nabucco, which they've adopted as their official anthem. Another lot of Italians who have scant respect for the rest of the country's anniversary celebrations are the mainly German speaking former Austrians, the people of South Tyrol, who were forced to become Italian citizens as a result of the disappearance of the Habsburg Empire at the end of the First World War. We have no reason to celebrate. We were annexed against our will, the local regional chief, the head of the dominant South Tyrol People's Party, said recently. This patchwork quilt of former Mediterranean city states, principalities, grand duchies, papal territories and kingdoms subdued after successive centuries of occupation by foreigners, including the French, the Austrians, the Normans, the Spanish and even the British, is giving only two cheers for democracy this week. The anniversary part is a bit of a flop. 150 years after the official unification, Italy is still searching for its true identity. The nation that first mooted the idea of a united Europe still cannot decide whether its true loyalty should be to the individual city states of which it's composed, or to Rome, to Lombardy or to Brussels. Meanwhile, for those of us who live here, the question remains how long can Italy's dolce vita image continue to be sustainable in an era of high unemployment, the prospect of a new mass influx of migrants from North Africa, and the continued haemorrhage of the best and brightest brains seeking new lives elsewhere?
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David Willey in Rome. There has been more serious fighting in South Sudan ahead of the area's independence, which is due to come in later this year. The south, which is mainly Christian and animist, voted in a referendum in January to secede from the Arab Muslim north, against which it had fought a two decades long civil war. This time the violence broke out in the town of Malakal in the oil rich Upper Nile region. Dozens are said to have been killed when South Sudan troops battled with a rebel militia believed to be linked with the Khartoum government. In the north, the so called Sudan Troika, which consists of the United States, Norway and Britain, has been overseeing the run up to independence and has condemned the violence. Hugh Sykes, who's just been in Juba, the future capital of the south, has seen for himself that the transition is proving anything but smooth.
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It's seven o' clock in the morning in a suburb of Juba called Kator. A vivid dawn of pink, blue and green light has brightened the eastern sky. And now a heavy orange sun is lifting slowly above the high trees along the White Nile River. It's already hot. There are no seasons here, really, just hot and dry and hot and wet. The early months of the year are hot and dry. It's been about 40 degrees centigrade in the shade most days this week, which is nearly 110Fahrenheit. Thousands of people in Juba have no running water in their homes. Thousands of people in Juba have no electricity. Thousands of people in Juba live in shacks. Even top Juba lawyer Robert Lamoro, who lives in a solid brick house, gets his water from a tanker and tells me he has to charge his laptop in his office, which is a porter cabin, but there is a generator if he wants to do any work at home. After three hours, when the battery dies, he has to stop working and wait until morning. The view through the windscreen of the 4x4 Land Cruiser this hot Juba dawn is of low sunlight slanting through clouds of dust and smoke. An ordinary car wouldn't last long here. There are some tarmac roads, but most of the streets through this about to be capital are dirt tracks full of ruts and potholes. There's smoke in the air because there are rubbish fires in the ditches, flames leaping up in the shadows, some of them barely an arm's length from wooden shacks. Fortunately, this morning there's no wind where the sun hasn't yet penetrated. Some small grocery shops in wooden or tin huts are lit with candles. My driver John, says this is a poor place, you know. He drives very carefully. A small child darts directly in front of us carrying an empty yellow plastic container. A motorcycle cuts across our path. Driver and 2 billion passengers. Yellow plastic containers hanging from the bike we nearly run over a goat, adding to the eye stinging smoke. There's now a smell of rotting garbage. We pass some open ground which is a rubbish dump with a bumpy dusty path through the middle of it. A path that's being used by motorcycles and bikes and mothers with babies and small children, some wearing only ragged T shirts, no skirts or trousers. A pile of paper and empty plastic water bottles has been sat alight on the edge of the dump. Children are turning it over with sticks to keep it burning. A little girl, perhaps six years old, struggles past avoiding a small boy who's defecating on the path and stooping under the the weight of the baby brother who she's carrying on her back. Over to one side of the rubbish dump there are two dozen yellow plastic containers in a row and a water pump. These containers are everywhere and they're so heavy when they're full. And such young children staggering along, one container in each hand, knees bent, stopping every few paces to rest. On the road to the south, to Uganda. In every village of round Tukal, mud huts with conical straw roofs. In every village, yellow plastic containers and adults and children carrying them sometimes long distances to the nearest water pump. It's 120 miles from Juba to Nimule on the uganda border, about 190km. The road is so rough the journey took more than four hours. There is a project funded by the United States to surface this road with bitumen. The graders and water sprinkling, lorries and steamrollers are busy and it's been underway for four years and is scheduled to be finished this year. But I don't think it will be. There were just 2km of bitumen the day I travelled. This road though, is crucial. It's the main artery from South Sudan to the rest of the world. The Ugandan capital, Kampala is a day's drive from Juba. To drive from Juba to the Sudanese capital Khartoum takes a week. And after 22 years of civil war, war between north and South Sudan, there is now a new war of words and possibly worse. The south believes that the north is trying to sabotage its independence and accuses Khartoum of stirring up trouble by sponsoring militias in Upper Nile state in the south and in Abiye district in the north. The north denies this, but one fact is Abye and Upper Nile have a valuable commodity, oil. And there's good reason for the people living in the smoke and rubbish plagued shacks in Juba to care about that. Oil revenues could bring them Electricity and housing and water.
