← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
The Battle for Hong Kong
00:28:09
'Caught between the demands of the masses and the stern imperatives of Beijing's Keane...
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You're about to hear from our own correspondent.
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We do two versions of the programme,
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one for the BBC World Service and
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this one's a download of the latest edition from BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, stormy days ahead as protesters in Hong Kong answer a call for a show of strength. A battle for hearts and minds in Eastern Europe with gathering support for a new political union with Russia at its centre. Down among the bulrushes in the Danube delta, we wait for a visitor who may never arrive. And we're in a hill town they called the most beautiful of all Queen Victoria's possessions. But will we sample its crunchy mouse kebab? Hundreds of pro democracy activists camped out overnight in Hong Kong after a big rally there yesterday. Most were in the Central Admiralty District, with smaller numbers in the commercial areas Mong Kok and Causeway Bay. There'd been appeals for a big turnout after the authorities called off planned talks. With the protest leaders due to have taken place yesterday, the protests are being seen as the biggest challenge to Beijing's authority since China took control of the former British colony in 1997. Our correspondent in Hong Kong then was Fergal Keen. He was back there to witness this display of people power.
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Our memory of the places we've lived in is shaped by many things. The landscape and visual superstructure, the smells and sounds, and then the personal, our encounters with other people, and more intimately, how we experience change in each place. Hong Kong changed my life more profoundly than any place I have ever lived. It wasn't really the drama of being there during the transition to Chinese rule, for in truth, there was little drama. No, it was because in Hong Kong, I became a father for the first time. It was here in the city on China's southern fringe that I began to experience a reordering of priorities and the start of a different way of experiencing and understanding the world. For this, I've always felt grateful to Hong Kong. Oh, in the beginning, the place infuriated me. I felt hemmed in by the noise and pollution. I had no sympathy with what I saw as a money dominated culture. But being a parent in Hong Kong changed all of that. There was the warmth of the old women who came to cluck over the infant and watching the way in which my child responded to the extraordinary sensory stimulus of a city that provided him with such light and noise. And there was the gradual deepening of friendships with local people. I remember many dinners and outings with Chinese friends. Among the most memorable, a trip to the island of Lantau where our hosts, a fishing family, were going to clean the graves of their ancestors, the annual Qingming Festival. Our son Daniel spent much of the journey being passed from one matriarch to another on board the crowded fishing junk. In my Hong Kong years, I saw how close were the bonds of family and how these spread out into the local community. There was a cohesion here, a fidelity to older ideas of human kinship that had survived the onrush of material prosperity of the Asian tiger years in the 1990s. This isn't to idealize Hong Kong. There was, and still is, a serious economic disparity between the very wealthy and those who aspire to live alongside them in mid levels and on the peak. But in my time living there, and every time I go back, I felt Hong Kong to be a place where a sense of community was deepening. The Hong Kong identity is ethnically Chinese, but more than anything, its people are proud of the city itself and of the freedoms they've achieved there. My son was born in Hong Kong in 1996, the same year that many of the young protesters made their way into the world. They are children of the Internet age, where the world's dramas unfold in digital chunks to be quickly overtaken by other upheavals, a world in which understanding is often a poor second to sensation. But the young who crowded into Admiralty Causeway Bay and Mongkok were no prisoners of the dramatic moment. What I saw unfolding was not the revolt of the immature and ill advised. The Hong Kong students have been educated to think for themselves, and having thought hard about what China wished to do to the city's democratic aspirations, they decided to protest. On the day I was due to fly to Hong Kong to report on the protests, I asked my son, now preparing to go to university, what he thought of the drama in the city of his birth. He is a Chinese speaker, having studied the language since primary school, and he takes a close interest in what happens in China. I don't think Beijing will do another Tiananmen, he said. They don't need to, I said. I thought that if it came to it, the party chiefs would do whatever they deem necessary to end the protests. But they don't have to, he responded. This isn't an existential threat to them. Not yet, I replied. In the end, Beijing never had to act. The protests swelled and then subsided. There was a brief upsurge of street violence directed against the protesters, but they didn't respond, and calm was restored. The euphoria of protest has evaporated I suspect it will be replaced by the creation of a more broad based pro democracy movement, which will continue to pressure Hong Kong's local leaders, who in turn are caught between the demands of the masses and the stern imperatives of Beijing's control. Nothing has been settled. Beijing didn't buckle, but the movement survived to fight another day. There will be stormy days ahead. Hong Kong, my city of changes, is vibrant, volatile, exuberant, fractious, infuriating and inspiring. Above all, inspiring.
