← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Nov 20 2010
00:28:13
Ireland prepares to say goodbye to the best and brightest of its youth – Gavin been...
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Transcript13 lines
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A
Hi, this is Alan Johnston.
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We make two editions of from our own correspondent. If you'd like to hear the version I introduce on the BBC World Service, you can find it by going to the BBC iPlayer. But here's the one broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's presented by Kate Ady.
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Today, a brain drain Ireland can ill afford. A whole new generation forced to consider emigration. The dysfunctional family that is NATO tries to work out its role in the 21st century. The peacekeepers who've made sure there's a corner of Africa that is forever India and why a remote tribe up the Amazon reckons our correspondence the funniest thing ever to have stumbled into their forest. The Irish government is meeting later today to finalise a four year plan to cut its huge budget deficit. The details are due to be published by Tuesday. Sources within the European Union say a financial aid package for Ireland will be unveiled at around the same time. But the authorities in Dublin are thought to be reluctant to sign up to a deal they fear could harm their country's chances of economic growth. Little more than a decade ago, the Irish economy was riding high, its people elated with their new prominence in Europe. Today, as Gavin Hjurt's been finding out, the mood is much more subdued.
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A taxi ride in Dublin is rarely silent. The drivers like to talk, to savor the crack, to shoot the breeze. But there was something in the tone of the grey haired driver with his pale blue eyes that made me study him in the mirror. He was talking about his daughter who was 15. He feared that in a few years he would lose her, she would emigrate. The thought gnawed away at him to the point he confided in a stranger. Lily, I think her name was, who would go to Australia, Canada, faraway places. And he hated those who had broken his country. I thought of him as we later drove to what they call the Midlands. It is an undulating drive, the rolling hills of the Republic. The mist hanging low to the ground. The late afternoon light soft. Ireland unchanged, or so it seemed. And then townhouses emerging like intruders from the mist, row after row of them. Most were empty. These were the ghost towns, the houses left unsold when the property bubble burst. I was there to meet Jerry and Poole. As a civil servant, she had had her wages cut by 13%. He had been laid off the previous week. We walked around the deserted estate. The builders had left, suddenly abandoning tools and bags of cement. But here was the point. The houses had been built not just by Irish labor, but but by Poles and that was a badge of pride. Instead of the Irish having to work abroad, it was outsiders and foreigners who were doing the traveling. And the work was in Ireland, and that had gone down well. In those roaring years of the Celtic tiger, Ireland had slipped the leash of its past. The wild Geese. The immigrants were no longer leaving. They were returning home. The light was fading as we headed towards Kilkenny. We spotted a ruin, a a graveyard, and beyond them, a quarter moon. I thought it might make an end shot to our television report. The dates on the gravestones, as far as I could see, did not go back beyond a century. For before that, in the 1840s, there had been famine and waves of Irish emigrants had headed west to the New World and Ellis island, the reception center in New York. Out in the country you hear stories now of immigration fairs, the that are pulling in the crowds. Back in Dublin, I decided to visit a college in Taller. The government was saying that 100,000 could emigrate over the next few years, and I wanted to test the mood. There were 25 engineering students in the lecture theater. One young man, unprompted, said he was heading to Canada, a country where I once too had been an immigrant. I then asked the class to raise their hands if they were considering immigrating. Every hand bar one went up and he was a mature student with a family. I looked into the eyes of bright, articulate, ambitious students. In those faces I saw a brain drain that Ireland could ill afford. Like generations before them, they were preparing to follow the scent of work and to join the Irish diaspora. Afterwards, the woman from the college who had arranged the visit said she had found the hands going up, moving but intensely sad. While in the city, a writer had described immigration as an index of Ireland's failure. When I came to leave, it was early, the streets dark and half empty. The driver was troubled by new speed cameras. But eventually he spoke about the craziness of the boom. His grown children had been offered thousands on their credit cards without any income checks. Everyone knew people who were printing up full salary receipts to inflate their incomes. Neither the banks nor the finance houses cared. You couldn't fail with property. All lies and greed, he said. The euro, with its low interest rates, had seduced a country. Now locked into a single currency, the country had few options other than to slash spending or be bailed out. In Grafton Street, I'd seen an old man sunk into the wall, his flat hat half obscuring his face. In his hands were two string puppets of young Irish girls. He jigged them to some fiddle music that placed you in an old, half forgotten island. Nearby were Dublin's pram women selling grapes and bunches of fruit from battered baby carriages. They had hard, lined outdoor faces. They were women who would outlip you. They, too, took you back, Perhaps to the 80s, maybe further, but certainly the past. Ireland believed it had escaped its past. The raised hands of the college students were a rebuke, however. Mass emigration, said one columnist, mocked the idea of Ireland being in charge of its destiny.
