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From Our Own Correspondent
Teatime in Germany
00:27:52
Reporters worldwide tell their stories. Steve Evans in Berlin on how, perhaps given a...
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This is a download from the BBC. It's the latest edition of from our own correspondent, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady today.
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Once the most powerful woman in Mexico, this morning she's in jail, accused of embezzling millions. We hear Sir Frederick may be turning in his grave as the order he brought to the Middle east starts to crumble. The bright young things queue up to leave the country as recession drags on in Portugal. And one lump or two? Our correspondent has advice for Germans on the mysteries of tea drinking. The powerful and feared Mexican teachers union leader Elba Esta Godillo is behind bars this morning. She's been accused of diverting millions of pounds from union funds. So far, the authorities have refused her bail and the union has already named a replacement leader. A clear signal, observers say, that it won't be standing by her when the case gets to court. Will Grant in Mexico City points out she was detained a day after the country's president, Enrique Pena Nieto, approved education reforms which she had strongly opposed.
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We'd done our homework. We'd bought a biography, read dozens of newspaper articles and watched a documentary about her. We'd prepared our questions, charged the camera batteries and even bought new tapes. Finally, after weeks of chasing her press people, we were ready to grill the most powerful and perhaps the most hated woman in Mexico. Then, the night before we were due to meet her, the news broke. Elbarester Gordillo, head of the National Teachers Union, has been arrested on embezzlement charges, the Attorney General's office announced. Bangos our interview. It's a shame. I was looking forward to meeting this almost mythical character, known simply as La Maestra. Famed for her expensive handbags and thousand dollar shoes, her botoxed and heavily operated upon face has loomed over Mexican politics for more than 20 years. Born into a mixed race indigenous family in the state of Chiapas, Elba Estero Gordillo has had an extraordinary rise to power and an equally dramatic fall from grace. Her tale is, in parts tragic. She fled the violent family home after the death of her father and came to Mexico State with nothing. Or so the story goes. Her young husband, who'd helped her gain a foothold as a teacher, died even though she donated a kidney in a vain attempt to save him. But her story is also terrifying. Her ruthless control of the country's teachers union is notorious, as is her fierce personality. There are tales of backstabbing and treachery among close friends and allegations of corruption. Deep, entrenched and rampant corruption. It was often asked how she could afford two luxury homes over the bordering California on a teacher's salary. Yet try as they might, her many enemies could never make anything stick. Against La Maestra, Gordillo appeared immune, untouchable. She'll never go to prison, people said. She knows too much, too much about the inner workings of the long running governing party pre of the president's office and of governors in states large and small. No one seemed to dare take her on. Until now. It might seem odd that the leader of a teaching union could send shivers down the spine of senators and presidents alike. But Alvarester Gordio wielded real power. Her union's roughly 1.4 million members are responsible for everything from counting the votes on polling day to running the national lottery. La Maestra's teachers do everything, it seems, except teach. Education accounts for around 22% of Mexico's public spending. But the country's education system is in disarray. It currently ranks bottom of all the developed nations. A recent documentary, the one I watched in preparation for the interview that never was, shows why. Called Depan Sasso, meaning by the skin of the teeth, the film is a stark snapshot of an ailing a failing education system. The filmmakers gave video cameras to school children around the country, from public schools in rural states to private schools in Mexico City. Everywhere the stories were the same. For every decent, hard working teacher trying to educate their overcrowded classes under difficult conditions, there was another who was going through the motions at best, forcing the children to chant articles of the Constitution parrot fashion. There was the English language teacher who threatened to throw the children down the stairs if they misspelled words. The science master who spent the entire class on his mobile phone. There was. And the absent head who promised that classes would resume manana. That final issue. Absentee teachers is a huge problem. The children filmed themselves cooped up inside hot classrooms with no one watching over them. Parents turned up to find that yet again the teachers had been told by their union not to teach that day. Under Elba Esther Gordio's rule, it seemed strikes could be called at a moment's notice and and on her personal whim. This year alone, the union has been out on strike a dozen times over education reform. The sweeping changes are intended to do several things, including take stock of the number of teachers and schools that exist in Mexico. Figures which incredibly aren't known. Teachers will be assessed on their abilities so the good ones can be promoted, the others weeded out. They are also intended to end the corrupt practice of buying and selling teaching positions in public schools. La Maestra opposed all of these measures. The day after the reform was signed into law, she was arrested. One of my questions in our non existent interview was going to be, after more than two decades leading Latin America's most powerful union, isn't it time to step aside and allow new leadership to come forward? We'll never know what she'd have said. She's been pushed instead.
