← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
May 21, 2010
00:27:57
The carrots and sticks which the authorities in Saudi Arabia hope will persuade their...
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Hi there. You're about to hear from our own correspondent, a Download from the BBC. We make editions of the program for both the BBC World Service and Radio 4. And this is the latest Radio 4 broadcast. As ever, it's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, the carrots and sticks preventing the Arab Spring from taking root in Saudi Arabia. The lessons to be learned from the catastrophe at Fukushima. We get a view from inside a nuclear power plant on the River Danube. The American President's flying in, but thousands are getting ready to leave. How Ireland's tottering economy has created a new wave of emigration. And what on earth was Tarzan of the Apes doing in Algiers? We're in the Kasbah trying to find out. Barack Obama is preparing to travel to Europe at the end of a week which has seen him concentrate on the Middle East. Yesterday he had an apparently difficult meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Earlier, he announced a programme of economic help for those countries in the region which have been shaken up by popular uprisings. Saudi Arabia has not seen the sort of protests which have been going on elsewhere and it wasn't mentioned in the President's speech yet. It's a country still central to American policy in the Middle east and millions are being spent on protecting its oil riches. Amid worries about Al Qaeda and doubts about the future ambitions of nearby Iran. Michael Buchanan, who's in Saudi Arabia, says it's a place which above all values stability.
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There were hundreds of them, migrant workers from south and East Asia coming to Saudi Arabia to work for meager but tax free wages. And their arrival in Riyadh coincided with my flight, making for a teeming but fairly orderly passport hall. The queues were not moving much, however, and so one tall, thin Indian man decided to sit on the floor. Not for long, though. Out of nowhere, one of the guards shoved his way into the line, spraying people left and right, and hauled the man back onto his feet. Moments later, the same guard kicked the arm of another migrant worker who couldn't figure out how to operate the biometric scanning machine. It was my first impression of the country and to the extent of the incident's highlight, the authoritarian, uncompromising nature of Saudi society, not to mention the appalling manner in which some low skilled migrant workers are treated, that it has proven fairly accurate. I've traveled the breadth, if not the length of this desert kingdom over the past week or so, and the lesson I've learned again and again is that there is a Saudi way of doing things which is quite unique. A tribal, hierarchical, Society defined almost exclusively by its religion, tends not to tolerate much dissent and looks suspiciously at any new behaviours and ideas. A suggestion last week, for instance, from the Education Minister that it was maybe time to consider sending boys and girls to mixed sex primary schools led to one opponent claiming the idea would turn boys into transvestites. Any notion that Saudis had that the uprisings in other Middle Eastern countries might take root here were brushed aside a few weeks ago by an edict from the country's religious leaders that dissent and protest were un Islamic and that Saudis should obey their rulers. We don't challenge our parents in the house, one man told me. And so what makes you think we're going to challenge our government? On the streets, beside a big stick, a rather large carrot has been dangled in front of Saudis. The ruler, King Abdullah, in a series of announcements over the past few weeks, says his government is going to spend an unprecedented amount of money, more than £60 billion and counting, on social programs, raising public sector salaries, providing increased state aid to help people buy houses, and benefits for the first time for the country's burgeoning number of unemployed people. That's not to say that efforts at reform, if not exactly revolution, have been killed off. In the large basement of a wealthy businessman's house, I attended a diwaniyassentially, a cultural forum in which about 30 people came and discussed the merits of allowing women to vote. I met and chatted with some of the participants before the event started, but once we walked down the stairs, we were split. Men in one section, women in another, separated behind a partition in the corner of the room. When I asked one man why we couldn't mix as we had upstairs, he just said, this is the Saudi way. Other reformers are pushing for women to be allowed to drive, for women to sign legal documents, for companies to hire more Saudis, for stronger action to be taken to tackle corruption, for the practice of wasta, the need to know someone, to get ahead, to become redundant. The pervasive influence of those last two problems was brought home to me by a great story I was told over dinner one night, which may or may not be apocryphal. A Saudi princess asked if she could see a large house that had been built by a local businessman with a view to either renting or buying it. Flattered, he of course showed her round. But instead of paying any money, she simply took the keys and moved in. All attempts to remove her failed. So the man transferred ownership of the house to an American woman he knew who promptly called the US Embassy and told them that her property was being occupied, effectively by a squatter. The princess left shortly afterwards. Blogs and tweets and Facebook pages abound on such stories and topics and and small meetings are occasionally held. But few major changes are predicted. Civil society does not exist here in the way it does in other Arab countries. So as much of the reformists efforts are concentrated on organizing and informing as they are in actually pushing for change, the conservatives in the country are powerful and vocal and those pushing against them cannot say for certain how much support their ideas have. Although one poll suggested that 69% of Saudis do not want to give women the right to vote. Saudi Arabia has undoubtedly embraced economic change in recent years, raising the living standards of its citizens. It has been far less willing, however, to embrace political and social change. And whatever winds may be buffeting its neighbours, the Saudis are likely to continue to value stability above all else.