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Gavin Hewitt Afghanistan is the main item on the agenda at the second and final day of the NATO summit in Lisbon. The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, has been talking this morning to leaders of the alliance nations involved in his country. They've been discussing a draft communique which talks of setting conditions for an irreversible transition to full Afghan security and leadership by the year 2014. Mark Urban, meanwhile, says while some of those at the conference have their doubts about the continuing usefulness of the alliance, others insist it has a clear role to play in the 21st century.
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NATO summits, like others, end with statements and communiques. Those of the Western military alliance are pasted together from a well worn lexicon of security terms. Heading for Lisbon, I reflected upon my first experience of this in March 1988 in Brussels. That meeting took place at a time of real ferment in international relations, stirred up by the then Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, but one would hardly have known it. As President Ronald Reagan delivered his closing statement, I marvelled at the old actor's sharp blue suit, slicked back hair and relaxed delivery. We'd been given the statement on paper, but he didn't need it or a prompter. It had been an unusually good meeting. Much had been achieved. The allies stood together. He delivered it word perfect. The White House press secretary had warned the predators of the White House press corps that there would be a statement, but no questions. Given the momentous issues of the moment, how far did he trust Gorbachev? Was German reunification inevitable? They not only ignored that order, but shouted a barrage of questions within a second of Mr. Reagan finishing. The president stood for what seemed like a minute but was probably just several seconds paralysed with indecision. His mouth opened and closed, but no words emerged. The press secretary hurried on and shuffled Mr. Reagan off. There were some unkind jokes from the journalists along the lines of the president's brain is missing, but we had no idea just how unkind. For in the final months of his second term, as we now know, he was suffering from alzheimer's disease. The basic propositions of the North Atlantic Treaty that an attack on one is an attack on all, or that the many can be stronger than the one, are so simple that everyone gets them. They can be parroted without notes by any of the participants from one decade to the next, even those with a fading grasp of reality. The alliance undoubtedly works best when it is debating these familiar ideas. For decades during the Cold War, it formulated abstruse nuclear theology. Those soldiering on NATO manoeuvres in Germany in the 1980s. I was one of those soldiers were all too familiar with practicing the Alliance's graduated escalation to nuclear strikes as its poor, overwhelmed armies and US anticipated the Soviet juggernaut rolling over. If the exercise was particularly wet or miserable, some wag would inevitably pipe up. I wish they'd hurry up and nuke them so we can all go home. The experience of the 1999 Kosovo campaign, the Alliance's first proper war, showed what a nonsense these political concepts were, even under far less horrendous circumstances than World War 3. A carefully crafted system of political consultation whereby NATO allies would agree to escalating airstrikes against Serbia was ditched after just a couple of days. Instead, the Americans decided to bomb whatever seemed right to them in Afghanistan. The alliance has once again placed itself pretty much entirely under American leadership. NATO continues to exist the as a kind of dysfunctional family. It's underwritten by an ideology of mutual defence so comforting that nobody can bear to break it up. But it's fair to say that the love between its older members has long since paled and that the power relationship in which the main provider calls the shots gives a well understood subtext to this family drama. Even senior British officers now question the benefits of operating within NATO as opposed to so called coalitions of the willing. Today, the members with most belief in its ideology tend to be the stepkids, those that emerged from the Warsaw Pact. A household that was not just dysfunctional but abusive. Waiting long hours for a helicopter in Kandahar in the summer, I chatted to officers from a newly arrived Romanian battalion. One told me earnestly about the importance of the mission to his nation and army. In their freshly issued desert combats, they were desperate to do well. NATO's idealists today tend to be those with the most recent experience of oppression. But old Europe, as Donald Rumsfeld pejoratively called the Alliance's original members, is still able to sign up readily enough to the new strategic concept paper. Going through on the nod in Lisbon, the leaders could probably all give their concluding remarks off the cuff and before it had even started, just as Ronald Reagan did 22 years ago. And that political commonality of purpose, the comfort of those warm, familiar phrases, is what keeps NATO alive.