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That was Will Grant in Mexico City. The Iraqi Prime Minister this week spoke of the possibility of sectarian war in his country and how it could destabilise the wider Middle East. Nouri al Maliki warned this could be a consequence of victory for the rebels in neighbouring Syria. His comments come as his government faces growing tensions of its own between its Shiite majority and a restive Sunni minority. It's nearly a decade now since the US led an invasion of Iraq, toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein. Kevin Connolly has been considering the legacy of a man who led an earlier military force into Baghdad back in 1917.
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Sir Frederick Maud would turn in his grave if a senior officer of the Coldstream Guard could ever perform such an inelegant manoeuvre. A few yards away from his small but noble mausoleum in a military graveyard on the outskirts of Baghdad, in two sets of grey tubular steel goal posts have been erected. The makeshift football pitch is not, I think, intended as an act of desecration, although the same can't be said for the odd damaged headstone or the cross knocked off a monument in an act of anti Christian vandalism. It's more likely to be there because the area just inside the cemetery gates is the only flat, empty space in a busy part of town. You'd imagine that some of the young men buried in the graveyard themselves wouldn't mind anyway. They wouldn't have been as solemn in life as they are in death, and they'd probably rather be playing football themselves than lying in rigid rows on a last parade that will never end. Sir Frederick, one imagines, though, was cut from rather different cloth to most of them. It's hard not to picture him as something of a martinet, the son of a general who won the Victoria Cross in the Crimean War, who had himself been fighting the old queen's enemies in the deserts of the Middle East. Since he was hardly more than a boy, he wasn't exactly a swashbuckling leader. His men called him Systematic Joe, surely one of the least colorful nicknames of all time. But Maud was a smart and methodical commander. Not every general of The Great War was a donkey in the same way that not every squaddie was a lion. Maud led the British Imperial force, mainly drawn from India, that captured Iraq from the crumbling Turkish Empire. He was, in the end, denied a warrior's death. He died suddenly during a cholera epidemic, perhaps from drinking milk which had not been boiled. But before he died, he left one lasting bit of history, the Proclamation of Baghdad, in which he told the Iraqi people that the armies he led came not as enemies or conquerors, but as liberators. Interestingly, it's a sentiment with which the Western politicians behind the invasion of 2003, 86 years after his death, would have wholeheartedly agreed. Maybe it's just the kind of thing that Western soldiers and politicians need to believe. It's certainly a sentiment that many Iraqis wouldn't necessarily endorse. Their country has been a magnet for foreign armies in its short, unhappy history. And Iraqi civilians have paid a heavy price. You can't, after all, be liberated to death. It's the 10th anniversary of that invasion in 2003, and much time will be devoted to analysing what it all meant and how it left this country and the region around it. But the truth is, of course, that it's far too early to judge. You could argue that we're still working out the longer term consequences of the manoeuvrings of Sir Frederick Maude and the soldiers and statesmen of his generation. They, for example, added a Kurdish region in the north to the Arab lands of Mesopotamia to create Iraq, the sort of shotgun marriage to which colonial administrators were dangerously addicted. Less than a hundred years later. It could be that that Kurdish area is about to slip quietly into some sort of undeclared independence, signalling the end of the Iraqi state as we've known it. The weak and divided central government that prevails in Baghdad is preoccupied with tensions between Sunni and Shia communities elsewhere in the country. Holding the state together in its old form may simply be beyond its powers. And that's not the only sign that the order imposed on the Middle east at the end of the First World War is creaking. Syria was part of the French share of the spoils of the collapse of the Turkish Empire. There's no guarantee that it will emerge from its civil war as a viable nation state. And if it doesn't, what of Lebanon, another former French colony with deep political ties to its big, turbulent, dangerous neighbour? It would be too strong to argue that we are living through the last act of the First World War here. But it does sometimes feel like it. The whiff of chaos about it all would probably have appalled old Sir Frederick, who died at a time when the British Empire was still expanding, and would have had no reason to doubt that it would go on expanding forever. It's worth remembering, as we prepare to mark the 10th anniversary of 2003, that none of us, not even the Sir Fredericks among us, can ever tell where that kind of intervention will ultimately lead.