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And that was Fergal keen. The debate in this country about the benefits or otherwise of EU membership gained further momentum this week after UKIP's performance in the two by elections. On the far side of the continent, discussion about alliance with Brussels and the other capitals of Western Europe is perhaps even more heated. There's gathering support in some quarters for a new political union centred on Moscow. Nick Thorpe, who's been investigating in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, says the idea is based on a rejection of liberal values and what its champions see as the spiritual emptiness of the West.
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Volen Sidorov is making my afternoon tea. For a politician with a reputation for eating reporters like me for breakfast, I find him surprisingly charming, and his brew is delicious mountain herbs from the slopes of the Rodope mountains, stewed for 15 minutes and served in a pewter teapot. What exactly are you, Mr. Sidorov? He dislikes words like nationalist and extremist. He his policies are more social than similar parties in Europe. He says he stands with the working people. His favorite epithet is patriotic. His vision of the west comes close to Ronald Reagan's depiction of the Soviet Union as an evil empire. He opposes what he calls the colonialist policies of America and its European allies. His latest book lists supermarket chains like Billa, Liddell and Carrefour as leeches on the bodies of poor countries like Bulgaria. And he's a fan of Alexander Dugin, the Russian intellectual who allegedly inspired Vladimir Putin to re annex Crimea and lay claim to eastern Ukraine. The author of the Political Vision of Eurasia with Russia at the center, Sidorov and Dugin met several months ago in Vienna and clearly took a shine to one another. Mr. Sidorov is also a fan of big Russian energy projects in Europe, of the nuclear power plant started at Belen on the Danube in Bulgaria until it was scrapped to his fury in 2012 and of South Stream, the new gas pipeline which will bypass Ukraine to bring Russian gas to southeastern Europe. It's scheduled to come online despite grumblings from Brussels and Washington in January 2016. But aren't these the fingers of Russia stretching greedily into Europe in the same way that he accuses Western multinationals of doing, I ask gently. Respectable economists also accuse Western companies of keeping wages low in the east in order to keep their cutting edge on the world market. But why should we trust Russia more? Isn't it just as hard to feel at home in the long shadow of a nuclear reactor as in the car park of a shopping mall? During socialist times, he replies, we were much bigger winners than losers from Soviet cooperation. It was a vast market for our goods and Bulgarian industry worked at full capacity. And look at us now, a vassal of the west, crippled, poverty stricken and robbed. If that was colonialism, he adds, I prefer that to what we have now. Events in Ukraine have had an electrifying effect on politics throughout east and Central Europe. One measure of politicians is how they view Western sanctions on Russia. The Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, who opposes sanctions, has said his country will be doves in economy, hawks in defence. In other words, maximum business with Russia, but loyalty to NATO. Alexander Dugin argues openly for what he calls a fifth column of nationalist leaders standing up for Russian interests in Europe. Volen Sidorov categorically denies that his party receives more than moral support from Russia. The similarly pro Russian Jobbik party in Hungary also denies receiving a single Russian ruble. Volen Sidorov's attacker party won only a fragment of the vote in this month's parliamentary election in Bulgaria. But the Hungarian Fidesz party has a two thirds majority in the parliament in Budapest. Its leader also speaks of the colonialism of Brussels and shares his love affair with nuclear fuel rods. I always hold Viktor Orban up as a model of how a prime minister should behave. He explains he's ridding his country of big foreign colonialist investors. Mr. Orban also speaks of an opening to the east and recently described his people, the Hungarians, as semi Asian. Curiously, though, he recently banned Alexander Dugin from entering Hungary to take part in a gathering of nationalists, which the Hungarian government dubbed racist. The event went ahead anyway, but. But behind closed doors and while Mr. Orban sails along just inside the European Union, his eyes turned to the east. Mr. Sidorov wants out of both the EU and NATO. Before I leave his office, I ask for a photograph. On one wall he has swords and guns, all fakes, he insists. His is a peaceful country, only fighting in self defence. Unlike my own, he stresses, with its opium wars. On another wall is his icon collection from the Orthodox Church and on the third wall, a magnificent painted map of Bulgaria from the early 20th century. There are sheep in the hills, maidens pouring wine, men plowing with white oxen, soldiers with flags, portraits of famous men, and even camels. The nationalist map of Europe too, is getting wilder, and for some cartographers, ever more wonderful.