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Mark Urban in Lisbon after nearly two decades of dominating Italian politics, Silvio Berlusconi, major billionaire and prime minister, is in deep political and personal trouble. His centre right coalition faces a critical confidence vote in Parliament on December 14, the same day that Rome's Constitutional Court is to decide whether or not he can continue to claim immunity from prosecution on corruption charges. Lurid stories of Mr. Berlusconi's sex life, meanwhile, continue to make headlines around the world. David Willie in Rome tells us some now believe he'll flee abroad and spend the rest of his life in exile in his luxury Caribbean hideout.
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The tell tale signs of the end of a regime are here for all to see. 15 million working age Italians inactive neither in employment nor actually seeking work. A stagnant economy whose productivity is in decline. A government that seems incapable of responding in an orderly manner to either natural or or man made calamities. In the south, thousands of tons of stinking rubbish continue to fill the streets of Naples and Palermo, despite unkept promises of new incinerators and new landfills. In the north this month, disastrous floods whose seriousness went underestimated for several days swept away the homes and livelihoods of thousands of citizens of Vicenza. Then we have a Minister of Culture who also happens to be Mr. Berlusconi's chief propagandist, and who refuses to resign when the house of the Gladiators, amid the remains of ancient Pompeii, collapses into a pile of rubble. It isn't my fault, he said. The minister may now be forced to step down, however, as he faces a censure motion in Parliament, Police grumble about being ordered to escort young women guests to and from lively parties at the prime minister's luxury residences in Mil and on the island of Sardinia. One editorial writer drew a comparison with the Roman emperor Tiberius, who retired in his 70s to a palace on the island of Capri. There, according to the historian Suetonius, Tiberius appointed a minister of pleasure to devise erotic entertainments to stimulate his declining libido. Suetonius may be amusing to read, the editorialist wrote, but actually living through this is is becoming unpleasant. And this is what Italians I know and meet every day are complaining about in the cafe, at the supermarket, at the chemist's shop, on the train. Besides complaining, they are also asking now what the foreign press has been quick to call this the beginning of the end for Mr. Berlusconi, and he himself, for the first time, is showing signs of being worried. The latest opinion polls show his approval rating has dropped to between 35 and 40%. When he was elected in a landslide vote two years ago, his popularity stood at over 60%. Mr. Berlusconi still continues to attract many Italians who admire his financial success and his remarkable business and political acumen. In public, at least, Mr. Berlusconi remains his usual cheeky chappy self, boasting that he will easily gather enough support to win next month's confidence vote, despite the defection from his coalition of Gianfranco Fini. Mr. Feeney is the reformed post fascist speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and one of the co founders of Mr. Berlusconi's Freedom Party. He still has ambitions to become Italy's next prime minister, but it's doubtful whether he has either the time or the financial resources to mount a successful election campaign to challenge Mr. Berlusconi. If, as now seems likely, the country goes to the polls again next spring, two years ahead of time. Mr. Berlusconi has long been famous for his usually off colour, sometimes crude, and always politically incorrect jokes with which he likes to regale his listeners both in private and in public. His jests build political consensus and are themselves already the subject of academic study. Now, however, the Italian premier is himself increasingly becoming the butt of popular fun. Italy's most famous and popular jokester, the comedian and actor Roberto Benigni, poked fun at him on TV the other night when he mocked Mr. Berrasconi for claiming that the Mafia had been putting around false stories about his sex life. You mean, said Benigni to a record national TV audience, that the Mafia have laid down their shotguns and Kalashnikovs and are using girls instead? So when you go home and you find three pretty women in your bed, you tell yourself, oh, the Mafia are after me. More seriously, the sexual shenanigans involving Mr. Berlusconi in 2010 may have had a more devastating effect than he'd bargained for. His penchant for pretty young women may well have scuppered his chances of achieving his ultimate ambition of becoming Italy's next figurehead president when the mandate of the present head of state, the dignified Giorgio Napolitano, comes to an end in 2013. It's just 50 years since Federico Fellini's film masterpiece, La Dolce Vita celebrated Italy's post war, dream, society. Anything seemed possible in a country emerging from devastating war. Mr. Berlusconi, through his TV empire, has created a brash new consumer culture, not very Dolce, not very sweet, which offers little hope of a new Italian dream. Italy's economic future remains uncertain, and the romantic ruins of its past glories could well continue to turn to rubble.
