← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Nov 12, 2011
00:28:11
"That's nobody's business but the Turks'. " A quote from one of several songs which are...
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Hello, this is from our own correspondent, a download from the BBC.
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For a sneak preview of our program, you can join our feed on Twitter and there's a daily airing of from
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our own correspondent on the BBC World Service.
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But now the latest edition as broadcast
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on BBC Radio 4 and it's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Will he go today? Tomorrow. Silvio Berlusconi is believed to be on the point of resigning. As Italians contemplate tears, blood and austerity. Turkey says it still wants EU membership despite the debt problems and mounting insecurity. There's a new law on property in Cuba. But does it really mean the grip of Castro Communism is finally being relaxed. And a tough trek across the Pyrenees in the footsteps of those who cross the mountains escaping from the Nazis. The lower house of the Italian parliament is about now starting to debate a stringent economic reform package designed to curb Italy's huge debts. If, as expected, it's approved, it'll pave the way for the promised resignation of the Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his replacement by a former European commissioner, Mario Monti. Hugh Sykes, who's been in Italy all week, says it can be hard to comprehend how a country which does so much so well can have got itself into so much trouble.
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In the piazza outside the Italian parliament, waiting and watching for another scene to unfold in the political drama here, I rested my laptop on a ledge at the base of an ancient stone column and sent emails and filed a radio report over the Internet using free public no password WI fi on the sleek, smooth Freccia Rossa, the Red Arrow, the high speed train between Milan and Naples. I looked up at the screen at the end of the carriage and noticed that we were travelling at 285km an hour, nearly 180 miles an hour. This is an advanced, sophisticated country. Made in Italy is an honourable, reliable label. Wine, cheese, Parma ham, fashion cars, scooters, fridges, cookers. In Piacenza, near Milan, I was shown round the Jobs factory. No relation to Steve Jobs. They make machine tools, they export them all over the world. Machine tools for making car bodies and doors, fuselages and wings for aircraft, including the Boeing Dreamliner. The marketing director Antonio Dordoni pointed out a cross section of the Eurofighter, the jet fighter, which is a product of a European consortium. The right wing is made in Italy, he informed me. The left wing is made in Spain. The fuselage is made in Germany, the tail is made in Britain, the cockpit is made in France. And they are all our customers. All those parts are made with Our Italian machine tools. Italian exports are doing very well at the jobs factory. I asked Antonio about the apparent disconnect between that and the crisis. Yes, he said we have a financial crisis, but we don't have an industrial crisis. Several people I've met here over the past month say that the markets are being unreasonable, that they pay far too much attention to the ratings agencies, moodys and standard and poors. Who are they to decide the fate of a nation? A member of Parliament complained, they don't understand us. You can't apply the linear logic of economics to a complex society like Italy. We're intelligent and we have criminality, we're creative and we don't pay our taxes. That's who we are, that's our DNA. But that train again. The Frecciarossa sped through a heavy storm on its way north from Naples. Rain poured in round the frame of one of the removable emergency exit windows. Bad seals. The ticket collector put paper towels on the floor to contain the puddle. A metaphor, maybe, for Italy's problems. This advanced, sophisticated country is also hugely in debt, leaking cash. But the remedy, austerity will please the markets, but it may do greater damage than the debt is doing. A senator, Paolo Tuzzanti, genial, bearded man, warned that there will be lacrima in sangue, tears and blood. Austerity is likely to include raising the retirement age, delaying pensions, reducing job security. He described Italian debt as the social shock absorber which pays for the generous, civilized welfare state. If you beat the donkey too hard, he warned, you will kill the donkey. You will kill the Italian economy. There's another danger. As I waited outside Parliament, a few, very few, angry protesters blew whistles and demanded revolution. But in October, a small group of anarchists who style themselves the Black Bloc, wearing motorcycle helmets, carrying petrol bombs, infiltrated and hijacked a peaceful anti capitalist demonstration here in Rome and set fire to police cars and a church. Austerity could fan those flames. But haven't I forgotten something? Somebody? In many ways, compared to the debt crisis, Silvio Berlusconi is a sideshow. But it is also about him. I'm fed up with it. Secondary school English teacher Domenico Rascona told me. Whenever I go abroad, it's, where are you from? Oh, Italy. Ha, ha ha. Berlusconi. It's embarrassing. The announcement that Silvio Berlusconi will resign when the austerity measures are passed came first not from him, but from the President. Berlusconi himself seemed to be focused not on the crisis, but on what he regarded as betrayal. Photographers with long lenses zoomed in on the notepad on his desk in the Chamber of Deputies. Next to the figure for the number of people who supported him in a procedural vote, Berlusconi had written the figure eight and next to that the word traditore. Eight former supporters who'd turned against him. Eight traitors.