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Nick Thorpe in Sofia the capital of Bolivia, La Paz is an extraordinary place with an extraordinary history. A focus of the revolution in Latin America against Spanish rule, it sits high in the Andes. Tomorrow, Bolivians vote for a president. Evo Morales, who was the country's first indigenous leader, is running for a third term. His campaigns concentrated on how he's improved the lives of the indigenous communities which make up the majority of the country. In 2009, he passed a new constitution, trying to give them greater rights. Many believe he succeeded in doing just that, and he's expected to win a third term in office. Katie Watson's there.
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I first visited Bolivia when I was a young student of Latin American politics. Coming over land from Chile by bus, arriving in La Paz took my breath away. High up in the Andes, it's more than three and a half thousand meters above sea level. La Paz is a city that feels like it should never really have been built. It is such an impractical and remote place. Nestled in a canyon below snow capped mountains, houses are squeezed onto every last bit of available land, rising up the side of the cliffs precariously. On this last trip, La Paz took my breath away again, but not quite in the same way. I flew in this time, and as I was waiting for my luggage, I spotted the free oxygen on offer to passengers. I chuckled. Only in La Paz, I thought. On my first night, I went out to meet a friend. I had a glass of wine and thought nothing of it. Only the next day I could think of nothing else. Altitude sickness, or soroche, as they call it here, had hit and I was bedridden with a stinking headache and nausea all day. 24 hours later, I was acclimatized and fit to hit the streets. The roads are still potholed and the traffic terrible. But since my last visit, there's been an addition to La Paz's incredible skyline. A cable car. It's a big deal. When it opened earlier this year, people queued for hours rather than squeeze into cramped buses. These space age glass bubbles, complete with WI fi, are just out of this world. The cable car's main route is between La Paz and El Alto, which sits above the capital on the high plains of the Andes. More than just a symbol of development, it links up two cities that are often seen as Very different. El Alto used to be a suburb of La Paz, but as it grew, became a city in its own right. Its residents are migrants, people who've come from the country in search of work, and it's now growing at a faster rate than Richelie Paz. Altenos, as the residents are called, are mainly indigenous Aymara and some Quechua. Most women here wear their traditional dress long black plaits, bowler hats and colourful skirts known as polleras. And they carry an aguayo on their backs, a fabric sling that's used for everything from babies to the weekly shop. El Alto has long been seen as La Paz's poor cousin, but there's hidden wealth here that's slowly starting to reveal itself. Freddy Mamani is at the forefront of this change. He's from El Alto, but studied architecture in La Paz. He's become the king of Andean architecture, building dozens of houses that are changing the face of the neighbourhood, which has up until now been full of simple red brick and concrete houses. He took me to one house under construction as well as private accommodation. The first and second floors were taken up with a dance hall, and I have to say I have never seen anything quite like it. Bright orange and yellow paint, ceilings 15 metres high, with space for an orchestra and an upper balcony for guests. This is no village hall entertainment. I felt like I was in Disneyland. Freddy's style, he says, is influenced by Tiwanaku, one of the most famous archaeological sites near Lake Titicaca. It's known for its incredibly accurate stonemasonry. Of course, Freddy has a modern take on it, using bright coloured paint, geometric patterns and folkloric elements. He says he's broken traditional architectural rules, but not everybody appreciates them. People have started to call them chollettes, a combination of chalet and cholo, which is a slang word used to refer to indigenous people here. Calling a woman a cholita may now be an affectionate term, but Freddy doesn't like the label. Cholette, he says, is pretty demeaning. Freddy took me to meet another client, Alejandro, an Imaran businessman who's worked as a tailor since the age of 14. He saved up more than half a million dollars to to pay for his new venture in cash. The result? A building with two dance halls and his home on top. Each dance hall has capacity for 1000 people and he rents them out every weekend. The chandeliers were imported from China, he tells me. The walls hand painted with designs showing off the Aymaran culture and flashing lights coming out of every luminous green pillar. But Alejandro wasn't finished, but I followed him up some stairs. And what do you know? On the fourth floor there's an indoor football pitch. With the cold weather in El Alto, you need something more reliable. This has the temperature of Cochabamba, he tells me, referring to the Bolivian city that has more of a Mediterranean climate. I asked Freddie where this new wealth was coming from. Have Evo Morales indigenous friendly policies made people richer? They've always been rich, he told me. What's happening now is that people feel prouder of their identity. They want to show it off.