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David Willey in Rome the United nations peacekeepers deployed in Africa's most lawless country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, have their work cut out. There are incidents demanding their intervention virtually every day of the week, some of them appallingly violent. The mission there is the largest ever attempted by the UN there are nearly 20,000 people on the ground, and the operation, known by the acronym Monosco, costs millions. Paul Moss has been hearing that the challenge faced by the soldiers in the blue helmets is a daunting one. This, after all, is a country where some 5 million people have died in fighting in the past few years.
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The officer was genuinely upset. It was the senseless waste that seemed to distress him. He was Punjabi, a military man from a military family, and he had served in conflicts from Kashmir to the Chinese border. Now he was a UN peacekeeper in Congo. But even with this extensive experience of human behavior, he had seen something here that defied all understanding. It's the mangoes, he said. They grow everywhere there. Good ones, too. And you know what? He sighed deeply, almost unable to articulate this outrage against all reasons. The local Congolese people here, they don't even know how to make mango chutney. I could have laughed, or I could perhaps have been annoyed at his odd sense of priority. Here in North Kivu Province, you can't count the number of war casualties. You can't even count the number of wars. They range from a major confrontation with international dimensions right down to little micro battles and with all sizes and shapes of conflict on the spectrum in between. As one Congolese journalist said to me, almost proud here, every hillside has its army. And it's into this maelstrom that the troops from India have been sent as part of the United nations peacekeeping mission. But their mandate here is not just about preventing war. We want to set up social projects to develop the area. Another Indian officer told me. If people have jobs, they're less likely to fight. He showed me the village hall they're helping to build near the town of Kawanja, and there are plans also for a school to teach car maintenance. But then, yes, he was in, and his thoughts had turned to culinary possibilities, and that meant showing the villagers how to make mango chutney. They could sell the chutney, or at least learn how preserving fruit makes it keep, a useful skill where refrigeration is scarce. But in the temporary absence of this crucial condiment, the troops were not going short of decent food. Much to my amazement at their base, they'd built an impressive officer's mess and rustled up there a dazzling selection of curries, side dishes and fried rotis. Once, Once upon a time, British officers serving in the Raj would go to great lengths to recreate familiar home comforts. Now these soldiers were echoing their former colonial masters, making sure there was a corner of an African field that was forever India. They'd even had India's Kingfisher beer flown in and served it up in rather elegant pint glasses with spicy snacks on the side. I soon saw why they needed these comforts. One morning we set off on foot patrol, about a dozen of us, all wearing bullet proof jackets that weighed heavily in the damp equatorial heat. We were trekking into a remote area of farmland where the owners are often too scared to tend their fields. Every time one of the myriad armed factions here decides to take on another or to pillage a local community, the Indian troops are expected to throw themselves in the middle. As we tramped through the wet knee high vegetation, I asked one soldier where he came from. A small town in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. It turned out another grew up in Kerala. None had been abroad before, and some would not even have left their home state until army life required it. Now here they were, on patrol in a distant country that I'd guess some could not have found on a map. But the UN mission in Congo is not going according to plan. Only last July, one rebel group raped more than than 200 women in a single attack. It turned out there was a UN peacekeeping base just 20 miles away. Yet no troops showed up until several days after. It was, the UN admitted, a terrible failure. I raised this subject with the soldiers on my patrol. It seemed they had been handed a mission in which the failures were clear. But success was harder to define. There was no target destination to conquer, nor invaders to expel. So what, I asked them, would count as victory. As if on cue, a group of children from a nearby village came past, all laughing and giving the Indians a thumbs up sign. A little happiness on the face of a single villager. The platoon commander said, that's a kind of victory. And he didn't offer anything more substantial than that. It was odd to find this attitude almost Gandhi, like in its simplicity from a man carrying an automatic weapon. But the children were laughing, and in the midst of this war zone, I too felt a little safer to have the blue helmeted soldiers alongside me. I thought of the Kingfisher beer waiting back at base, and we carried on walking.