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Hugh Sykes in Juba so Discovery retired last week. The other two shuttles, Endeavour and Atlantis, have their final flights later this year. After that, if you want to travel to the International Space Station, it'll have to be a Russian spacecraft which gets you there. This week, the American space agency NASA signed a deal which will see Russian Soyuz rockets carrying US astronauts and cargo aloft until at least 2016. Richard Hollingham in Moscow says it's no surprise that there's a renewed sense of pride in that country's extraterrestrial adventures.
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As historical artifacts go, it's not much to look at. A charred cannonball two metres across its centre, hollowed out to just about allow a man to fit inside. In 1961, this Vostok capsule carried Yurig Garin around the Earth. Considering the importance of the spacecraft and today's nostalgia in Russia for the achievements of the Soviet Union, few people ever get to see it. The capsule is displayed in a private museum run by the state owned space company Energia, and it can take months to arrange a visit. I've been obsessed with space exploration from an early age, so once inside the museum, I could barely contain my excitement. Alongside Gagarin's spacecraft, there's the capsule that took the first woman into orbit, Valentyna Tereshukova. There's the first space capsule to carry three people. And the spacecraft flown by Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space. And with the Soviet space program once shrouded in secrecy, only now are the more colourful details of these missions emerging. Take the three man capsule, for instance. Vosthod 1. It was so cramped that the cosmonauts couldn't wear spacesuits. The story goes that one of the engineers warned the chief designer, Sergei Korolev, that the slightest leak of air would kill those on board. Korolev's solution was to appoint the engineer as one of the cosmonauts, figuring that this would help motivate him to make the capsule as safe as possible. All three cosmonauts survived the mission, although others weren't so lucky. Today's Soyuz spacecraft doesn't look much different from those pioneering designs. It's even launched on a rocket that wouldn't be out of place in a 1950s sci fi annual. So what's it like to be stuck in one of these cannonballs, being blasted into orbit? Like having a smallish elephant sit on your chest. According to retired Colonel Bialyev, who has taught countless cosmonauts how to survive the extreme gravitational forces involved. The Colonel was responsible for the enormous centrifuge machine which cosmonauts use in training. It's the largest in the world. A giant rotating arm that spins around within a drum shaped building to simulate launch and landing. As a tutor, the Colonel was the first to try it out. So he could teach people how to stay conscious at up to 12g. And not only conscious, but capable of pressing the right buttons in a confined space. In a spacesuit on top of a noisy, bumpy rocket. I may like space, but that's why I never wanted to be a spaceman. The centrifuge is at Star City, which sounds much grander than it is. A complex of crumbling concrete blocks on the outskirts of Moscow. Star City was once the secret training centre for Soviet cosmonauts. These days you're as likely to bump into an American, Canadian or European astronaut in the canteen. Narrowly avoiding a couple of Japanese astronauts cycling past through the snow. We head into the building where all these spacemen and women learn their craft. Like most things spacey in Russia, the Soyuz training facility is gloriously retro, if not a little kitsch. The three simulator capsules, spread out along an aircraft hangar of a room, are raised on platforms reached by carpeted stairs lined with pot plants. The capsules are surrounded by instruments with giant levers and dials, the sort of hardware sadly lacking from today's touchscreen world. To be fair, the rest of the controls are in an adjacent room full of shiny new computers. But even today's Soyuz capsule is a curious mixture of the old and new. In order to dock to the space station, the commander uses an optical periscope which sticks out of the side. Why not a camera, I ask. Why make it complicated? Replies the Colonel. And that's the great thing about Russian space technology. It may look a bit dated, but. But it works. I've seen Soyuz launched in a blizzard. The slightest gust of wind delays the shuttle. When I first reported on the Russian space industry in the mid-1990s, it was at its lowest ebb. Space was considered a luxury the country could ill afford. The Boran space plane had been cancelled. Space Station Mir was a liability and the official state space museum was being used as a car showroom. Colonel Byalyev told me he hoped the Russian space program was now being re energised. And Russia appears to be reasserting itself in space. The International Space Station is based on Russian expertise, supplied by Russian rockets and soon to be commanded by a Russian. There's even talk of nuclear powered spacecraft and missions to Mars. In comparison with the shuttle about to be retired and funding cut, the American space program seems lacking in ambition. Fifty years after Yuri Gagarin first orbited the Earth, could the real winner of the space race be Russia?
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Richard Hollingham on the retro and kitsch which I saw in a Vostok rocket on exhibition over 40 odd years ago, which had orange chintz curtains to keep out the glare of the sun. More on Saturday. Please join us. Goodbye.