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Kevin Connolly in Baghdad Demonstrations are expected in cities across Portugal this afternoon as people voice their displeasure at their government's handling of the economy. The country's mired in its worst recession since the 1970s, and figures released yesterday show unemployment running at 17.6%, its highest level ever. Alison Roberts in Lisbon says that job prospects for the young are now so poor that many of the best educated generation in Portugal's history are leaving to look for work abroad.
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The businesses that are booming in Lisbon are the five star hotels. Several new ones have sprung up in recent years. These days, they're often thronged with wealthy Brazilians or Angolans in town on sightseeing trips or shopping sprees, as well as the European executives who fly in for corporate conferences, another flourishing business in this friendly and historic city with its mild climate. But Lisbon's posh hotels are also hosting events aimed at helping people leave the country. Companies from across Europe and beyond are descending on Portugal with a view to snapping up highly educated local youngsters, many of them impressively fluent in English and willing to adapt to whatever working conditions an employer imposes on them. In one top hotel, as tourists sprawl in armchairs in the sunlit reception area downstairs in a basement meeting room, several hundred smartly dressed twenty somethings fidget on chairs, waiting to be called forward to one of three desks for a cursory chat. If they impress, they might be contacted later and asked to come back for an interview. This recruitment event is for a leading international airline looking for prospective cabin staff. It's the second such event. It's held in Lisbon in a matter of months. Outside the packed meeting room in the thickly carpeted corridor, a slim woman with a tired face leans against the wall, casually dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. Sofia is waiting for her younger sister, Laura, a qualified school teacher. Like thousands of others, Sofia explains sadly, Laura failed to get a teaching position last autumn. In fact, she's been working as a lowly classroom assistant since graduating three years ago. But with the government planning more cuts to education and Portugal's birth rate plummeting, she believes the chances of her ever being able to follow her chosen career look remote. After all the disappointments, the idea of Laura moving to the Gulf to work as a flight attendant seems a viable alternative. Sofia admits she's been pondering the possibility of emigrating, too. After studying philosophy at university, she found work in it, but has never managed to get a permanent job with decent pay. Unlike Laura, though, she has a husband and two children. If I go, she says firmly, it'll only be with the whole family. She winces as she recalls that she and her sister grew up barely seeing their father because he worked abroad for years. It's an experience she's determined to spare her own children. Laura eventually emerges from the meeting room, fizzing with nervous energy, and heads towards her sister. She's not sure how she's done, but has been told she might be contacted and is obviously preparing herself mentally for the possibility of moving to the Gulf. After all, a cousin of theirs has already done just that, working for a rival airline. Then a group of besuited youngsters emerges from the meeting room. One of them, Georges, is hunting for a job. While carrying on with his engineering studies, Georges is doing a masters and fancies his chances of finding work in one of several countries where engineers are much in demand. In fact, he tells me, he did have a couple of offers from Portuguese companies bidding for contracts in Angola and Mozambique, except that in both cases they failed to win the business. But Georges is angry. He's heard about how Portugal's government has just launched a campaign for citizens thinking of working abroad, offering practical information on visas and employment law in various countries. But George doesn't blame this administration so much as the ones that went before it, which left the country in its current state of crisis. Like so many young people here, he says, I dream of a future in our parents country. But, he adds, it can hardly be called our country now. What really outrages young people in Portugal, he goes on, is that the state invests for more than a decade in educating and training us, and now it's putting its most precious asset up for sale and denying us the opportunity to contribute to the society that formed us. Basically, he says, the state is planting but not harvesting the fruit. It won't be long, he says decidedly, before those seeds will run out altogether. And with that, he goes upstairs, past the tourists now gathering for a historic tram tour of this ancient city, and walks out into the still, still warm afternoon sunshine.