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Katie Watson in La Paz Now, Malawi may not be everyone's dream destination. Certainly one now admittedly rather ancient survey would have you believe there are no fewer than 117 other countries where it's safer to invest your money. Lilongwe, the capital, is where most of the nation's business is conducted, but it's only been the capital for 40 odd years. Before that, the big decisions were taken in the verdant hill town of Zomba, one of the most attractive places in the heart of Africa. Picturesque it may be, but Jonathan Fryer's been finding out that people living there have a hard time trying to make ends meet.
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The road that runs past the Zomba Gymkhana Club is lined with huge trees, the electric purple of the jacaranda shining brightly against the ambient bottle green. There are lots of lovely but crumbling British colonial buildings in this part of town, a legacy of the time when Zomba was the capital of the British Central African Protectorate. It was known then as the most beautiful capital of all Queen Victoria's possessions, and it's still the most appealing of independent Malawi's major settlements. But as the jeep I was travelling in climbed up the increasingly steep road towards the top of the 6000 foot Zomba Plateau that towers over the town, my eyes were fixed on the only other traffic. Young men were slowly pushing bicycles up the incline, while down the other side came others gingerly manoeuvring their bikes laden with piles of firewood six or even 10ft high. It must take them all day to trudge up and down just once, as well as gathering and fixing their loads of wood. But the pittance they earn keeps them alive upon the plateau. Well away from the tarmac road, a local scout, Isaac, pointed to an earth path running from the edge of a waterfall into the thick forest. That's the potato path, he declared. It leads down the other side of the mountain to a village where they grow Irish potatoes. When the potatoes are harvested, the villagers carry them in sacks up the mountain and then down again to sell in the market. In Zomba, the potatoes are the village's only source of income. Meanwhile, deep in the forest, local youths spend the day scouring the undergrowth for wild strawberries and gooseberries and Himalayan black. Later, they stand by the side of the road with their pickings in the hope that a car will pass and stop to buy. You can have a whole mound of fruit for a pound. Other lads fish in the rivers and ponds around the massive plateau, then hurry back down into town as fast as they can go, their catch slung over poles before the fish goes off. But the other day, when we got to Chagua Dam, a small lake a great good hours walk away from the road at the top of the plateau, we found the place deserted. A small white frog sitting in the grass stared up at us in surprise. No one comes here, isaac explained. They're afraid of the spirits in the lake. Some years ago, a group of boys went there to fish and swim, but one of them suddenly disappeared in the water. The others search for him in vain. Months later, the chewed remains of his corpse floated to the surface. The local people were sure he'd been killed by a monster in the lake, but in my opinion, isaac added gravely, it was not the monster who ate him. A shiver went down my spine, not just because of a slight chill in the air. It was much warmer back down in the town, with its reassuring bustle round the market and the cries of minibus drivers touting for business. There's a well made two lane highway linking Zomba to the modern capital Lilongwe, over 200 miles away, and for a long stretch, that road marks the boundary between Malawi and Mozambique. There's no border fence or anything, and people just wander back and forth between the two countries. During Mozambique's long civil war, a refugee settlement grew up just on the Malawian side of the road, which where the people were apparently completely safe. These days it's mainly children who run to and fro across the road playing or hunting field mice. A local man, Henry, explained. The mice live in burrows in the banks by the side of the road, and the children smoke them out by putting burning paper into the holes. Once dead, the mice then have their entrails removed and they're roasted on sticks. If you pass by at the right moment, Henry said, you can buy them as a crunchy snack. Despite my usual enthusiasm to get into the spirit of countries I work in, I decided on this occasion that mouse kebab was one delicacy I could go to my grave without trying.