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Michael Buchanan in Saudi Arabia it wouldn't have happened in Stalin's time. The Russian President was loudly booed the other day by reporters who'd come to a press conference hoping he'd tell them if he was going to stand for re election. Dmitry Medvedev kept them guessing about any plans he might have for a second term in the Kremlin. Some observers believe he'll stand aside to allow the Prime Minister and former President Vladimir Putin to run again this week. Observed by our man Steve Rosenberg, he's been out and about in the south of the country shaking hands and looking like a politician, drumming up support.
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I've often thought that trying to make sense of Russian politics is a little bit like trying to do a 5,000 piece jigsaw with half the pieces missing and with no picture on the box to help you, you can spend an eternity struggling to fit together the bits you have. And just when you think you've uncovered a connection, a tiny clue to the mystery, you realise, no, that doesn't fit. After all, you have to pull it all apart and start again. Because politics in Russia is conducted behind closed doors, with the curtains drawn and the shutters down. Most of the jigsaw pieces that Kremlinologists have to work with are hints, rumours, speculation, plus whatever public announcements the politicians deign to make. The problem is that the picture keeps changing. One minute it looks like Vladimir Putin will replace Dmitry Medvedev in the Kremlin, the next that President Medvedev will get a second term. Sometimes it seems that Putin and Medvedev are one team, sometimes that they're rivals, and sometimes that the next President of Russia will be someone completely different. Make sense of all of that? But this month, two things have happened which may hint at how the puzzle will be solved. Dmitry Medvedev held his first high profile news conference since becoming president more than three years ago. The event was broadcast live by three Russian TV channels. In the end, there was no big announcement. In two hours, the President said very little that was new. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Putin has created a new political movement, the All Russian People's Front. His it aims to unite different parties, unions and business groups around the Prime Minister. The way the jigsaw pieces lie now, it looks like Mr. Putin will make a play for the presidency. If that really is the final picture of the political jigsaw, what do Russians think about it? Mr. Putin has fierce critics, particularly among the more liberal, pro Western section of society. They accuse him of rolling back on democracy, eroding human rights and encouraging corruption. They're the kind of criticisms you often hear in Moscow. To find out what people think away from the capital, I traveled to Krasnodar in southern Russia, far enough from Moscow to feel the pulse of the nation. Most of the people I spoke to in the city and in the villages outside expressed support for Mr. Putin. Like Irina, a 24 year old marketing manager, who I chatted with in the park. Speaking as a woman, Putin's more handsome than Medvedev, Irina told me. What's more, she continued, its Putin who began the reforms, Medvedev's just continuing them. Pavel told me that Putin was a tough guy, just the kind of leader Russia needs. Pensioner Olga said she thought Putin was closer to the people than Medvedev. Curiously, everyone had something to complain about. The state of the Russian education system, low pensions, rising petrol prices. But few people blamed central government directly for their problems, preferring to hold local officials or multi billionaire oligarchs responsible for things that go wrong. It's not Putin's fault that fuel prices are going up in our city, a man called Sergei assured me. How could he know what's happening here? The local bureaucrats hide the truth from him. I wasn't the only visitor to Krasnodar that day. Vladimir Putin was there too, on a trip to promote Russian sport. At the local physical education college, Mr. Putin watched young people wrestling and boxing and lifting weights. Russian TV cameras crowded round to capture the action. Prime Minister Putin loves being associated with the world of sport. He's often shown on TV here doing judo, skiing, swimming or playing ice hockey. It boosts his image as a strong leader. I suspect it's one of the reasons he remains Russia's most popular politician. In the corridor of the college, I spotted Mr. Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. Now this was a chance to fill in some key pieces of the jigsaw, to find out whether the picture I think I formed is accurate. So was Vladimir Putin planning a Kremlin comeback? I don't know who's going to be the next president of this country, Mr. Peskoff said with a large smile, followed by a little chuckle. Oh well, it was worth a try. I'll just have to keep puzzling it out.