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Hugh Sykes in Rome don't laugh, the Romanian president told correspondents on Thursday. We still want to join the European Union, traian Basescu told them. Romania continued to support the process of integration, and Turkey's desire to join the European club also appears undiminished. Its Europe minister this week suggested that while Turkey's need for the union might have declined, the EU's need for Turkey was actually growing. When there's a balance in mutual need, he said, Turkey would become a member. Kevin Connolly has been taking a look at some of the issues which have been holding up its membership.
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If you put your mind to it, you can write popular music lyrics about pretty much anything. As the lyricist behind the unwarranted bravado of we're going to Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line could tell you. When British forces recaptured the strategically important town of El Burdi on the coast of Libya during the Second World War, the event was swiftly celebrated with the breezy toe tapper where do we go from here now that we've captured Bardia? The anglicised pronunciation made it rhyme, of course, but it also celebrated a sort of high handed genius for making those funny foreign place names sit more comfortably on the colonialist tongue. But but surely the most improbable source of musical inspiration of all time is the shifting historical identity of the great Turkish city of Istanbul, which straddles the Bosphorus and links Europe to Asia. In the late 1920s, one of America's best known jazz orchestras recorded a song commemorating the city's old name, Constantinople. It hasn't dated. Well, you sing the name out in full and then the rest of the chorus consists of spelling it out at dizzying speed. C O N S T A N T I N O P L E It probably wasn't written with any real political intent, but it did commemorate the fact that before the city was conquered by the Muslim Ottoman Turks, it had served as the capital of the Byzantine Empire, that wobbly Christian edifice built on the ruins of Rome. A few years later, a sort of musical rebuttal was produced, which became a much bigger hit. It's called In Istanbul, not Constantinople, and contains the immortal line why did Constantinople. Get the works. That's nobody's business but the Turks. It was written, incidentally, by a Northern Irish songwriter called Jimmy Kennedy, who was a bottomless font of eccentric inventiveness. He was responsible for hanging out the washing on the Siegfried line, but he also wrote the Teddy Bears Picnic and the Hokey Cokey. He captures with surprising deftness an ambiguity in the Turkish identity on a fault line between the worlds of Christianity and Islam and between Europe and Asia. It feels as though it doesn't quite belong anywhere and doesn't quite not belong anywhere. That might be the reason why negotiations over Turkey's membership of the European Union have now dragged on for a startling 52 years and are still nowhere near any kind of conclusion. People who were still in primary school when the process began now qualify for free public transport. Some of the obstacles are problems that Turkey could have fixed for itself, like its penchant for locking up inconvenient or recalcitrant journalists. But there's no doubt that at the core of the difficulties is a European ambivalence over what Turkey is and indeed where it is. There's a revealing video clip of President Sarkozy of France, which you can find on the Internet where he's asked why he doesn't think Turkey should be allowed into the eu, and he pauses before replying, because it's not in Europe. A lot of Turks find that kind of talk both irritating and insulting. After all, no such reservations were raised during the Cold War, when Turkey, which bordered both Communist Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, was very firmly in NATO, that other club of wealthy democratic nations. There is a feeling that Turkey is being asked to garb the camp without being allowed to enter the tent. Over the course of the 52 years of talks, a few things have changed in and around the European continent. Turkey back then was desperately poor and underdeveloped and saw the EU as a source of aid more than trade. Now it is booming and has a sound banking system run on old fashioned principles. From the Turkish perspective, you can see how the European Union might be parodied as a rather odd club in which the thrifty, hard working north ends up bailing out the sunbathing south, a club no one would want to join. And if Turkey ends up negotiating membership through the years of plenty and then finds itself ultimately joining the EU in leaner times, you can see why it might feel it's being invited to a restaurant so late that it misses the feast, but arrives in time to pick up the bill. And yet Turkey is still desperately keen to join the European Union. In common with quite a list of other countries in South Eastern Europe, that might conjure an image of swimmers striking out desperately towards a sinking ship in choppy waters. But to lots of people in Turkey, it still makes perfect sense. They argue that the rules of the European Union amount to a kind of instruction manual for running an economy and a modern democratic state. They realize that some of the current members have been ignoring the instructions, of course, with consequences that may ultimately be disastrous. But runs the argument, the rules themselves are still valid and are the best blueprint of their kind available anywhere. Turkey does occasionally toy with the idea of becoming a kind of regional superpower in the Middle east, reviving influence in the turbulent lands where it once exercised imperial power. But no amount of talk about the rise of a new Ottoman identity will displace that old itch to be invited into the European Union. It's hard to be sure exactly what drives this Turkish ambition. A desire to be recognized as the equal of France or Germany. A hunger for global recognition of its growing wealth and modernity. Perhaps a feeling that a country of Muslims should be allowed to join what has been an essentially Christian club. And if at this troubled moment in European history, those ambitions are a little harder to understand. Well, as our songwriter put it all those years ago, that's nobody's business but the Turks.