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That was Alison Roberts in Lisbon. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has defended a bill now pending in the Russian parliament, which would target gays. He insists that despite the planned legislation, they enjoy full rights in Russia. Homosexuality was decriminalised in Russia in 1993, but there are constant complaints about homophobia. The authorities regularly ban gay rallies and parades. The new bill will outlaw anything deemed to be homosexual propaganda. So what happens when a story like this is covered by a correspondent who happens to be gay? We asked Paul Henley if it had been a struggle not to take things too personally.
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Giving your full concentration to unrelenting vitriol can be quite tiring. My fault, I suppose, for actively seeking it out. It's just that after many hours of holding a polite expression and nodding while being told that you are, take your pick, disgusting, contaminating, a threat to civilized society, then what you really want is several drinks, a fight. Neither of them really BBC etiquette or just a darkened room and a comfy bed. I'll settle for a fold down bunk narrower than my shoulders on a 12 hour night train to Moscow. But I can't pretend there aren't issues. Persecution complexes are all about context. The black and white striped mattress doesn't help. Or the screeching of brakes that make it sound as if we're being shunted into sidings. Or the shouts in an unfamiliar Eastern European language and torchlights on snow covered station platforms. Don't underestimate the effects of repeatedly hearing how people like you should be rounded up and punished. A ticket inspector at the door can seem a lot like a guard. And in a haze of fitful sleep, a miniature pinscher yapping up and down the corridor in a knitted rainbow jumper with Dance time written on it is an angry Alsatian on an unnecessarily long leash. In the cold light of even a Russian day, I can see that not everyone is out to get me. The dangerous ones think that gay people exist only in silver knickers anyway, waving banners and dancing in an accomplished way to Madonna. The Cossacks from the city of Lipitsk were something, though they used to specialize in pogroms. And lots of Russians apparently still trust them more than they do the police. They turned up in their capes and bearskin hats and knee length boots saying homosexuals weren't even worth the effort of using their steel tipped whips on. One of them made a spitting sound when he said that unlike the English, they knew how to deal with perverts. They posed for photographs with me, all smiles and arms round my shoulders. For me, a moment of minor revenge, because out of the many people I'd met in the past few days who happily told me they hated homosexuals. I don't think any would admit to having met one. I've seen them on tv so I know they exist, said one lawyer and dedicated drafter of legislation to curb minority rights. Such wilful ignorance I'd expected. And of course there are plenty of reasonable people in Russia too. They just weren't part of this story. And what I found interesting in my travels around homophobia was the idea among those who thought of themselves as open minded that gay people were tolerable as long as they kept their gayness entirely secret, never referring to it in conversation, never admitting to having a partner, God forbid, having children too, and kept up a lifelong pretence of being exactly the same as them. I was constantly told that sexual expression was a private matter in Russia and that conservative family values ruled. But I wondered how this tallied with the boy girl couples I was getting used to seeing putting their tongues in each other's mouths at bus stops and with the women's clothes moulded to enhance the curves of bottom and breasts even in minus 15 degrees. The hotel I was recommended to stay in in a small southern town, Best Business hotel had tiger print polyester sheets, soft pawn on the walls and grunting for from the next door rooms. Its restaurant on the town's main street was due to be the venue later that week for Sweet Couple, a live erotic show billed as shocking to celebrate Russian Army Day. So under the new law against homosexual propaganda, gay people in Russia could theoretically be arrested for holding a social in a cafe. But it was apparently okay for straight people to have full on sex on the cafe table. It's been a long week of being journalistically impartial. I talked to the leader of a 1500 strong mob in Voronezh that set on 14 gay protesters last month. He was a man fond of military uniforms and crucifixes from the All Russia People's Union. I asked him if he'd ever met any gay people. He laughed and said no, he didn't keep any damaging connections. He said in his organization you they joked that if you shook hands with a pervert he became one. I gave him a nice firm grip. When we said goodbye, I'd taken my glove off.