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And that's Steve Rosenberg on a subject which will doubtless keep him busy in the months ahead. The European Commission has been meeting in Prague this week to try to agree a safety framework for the 14 EU countries which have nuclear power plants. Since the suspected meltdown caused by the earthquake and tsunami at Fukushima in Japan in March, nuclear power plants around the world have been scrambling to check their safety procedures. It's meant testing the ability of structures, equipment and staff to withstand both natural and man made disasters. Nick Thorpe's been to one plant, which is on the River Danube in Romania.
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When the great Russian writer Pushkin was a baby, Moscow was hit by a Romanian earthquake in October 1802. His nanny was pushing his pram through the grounds of a church on a Sunday morning. Soon after, the service ended when the earth shook and the masonry began falling. Professor George Muamurianu, head of the Earth Physics Institute near Bucharest, tells me this apocryphal tale as we sit discussing the Japanese nuclear disaster and the object of his lifetime study, the Vrancha fault in in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. Vrancia is the mother of all Romanian earthquakes, the professor explains, but they usually take place between 100 and 200 km below the surface, so they affect places a long way away. I have to study his face to make sure he's not joking. One day Rome might feel ripples from Brancha, another day, Moscow. I've come to see him to hear about the possible earthquake risk from the Vranche fault for Romania's only nuclear power station at Chernavoda on the Danube. Professor Mamonianu carried out all the seismic tests on the power station so far and gave reactors one and two a clean bill of health each time. Chernovoda is designed to withstand a quake of 7.5 on the Richter scale, he explains, and Vransche has never had a quake bigger than 7.5 in the thousand years and for which records exist. The Problem will come, he continues, with plans for reactors 3 and 4. How come the International Atomic Energy Authority in Vienna now requires safety standards for new reactors of 10,000 years? 10,000 years, he repeats, wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes. I start to warm to the professor. We take refuge together in geological time. Could Czerno Voda be hit by a bigger quake than it has been designed for in the next 10,000 years? I want to know, given that the spent fuel rods currently stored outside the reactor blocks will remain radioactive for 300,000 years. I refuse to predict what will happen in that span of time, he insists. Look at Africa. It's moving towards Europe at a speed of 16 millimeters a year. Look at Madagascar. It's forming a new continent. As we stand in his multi million dollar control room, he casually drops another statistic into our conversation. Do you realize there are 65 earthquakes a day on this planet? He gets a text message about each on his mobile phone. Two and a half hours east, at Chernavoda, I sit down with the director, Yonal Bukur, for a strong coffee. He's a good storyteller too. Like Pushkin. He was also in Moscow, but in 1977, working on plans for a Soviet designed pressurized water reactor in southern Romania. But then another Vrancha earthquake badly damaged several towns near the site they had in mind. So those plans were scrapped and a different nuclear plant was built with Canadian technology at Chernavoda instead. He's been there ever since. Czernavoda is safe for many reasons, he explains. It's built on limestone. The uranium is not enriched, and unlike the Japanese reactor at Fukushima, the containment vessels are full of cooling water. Inside the blue control room, the turbines murmur in voices only nuclear engineers understand. I study panels which disclose the temperature of water pumped into the reactor hall and the temperature of that pumped back into the Danube and the little dosimeter pinned to my shirt until a female robot pronounces me clean at the end of the trip and I stumbled back into the uncontrolled environment beyond the nuclear gates. In the car, I read a paper on tsunamis in the Black Sea in the last few thousand years. The Byzantine chronicler Theophanes recorded that in the year 544, the sea advanced on Thrace by four miles and covered the land in the territories of Odessus, Dionysopolis and Aphrodisium. Many were drowned in the waters. By God's command, the sea then retreated to its own place. Theophanes concluded, as perhaps we all will sooner or later.