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And that was Kevin Connolly. A new property law was introduced in Cuba this week. It's being seen as the most important reform so far in a series of economic changes introduced by President Raul Castro. Cuba's been an outpost of Marxist Leninism for more than 50 years and a constant source of irritation to The United States, 90 miles away across the Florida Straits. But there's debate about quite how much the grip of Castro style communism is being relaxed. Peter Day's been to Cuba to investigate.
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In any other country, the taxi would have been run off the road decades ago. But this was Havana. And off we roared back to the hotel, a wild, rip snorting ride along the city's wave battered Malecon seafront Avenue in a blue 1953American Ford saloon. It was nothing very special in Havana, still full of vintage cars, kept running by ingenuity and cobbled together spare parts. Many were cars imported into Cuba before Fidel Castro led his revolution in 1959 against the Batista regime, before the United States imposed its embargo on Cuba in 1960. Imported before this poverty stricken country was plunged into a time warped from which it has yet to emerge. Or has it? I went to Cuba because of a string of recent announcements from the government now led by Fidel's brother, President Raul Castro. They seem to indicate some freeing up of the state's powerful grip on the economy, an attempt to shift more than 1 billion jobs from state employment to small businesses, for example, and for the first time in communist Cuba, the right to sell cars and residential property rather than merely pass them on or swap them. The authorities seem to be embracing free enterprise in the controlled manner of Vietnam rather than the extravagance of China. Still, in a country where time has stood still, no gone backwards for so long, these moves sound like a big deal. Cubans I listened to were not so sure. The new rules won't make importing new cars any easier and they may bring out into the open the price is offered on the city's auto black market. One driver I talked to had been offered the equivalent of 40,000 pounds for his ancient Soviet larder. Cuba is a looking glass world where revolutionary zeal is the main subject of the roadside billboards and flocks of overseas tourists enjoying sea, sun and sand are kept at bay and exploited at the same time by having to use a hugely expensive convertible currency which worth 25 times the value of the national peso, the one used by everyday Cubans. But how do everyday Cubans get by with more than 80% of the workforce, from doctors to labourers, dependent on tiny state wages, millions of them. Well, just like the two currencies side by side with the official economy, there's an unofficial one based on tips and little extras and jobs on the side. It looks as if President Raul is trying to perk up a moribund economy by unleashing some of the huge unofficial energy that Cubans currently expend on survival. In the gorgeous, mostly dilapidated center of Havana, where much hasn't changed for a hundred years or more, I stumbled on a newly painted building. It was a snug smart little Italian restaurant opened less than a month ago, but by a family who'd lived in the property for several generations. The front of the premises had been a little repair shop, but after the official green light for small private businesses, the Italian father had brought in the money to transform the place. Abroad is a prime source of revenue for many Cubans. A daughter who'd worked as a bookkeeper in a state owned firm was now running the business and five other proud family members were also involved. Official regulations restrict the size of private restaurants to 10 or 12 tables, but round the back they showed me a covered courtyard with space for 40 more if the authorities were ever to allow it. If the Cubans develop an appetite for private enterprise, then there will be pressure for expansion like this. And meanwhile the property will be gaining value against the day when business premises were will also be permitted to be bought and sold on the open market. You can see how businesses like that might create a new kind of prosperity that has not really been allowed in Cuba before. The mojitos were delicious too, notably stronger than the ones served in the big state run hotels. A bit of a post revolution you might say, except that Cubans are cautious about the impact of these changes. You don't meet many dissidents there, especially when you are brandishing a reporter's microphone. But on his balcony in the centre of Havana, looking down on his street of romantically crumbling apartments, an old former diplomat mocked the revolutionary slogans that are still almost the only advertising you see on the island. 53 years of revolution, he said. It's like talking about 53 years of giving birth.