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And that was Paul Moss in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Deforestation is a huge issue in Brazil. The cutting down of the Amazon rainforest there was one of the talking points during the country's recent presidential election. But as the discussions go on, so does the march of the men with the chainsaws. More and more of the woodland is being given up to farmers and miners. Justin Rowlatt points out that it doesn't just mean a loss of habitat for the Amazon's rare species. It's also affecting the indigenous tribes, who have only minimal contact with the outside world. Or at least did until now.
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It looked like a mummified baby. Its dark brown skin was stretched taut over its face. Its eyes were half open and its lips drawn back over its sharp teeth. The creature's arms were still intact, jutting stiffly beside its chest, but its hands and the rest of its body from the waist down, was missing. Tacorentia must have sensed I was curious, because he held the body up towards me so I could get a good look. It appeared to have been grilled over an open fire, and I noticed that whatever it was, it still had eyelashes. Kaai, he said, waving the little corpse. He must have realized I didn't understand, because he then tore a strip of flesh from its shoulder and popped it into his mouth. He chewed it with exaggerated relish, pointing at his mouth and grinning. You will already have guessed, as I did, what was going to happen next. Tacorentia pinched a generous piece of meat again from the creature's shoulder. A white bone now poked through and held it up to me with a smile. Clearly this was an invitation to dine. The morsel had a piece of scorched skin attached, and I could see there was a layer of white fat between it and the fibers of light brown meat. This was without any doubt the most revolting snack I have ever been offered, but it is rude in almost every culture to turn down the offer of food, however disgusting. We'd only been in Djurite, Tacorentia's village for a few minutes, and I was keen to make a good impression. What's more, our little scene had now attracted a small crowd of villagers. We were hoping to spend a couple of days filming with these people, so this was an important moment for Our team. We were not here to tell a happy story. We were here to show how the global demand for Brazil's resources is driving deforestation. Even in places that were once remote like this. The AWA are an Amazonian tribe of hunter gatherers who until very recently were completely isolated. Some of the villagers in Djurite were contacted for the first time just 12 years ago. Yet now their land is the most deforested of any indigenous tribe in the Amazon. It is a huge problem for the awa. If they lose their forest, they lose their traditional way of life. I'll be honest, though. At this moment, I wasn't worrying about the perils faced by this community. I was deciding whether I could bring myself to accept Takbari. I looked around at the expectant faces of the 20 or so hour people who were looking on. They wore ragged T shirts and shorts or skirts. Some of the men had rope bands decorated with feathers around their biceps. And some of the women wore necklaces with beads and animal teeth. I look back at Tacorentia's repulsive offering. I was already pretty certain I'd worked out what it was. When one of the men from the Brazilian Indigenous People's Organization who'd come to the village with us confirmed my fears. Macaco, he said. I was being offered a mouthful of barbecued monkey. I made my decision. I took the scrap of monkey meat and put it into my mouth. It was cold and greasy, but I chewed gamely, only just managing to resist a powerful urge to gag. Nevertheless, despite my best efforts, my disgust must have been evident to everyone there. Because the entire group of AWA collapsed in gales of laughter. Rather than being offended that I didn't like their food, they seemed delighted at my discomfort and mimicked my grimaces to each other to renewed laughter. Indeed, the AWA were behaving as if I was the funniest thing to have ever stumbled into their forest. And from that moment on, they could not have been more welcoming. Two days later, the Brazilian Forest Agency had arranged for a helicopter to fly us out. Most of the village turned out to wave us goodbye. But as we rose from the clearing beside Jaritti, it became shockingly clear just how vulnerable this community is. There are already farms where the forest has been completely cleared within a couple of miles of the village. And I could see and smell the smoke from the fires made by farmers to clear yet more land. Even in areas of forest that seemed pristine, I could make out roads made by loggers carving their way through the jungle canopy. Why do white men need so much wood? One of the hour men had asked me before we left. It is a good question.
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And with that from Justin Rowlatt in Brazil, we reach the end of this edition. There'll be more from our own correspondence around the world this time next week. Do join us. Goodbye.