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Nick Thorpe In Romania, the Algerian authorities, like the Saudis we heard about earlier, are introducing measures they hope will persuade people that revolution is not in their best interests. Earlier this year, violent protests left at least five dead and hundreds wounded. Since then, the Algerian government has lifted a state of emergency, announced a series of political reforms and increased public service salaries by up to 70%. So will that be enough to keep the lid on simmering public discontent? Kevin Connolly's there trying to find out.
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I don't think I'd given a thought to Tarzan of the Apes since the long distant day when my voice broke and I realised I'd never be able to impersonate his yodeling, ululating war cry, it having been very much the fashion to try when I was growing up. In fact, his call was synthesized from the voices of an operatic soprano, a contralto and an Alabama hog caller. So it's probably just as well that I gave up. Tarzan, you may remember, was the scion of a noble British family who ends up being raised by West African jungle apes. As one of their own, he develops the muscular prowess of a gorilla and the manners of a British aristocrat. Although I always thought he'd be a more interesting literary character if it had been the other way round. As I said, he hadn't crossed my mind for nearly 40 years, but I hadn't been in Algiers for more than an hour before he cropped up twice in conversation. Apparently, Hollywood producers of the 1930s used the city's botanical gardens in place of the real West African rainforest to shoot at least one of his adventures. You can see the attraction. The gardens do look a bit jungly, and in the colonial 1930s, the luxurious hotels of the old French city were near at hand with their snowy napkins and sunny balconies. An improbable literary relationship was born. In one of the later novels, of which I now have a copy, Tarzan visits Algeria and I have found myself in the long, humid, sleepless nights following his voyage of discovery. In parallel with our own, the book has not dated well, it would be fair to say Tarzan is not of the cloth from which good diversity officers are cut. Being wearingly given to racial generalisation, the French are impulsive, Arabs don't like fighting foreigners and so on. He is also better in the small handful of situations which can be solved by hitting other people, rather than in the greater number which call for more subtle analytical skills. Nearly 80 years on from Tarzan's trip, we had come to explore the idea that the bracing winds of The Arab Spring might be about to blow through more of the countries of the Maghreb, but in a country where the shadow of tough, authoritarian government hangs over every conversation, it's easy to see why people prefer to talk about the many less obviously political ways in which foreign influences are absorbed here. The Kasbah of Algiers, for example, remains a place of brooding intensity, a warren of twisting, narrow, steep alleyways and tall buildings that spill down a precipitous hillside to the Old Port. It can seem impossibly exotic. On market stalls, great, fat purple heads of garlic are piled high alongside lemons, waxed and buffed like supermodels. Ornately tiled doorways lead down to public shower rooms in pungent cellars. The houses crowd in on you, heavily cantilevered, so the upper floors lean towards each other more closely than the lower ones. Here and there you find walls shored up with wooden scaffolding, a rickety looking insurance against the dangers of another earthquake like the one which shook the city in 1856. And yet, everywhere there are signs of an obsession with English football. Dozens of young men wear soccer shirts, complete with a logo of the building society which sponsored the national team. Stickers proclaim support for various different Premiership clubs, and an entire shop is devoted to Manchester United memorabilia. To escape the crowded streets, we stepped into the cool recesses of a Sufi shrine, where the remains of a 15th century saint lie in repose under a mantle of shimmering emerald green. The room is small, but perhaps a dozen heavy crystal chandeliers hang down to head height. The brilliant blues and reds of the comfortable stacks of rugs that carpet the floor are dazzlingly refracted through the glass beads. Below them, recumbent women pray together, pausing every so often to spray one another with heavily scented rose water. An imam who had been shushing the women to preserve the sanctity of this place was where the breath of the divine stirs amid the treasures of antiquity approached us with a question. Now that Manchester City had beaten Stoke in the league so convincingly, did we think it was inevitable that they would edge Arsenal out of the automatic qualification places? The next season's Champions League? It is a reminder to us that in the world of the Internet and the television satellite, even the most repressive governments struggle to keep out foreign influence. The question is whether you can permit the gentle breezes of popular culture to blow across your borders without inviting the more bracing winds, which might bring the seeds of democracy and the economics of the free market along with them. It's a particularly interesting question in Algeria, which was once so bruised by its experience of colonialism that it banned the job of the shoeshine boy lest it remind people of the civility that went with French rule. It is hard to say how the Arab Spring will ultimately affect this vast and complex place. Perhaps people prefer the simplicities of sport precisely because they provide easier questions and less challenging answers. We will see. In the meantime, as Tarzan will be the first to tell you, these foreign countries can be the very devil to understand.