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Peter Day In Cuba, cyberspace has been trilling with comment after a market research company found that Indians were among the happiest people in the world. Ok, the Dutch, Canadians and Australians all seemed happier. But nevertheless, fourth place out of all those nations was surely something to smile about. So why so happy? There were suggestions it had much to do with improved job and income prospects. Some were saying it was all down to the national cricket team, while others believed it was because the family is so much a part of Indian life. These views perhaps reflect the fact that while India has an economy which now outperforms many, it's a place where traditional values are still respected. Justin Rolat's been to the city of Varanasi, where the older ways of doing things show no signs of being overtaken by the modern world.
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The man swung his heavy bamboo pole down upon the already half incinerated corpse. It doubled up in a cloud of red embers. His second blow shattered the skull. Then he used the pole to deftly stack the burning logs on top of the now fizzing and sizzling knot of flesh and bone. He wiped the sweat from his face with his arm and stood back to survey his work. He seemed content and sat down on his haunches to watch the now blazing fire, encouraging it with a prod or a poke every now and then. There were nine other funeral pyres burning on the beach of sun baked mud alongside the swirling caramel brown waters of the Ganges. Each one was tended by a similarly stick thin man in a white dhoti armed with a Large bamboo pole. Each one contained its own sputtering, burning corpse. Manikani Khagat is in the Indian holy city of Varanasi. Agatha means a series of steps down to water. There are 80 ghats lining the Ganges here in Varanasi, many with elaborate temples or palaces. Almost all are used for bathing the steps allowing pilgrims to wash in the holy waters. Manikarnika ghat is one of the two which specialise in the grisly business of human cremation. These cremation ghats certainly do serve as a reminder of just how fragile human life is. Though the funeral practices in the west insulate us from the reality of death, here it was all too apparent that we are all just flesh and blood and bone. The fires coughed out great plumes of sticky black smoke. The smell, the taste of burning fat, was unmistakable. Half an hour amongst the pyres was enough for me, and I retreated back to the temple complex at the top of the steps to escape the smoke and the ferocious heat. There I met Gajanand Choudhary, the man in charge of Manikanika ghat, in the shade of the temple. He told me that people bring their dead here because Manikanika is reckoned to be the most auspicious place on earth for a Hindu to be cremated. As he spoke, another corpse arrived on a bamboo stretcher. Six pallbearers pushed past us, carrying it on their shoulders. The body was wrapped in a golden shroud and and decorated with garlands of marigolds. We watched as they took it down to the Ganges where they washed it, cleansing the body before it was burnt. If you are burned here at Manikanika Ghat, gajanand continued unperturbed, you will achieve moksha. The cycle of reincarnation will be broken, and your soul will ascend straight to heaven. He almost made it sound like an invitation, though not one I want to take him up on anytime soon. The reason the ghat is so sacred, Gajanand explained, is because the cremation fires are lit by a flame that is believed to have emanated from Lord Shiva himself. Shiva is the Hindu God of destruction or transformation, and one of the most powerful in the entire pantheon. You want to see the flame? He asked. I nodded enthusiastically and Gajanand led me up a narrow staircase and along a crowded balcony. He gestured to an arch where a small wood fire was smouldering. It didn't look that impressive to me. Someone was cooking a pan of rice on it, which rather detracted from Its mystical significance. As we stood talking, one of the cremation men pushed the pan aside and collected a few embers in a small earthenware pot. Another fire, Gajanand explained casually, we now have up to 25 fires at a time. Indeed, Manikanika ghat has never been busier. The fires now burn 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And the reason the trade is so brisk is, it seems simple. As India gets richer and the road network more extensive and more reliable, more and more people are bringing their dead here to seek moksha. A decade or so ago, it was only families in the direct vicinity of Varanasi who could bring their dead here. Now it's not unusual for even quite poor families to travel great distances to bring a body to the cremation ghats. We're used to hearing stories about how modern life makes the world more homogenous. But it seems that here in India, modernity doesn't always undermine the old traditions. Indeed, the problem here in Varanasi now is that the funeral ghats are operating almost at capacity. And as Gajanan put it, the dead sometimes have to queue in the narrow alleyway outside the ghat. A small price to pay, I reflect, for a swift ascent to heaven.