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Specially Paul Henley there. Now, back in Britain, the election results both in Italy and indeed in Hampshire are causing some worries among the leading lights of the European Union. They're concerned that without a strong government in Italy dedicated to austerity, the continent's debt problems could again catch fire. And that the sizable showing of Ukip at East lastly will bolster anti EU sentiment among the British. And this, it seems, causes Germans some dismay. It may be surprising, given our mutual history, but many Germans feel a great affinity for Britain. And as Steve Evans has been finding out, it shows itself in some odd ways.
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I'm currently trying to help German politics get a little calmer. The office of one of the Green MPs in the Bundestag, you see, has made a collective decision to switch from coffee to to tea. The great British beverages they discover much more soothing through the day, and they'd been getting a little hyper through overdosing on caffeine. So when I was there the other day, I was relentlessly quizzed about brewing times. They seemed to want the correct answer to the very second and which tea to use. I wasn't much help except to say, make sure it's a strong black tea, probably Indian. They'd made a bad start, offering me a cup of insipid, weak Darjeeling, which would have shamed a gnat. They had not made sure the water was boiling. I was too tactful to say that they need not look to Britain for tea expertise. They could try a good German tea. There are many brands on the shelves here. Sir Wynston, Lord Nelson, Windsor Castle, Queen's club, Sir Edward, Mr. Perkins Tea, Mayfair Tea, even Earl of Camden, which says it's a tea but isn't actually a proper tea, but more a kind of infusion of cherries or apple. Or think of this, blood orange. These German teas with aristocratic British names aren't effete fancy brands of expensive pretend tea involving fruit and herbs, but the tea the people drink. Lord Nelson, for example, is a staple of the Lidl supermarket chain. Sir Winston is a brand of a Hamburg tea importer which has been in business since 1882. This adoption of posh British names shows that there is affection for Britain here. Some Germans will tell you how they loved the irreverence of the Olympic opening ceremony in London and then whisper behind their hands that it wouldn't have happened here. Germans love Cornwall, courtesy of the romantic novels of Rosamund Pilcher, set around Padstow and constantly dramatized by for German television, they follow the royal family. Baby Bauch. Baby Tummy is now in the papers all the time. In a headline in bild, the equivalent of the sun above the words England ist happy. Bildt has also pleaded for Britain not to leave the European Union. Bitergate nicht. Screamed the headline Then, defying the stricture, not to mention the war, and. And defying the misconception that Germans don't have a sense of humour, it said that it loved what it called the home of mint sauce, despite the British habit of using the word blitzkrieg and calling them Krauts and putting them on the front pages in helmets. More seriously, the paper talked of the British sense of democracy and it said that Europe needed British obstinacy to counter the. The uniformity of the European Union. And it states its admiration of businessmen like Sir Richard Branson. It is well known that German businessmen are born in black suits. Their hair is already neat. I imagine they never take their socks off, even in bed. So to Germans, Richard Branson is completely exotic. And all the better for that. I often come across people who remain grateful to Britain for rescuing Germany from itself in the war. People who are, yes, indeed, grateful to the BBC. I took tea the correct British way, in a porcelain cup and saucer with milk, with a grand gentleman called Hans Christoph von Rohr. We sat sunk into sofas and in his home near Dusseldorf and ruminated cup following cup. He told me that Britain and the BBC saved his life, though I think that's putting it too strongly. His father, arrested by the Nazis during the war as an opponent of Hitler, somehow secretly heard on the BBC where the final demarcation between Soviet and Western forces would be the line of what would become the Iron Curtain. And that information pushed the family to flee westwards from what would become the Soviet zone. Herr von Rohr is passionate in his belief that, as he puts it, the European problem is to keep all states together, especially Britain. The majority of the German people are on the British side, he said. But for how long is the question we didn't discuss. The tea had run out.
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Steve Evans there, and the time's run out for us as well. Lots more next week on both Thursday and Saturday. Do join us all. Goodbye.