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Kevin Connolly in Algeria, clearly now an expert in the ways of Tarzan. Now, the Queen did not claim any sort of Irish ancestry when she visited the Republic earlier this week, but some European royals do, and in this they're joined by tens of millions of others around the world, Barack Obama among them. He's Ireland's next VIP visitor, arriving on Monday. The vast Irish diaspora, of course, follows wave upon wave of emigration today, as Kieran Cook's been finding out. In the west of the country, the tottering Irish economy means people are once again leaving in large numbers. Numbers.
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Two nearby bars, two events which seem, on the surface at least, very different. In one, at midday sits the immaculately turned out figure of Prince Albert of Monaco, enjoying a session of Irish music. The mood is upbeat. Those who can't cram into the pub stand outside, cowering under umbrellas against the lashing rain, trying to catch a glimpse of the royal visitor and his glamorous South African fiance. Another bar and a young red faced man, a university graduate, is being wished good luck and safe travels by a large group of family and friends. Despite the rapid downing of pints and singing, there's an air of slightly forced jollity about the place. Horick is leaving early next morning for a job and new life in Australia. By the look of things, he'll likely be nursing a hangover on his long journey. The link between the two gatherings is emigration, the issue that for generations has haunted the landscape of Ireland, particularly out here in the west of the country. Prince Albert's mother was the late Grace Kelly, the glamorous Hollywood actress who, marrying into the royal Grimaldi family of Monaco, became known to the world as the fairy tale Princess. Grace Kelly's grandfather emigrated from here in County Mayo to the United States in the late 19th century. Prince Albert has come to pay tribute to his Irish ancestry. His mother was obviously very attached to Ireland. The Monaco royals still own the old family homestead, though now it's a roofless, dilapidated ruin, grass growing from its walls. In the other bar, Porick talks of his strong attachments to his family, to Ireland, to the friends he's leaving behind. We call them Australia Wakes round here, he says. Big arms stretch round two of his fellow players in the local Gaelic football. During the boom years, we thought emigration had gone for good. But now so many of my mates are going, there's dozens of them in Australia and Canada. He slaps his two friends on the back. What's the betting they'll be out to join me before long? When Grace Kelly's grandfather left Ireland, he probably felt he was leaving for good. Now emigrants with modern air travel can return much more easily. But still, for Poric and the many thousands like him, leaving is often a deeply painful experience. Outsiders are often surprised that in Ireland there have been few big demonstrations of anger, no Greek style riots against the bankers and politicians who stand accused of bankrupting the country and of mortgaging the future. While some of the Irish might be fatalistic, saying the boom times were all a bit of a dream anyway, and now normal service has resumed, under the surface, there is deep anger most of all at the way those it's felt have brought the country to its knees have still not been held accountable. An elderly man at the Australia Wake leaving party says emigration is Ireland's safety valve. There'd be revolution around here if it wasn't for the habit of people going off to New York or London or Australia. It's like the kettle on the hob, he tells me. Emigration lets off the steam. It's the way things always were. So there's something of a paradox. Porrick and others like him are leaving in their droves, while others, Prince Albert amongst them, are eager to come and discover their roots, proud of their Irishness. There are millions around the world who claim some sort of Irish ancestry. In the US alone, it's estimated there are more than 40 million of them. Barack Obama is due to arrive here. Finding the Irish relations is a well known US presidential game. It seems Mr. Obama's great, great, great grandfather on his mother's side was born in central Ireland. It might be a tenuous connection, but Ireland is claiming the US President as its own. The town where his ancestor was a shoemaker is being spruced up and there's a welcoming song. O', Leary, O'Reilly, O' Hare and O'.
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Hara.
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There's no one as Irish as Barack Obama.
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And on that musical note from Kieran Cook in County Mayo, we've reached the end of this programme next week, two editions, once again. So join us for more from our own correspondence on Thursday morning as well as on Saturday. Until then, goodbye.