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Jonathan Fryer Able to resist that tasty morsel. In Zomba, Malawi, autumn's a time of year when the skies resemble busy motorways as birds migrate in their millions to their winter habitats. The traffic's keenly monitored by bird watchers or twitchers the world over. They know they'll be exotic species to be seen in places like coastal Norfolk where birds touch down on their way to and from northern Europe and Asia. And certainly by the Strait of Gibraltar where Africa is closest to Europe. In the Danube Delta in Romania, you might in time gone by have spotted the rare and beautiful slender billed curlew as it flew south from its northerly breeding grounds. But Horatio Clare's been been learning that this majestic creature is no longer to be seen.
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To the memory of the slender billed curlew, says Dr. Janos Botond Kish, raising a beaker of ruby tinted plum brandy pressed from the fruits of his garden. It's a rather amazing moment. Dr. Kish is legendary in Romanian conservation. A man who knows the Danube Delta as well as anyone alive. And he's drinking farewell to another legend. One of the rarest birds in the world, the slender billed curlew used to migrate from Siberian breeding grounds to wintering areas in the Mediterranean via the delta's archipelago of waters, marshes and sighing trees. Dr. Kish saw it several times, but it does not come here now, tracing the bird through its last haunts from Morocco to the Balkans. I have arrived here on Romania's Black Sea coast at the delta's fringe, only to hear the same story. A beautiful white and gold bird, finer and paler than the plump Eurasian curlew known to most birdwatchers, has gone. No one knows why. The impact of hunting on the migration route would be minimal, says Dr. Kish. The wintering areas are so vast it is unlikely minor changes affected them. But Russia is still effectively a closed country. We don't know what happened there. As a man who lived through Romania's communist years, Dr. Kish knows all about Russian legacies and about hunting. The first time I saw a slender billed curlew I had my gun. I still don't know why I didn't shoot it. I'm glad I didn't. It would have been a significant part of the population. One of his 19 cats climbs, his shirt claws out. He winces but does not flinch. In his garden are 30 species of fruit trees. Peaches, plums and apples sway in the branches like soft treasure. Dr. Kish has the gift of propagating life. It is largely thanks to him that The Danube Delta Reserve, one of the great habitats of Europe, has survived into this century. In the 60s, there was balance. It was mostly local people hunting for food to feed their families, he says. Everything changed with what he calls mega paranoid communist agriculture. They grabbed land of any kind, even what was unsuitable for farming, he recalls. There was a conviction that wild species were in competition with agriculture. They shot cormorants, pelicans and egrets. Maybe in England people like nature because it is other to their environment. Here it is not so. When his father in law fled communist Romania, being his relative became a crime. Dr. Kish was confined to an island in the delta for three years. Now I was the prey species, he smiles. I stopped shooting. Returning from exile, Dr. Kish founded what became the Delta Biosphere Reserve. He needed fit and educated men to guard it. He found them in karate clubs. They caught a government official shooting swans in a protected area. The official escaped censure while Dr. Kish was sacked, then reinstated and appointed Secretary of State for the Environment by the next government. I concentrated on trans frontier reservations, he says. Nature doesn't respect borders. A green corridor between Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary and a reserve for rare seals on the Bulgarian border are among his achievements. And what of the slender billed curlew, a creature of the littorals where water, sky and land bleed into one another? It lived in this soughing, murmurous world of bulrushes and rattling reeds among the glasswork beds where salt and sweet waters mingle. Its companions are all around us. White pelicans and black storks, like hussars, with their red bills, climb the thermals. Swallows and martens volley into the wind. The autumn migration is underway. Without the slender billed curlew, everything has a beginning, a climax and an extinction, says Dr. Kish. But if man is involved in speeding up such a process, it is a great sin. The birds recorded history sees the rise and fall of communism, the flood tide of Western capitalism, European integration, and now, perhaps, the ebb of those currents in the face of globalization. The career of Dr. Kish parallels the strides and now, he says, the stumbles of European conservation. We will lose the richness of the delta. I am glad I am old. Pressure on protected areas is greater every day. But what about the people you trained? The younger generation? I ask. Surely they give you hope. Who says hope is the last thing to die? He returns with a twinkle. The Chinese. And so we drink another toast to the slender billed curlew and to the world it leaves behind.
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Horatio Clare, scanning the skies above the Danube delta. In vain. And bringing this edition to a close. Do programs next week on Thursday as well as on Saturday morning. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.