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Justin Rolatt in Varanasi. Finally to a corner of the Pyrenees where each year a walk is held to Commemorate the nearly 800 people who, during the Second World War crossed the mountains here to escape from Nazi occupied Europe. Allied airmen and Jewish refugees were among those who braved the dangers of the trek from France into Spain, which is known today as the Chemin de liberty. This year, the walkers were joined by my Radio 4 colleague, Edward Stanton. He confesses now that the 40 mile long hike was hard going.
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The good escaper, says a 1944 British military document called Tips for Escapers and Evaders is the man who keeps himself fit, cheerful and comfortable. He's not a he man who boasts about his capacity to endure discomfort. He should be a man of sound common sense and above all, a man of great determination. I'm certainly not a he man. I hate discomfort. I'm cheerful by nature, with a reasonable supply of common sense. I hope, and I like achieving my goals. So I ticked most of those boxes. The problem lay in that unassuming little word, fit. I'm 53. Most of my work involves sitting in studios or at desks. And I like the good things in life. The Chemin de la Liberte takes four days. It involves climbing 15,000ft up and 11 down the weather changes as if someone's hit the fast forward button. On the seasons, we experienced a dank drizzle, boiling heat, freezing mists, snow underfoot, and then more heat in quick succession. There was a point to putting myself through all this. Every time I interviewed a survivor who'd done it for real during the Second World War, I found myself brought up short by the chasm and that separated my own experiences from theirs. Reflect on what it was like, for example, to be shot down over Belgium when you're only 19 years old, your parachute works something of a surprise in itself since you've had only the most rudimentary training. And when you land, you find yourself behind enemy lines with most of Nazi occupied Europe between you and freedom. You have to ask someone for help, even though you know they're risking their lives if they give it to you. And if you're lucky and they don't turn you in, there's still the long journey south to negotiate past German checkpoints and patrols with, at the end of it all, the climb over these massive mountains. Or think of the Jewish families who attempted the Pyrenees, just one step ahead of arrest and deportation to the death camps. I was told the story of a woman who carried her two year old daughter across in November snow. When the child cried in the cold, their guide said she should be suffocated because the noise might alert the German patrols. And one of the French helpers, one local supporter of the Chemin, remembered his mother hiding escaping Allied airmen in her mountain B and B, where she was providing lodgings for German troops at the same time. All of these experiences are so far beyond our own that they seem to belong almost to another dimension. The walk, I reasoned, might help me build an imaginative bridge over that chasm. At the pass where we crossed the frontier into Spain, seven and a half thousand feet above sea level, we paused for a brief ceremony in remembrance of Maurice Collins, an RAF pilot who asked that his ashes should be scattered there. Collins had needed real grit and determination to get home. In 1941, he crossed the mountains up to my testicles in snow, as he later so vividly put it, and spent three months in a Spanish concentration camp before the British authorities were able to extract him. And it seemed ironic that he'd chosen the mountains, which had caused him so much pain and suffering, as his final resting place. But as I talked to my fellow walkers, like Chaucer's pilgrims to Canterbury, we shared our tales. Along the way, I came to understand what a powerful aid to remembrance this mountain journey has become. Many of them had a personal connection with the past we were honoring and. And some of them had kept coming back again and again. There was one man who'd completed the trek 10 times because he was so fascinated by his late father's account of escaping across the Pyrenees in 1941. The escape lines Memorial Society calls the Chemin a walking memorial. And it's become a way of passing the idea of remembrance on down the generations. There was a young man from Liverpool with us, seeking peace with more recent history. He showed no obvious interest in the Second World War, but he was making a pilgrimage in memory of his brother, killed serving in Afghanistan two years ago. He was using his brother's backpack and walking gear and listened to his brother's favourite songs on his ipod as he swung along with the rest of us.
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Edward Steddon. And you can hear his program Freedom Trail, here on Radio 4 at 11 o' clock on Monday morning. And that's it. More from our own correspondence, some fitter than others. Next week. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.