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From Our Own Correspondent
The Death of Gypsy Music
00:27:49
The best in news and current affairs story-telling. In this edition, the music which a...
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Thank you for downloading the latest edition of BBC Radio's from our own correspondent, the best in news and current affairs storytelling.
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It's introduced by Kate Ady. Hello. Scandal on the tea estates of India. Their products sold in the smartest shops in London and New York. But some of their workers are beaten, hungry and underpaid. Also today we find that British sarcasm is a prized commodity. At the state run Housemaids Academy in the Philippines. The foreigners are coming to look at the dragons of Indonesia. The locals are excited but worried. And it thrived under communism. Perhaps it could even cure a migraine. But the gypsy music which once provided the heartbeat of central and Eastern Europe is almost gone. But first, the eight month battle over the international airport in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk has not only left the Runway and terminal in ruins, it's also destroyed the neighbourhoods nearby. The fighting between government forces and pro Russian rebels has left the small, once picturesque suburb of Oktyabrusky largely empty. Its mainly one story houses have been destroyed. The tails of rockets can be seen sticking out of pavements. Homeless dogs and cats whose owners have been killed or who have fled rush up to meet the few people who wander through its deserted streets. A shaky ceasefire is still in place for now, but Fergal Keene says with talk of both sides taking the opportunity to regroup and rearm, there's little confidence that there'll be a lasting peace.
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I do not know how long he had lain there. Weeks certainly. The stage of decomposition was advanced. The dead Ukrainian lay to the left of the track. As we walked away from the airport terminal, some rebels stood looking at the corpse. My colleagues overheard a senior officer say, you've got a body here. A subordinate replied, I know. I've asked the emergency services to move it, but they haven't yet. The rebels moved on. I remember driving along this road last spring on one of the very last days before the war, I checked in for my flight to Kiev. In the sparkling terminal, upgraded only two years before to welcome thousands of football Fans to Euro 2012, I drank cappuccino and enjoyed the warm sun streaming through the great glass windows. And within days, just days, war would turn this airport into a citadel to be fought over by rival armies until they'd reduced it to ruins. There had been violence before then. Attacks on pro Ukrainian demonstrators, armed takeovers of police and administrative buildings, a rising tide of intolerance. But none of us who were here then foresaw the big guns, the rockets, the trenches, the thousands dead and the and the million displaced. The suburbs of a modern European city shelled to rubble. Back then I saw a modern city with its factories and offices, shops, restaurants, opera house, playgrounds, buses and taxis, police handing out parking tickets. I saw all of this in the warm spring sunlight and came to the wrong conclusion. I thought that the rebels would try to entrench their power and that the government might try to bring them to submission with an economic blockade holding back all monies from central funds, and hope that their backer in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, could be pressured into pressuring them to make a reasonable peace with Kiev. But with town after town falling to rebel gunmen, and the specter of Crimea's recent annexation so vivid, the government launched an offensive to recapture sovereign territory from the self styled republics of Donetsk and and Luhansk. And here we are today, after all the death and ruin, there is a ceasefire. Though few here believe in it. A rebel said yesterday in the ruins of Kievsky district on the way to the airport. It's a terrible idea. It just gives the Ukrainians a chance to build up their forces. In pure military terms, the rebels are winning, thanks in large part to the backing of Vladimir Putin and the Russian army. The EU continues to hope, or at least it publicly hopes, that the conflict can be brought to an end with sanctions and sporadic rounds of talks. The British are sending some military trainers. The Americans threaten to arm the Ukrainians. European leaders know that their electorates will recoil at any armed intervention in the realpolitik of contemporary Europe. Ukraine isn't a war worth risking. Nor, despite the rhetoric of a few on Capitol Hill, is it seen as a cause Americans should die for. Nobody in the west can be sure where a military intervention would end. Remember that this ceasefire came about because of an upsurge in civilian deaths, not because European leaders felt an urgent imperative to end the rebel military advance. Mr. Putin watches the competing impulses of the Western nations and knows that for all the hardships threatened by sanctions, his people are still robustly behind him. I refuse to try and guess the next move of Russia's leader. More informed minds than mine have been proved abysmally wrong over the last year. He may regard a destabilized Ukraine as victory enough, a lesson to other pro western states in the region. Or he may still hanker for a complete military victory that conquers the strategic city of Mariupol and links the rebel territories with with Russian occupied Crimea. As for Kiev, the government is losing the war and knows its Western allies have no intention of engaging in a military confrontation with Russia. This much at least is predictable and the ceasefire on the ground. I can only report what I hear on both sides of the front lines, the cynicism of the fighting men and the weariness of civilians condemned by big power politics to live in fear. In the fetid bomb shelters of Donetsk, the displaced of this new Europe are thankful for the reprieve but move warily, too exhausted to trust Fergal Keen Tea
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is big business for India. It's worth billions. It was the British merchants who first brought forced labourers to the country to toil in the tea fields. Their descendants still work there and you can buy their produce in supermarkets and high end stores around the world. But as Humphrey Hawksley has been finding out, the business has been hit by scandal. Workers, some just teenagers, have been subjected to severe abuse. The United nations children's charity UNICEF is one of a number of bodies now investigating.
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A lone distant motorbike throws up dust from a wide dry riverbed. On both sides, under a deep blue sky, there are shacks, little mud paths, laundry of worn clothes hanging on lines, listless children peering from behind broken fences. And stretching out from there as far as the eye can see, are tea bushes, overgrown, useless and tangled in weeds, like in a post apocalyptic world. A factory lies derelict, as does a hospital, its windows broken, health care posters strewn on the floor. And not far away is a once grand now faded paint, peeled green sign announcing that this is the Bundapane Tea Garden, which shut down suddenly in 2013 because it wasn't making money. Bijita Ecker, who's now 15, is hanging up washing when we find her in the mud yard of her family's shack. Some 5000 people live on the 1500 acre estate and rely on it for just about every aspect of their lives. Income, health care, education. Bijita's lip quivers when she recalls those months, straight after the tea business closed. We had no money, she says. We had to get money from somewhere. She sits, hands clasped in front of her on a broken plastic chair. She wears a thin old orange cardigan and a torn white T shirt. She tries to keep her story measured and unemotional. My mother took me to Delhi to meet a labour contractor, she says. We went to an office building and there were others there like me. One woman suggested it would be terrible and and that we should run away now while we had a chance. But we didn't because we had no money. They took us to a room at the top. There was a fan, a television and a desk and we had to sleep on the floor. The Door was locked so we couldn't get out. Her eyes slowly fill with tears. A woman came in. She was the one in charge. She beat me. She started by slapping me. Then she hit me hard, saying I was being punished for trying to run away, but I hadn't. Begito was separated from her mother and taken on a train to Chandigarh, a thousand miles away from her home at Bundapane. I was terrified because I realized that something really bad was about to happen to me, she says. I didn't know what I could do. I'd never felt so scared and lonely. She was sent to work with the family as a maid. In their eyes, everything I did was wrong. They used to scold me and hit me. Even the children would beat me. Now tears stream down her cheeks as she's regaining her composure. Pata Pratim Shakar, who runs a local charity, explains that several girls from Bundapane had been traded by their parents because their lives had simply collapsed. Earlier, Pata introduced me to tea workers who were clearly very, very sick. He says that several have already died from malnutrition and that he's asked for help from the big tea companies themselves but has had no response on the grounds of humanity. He pleads, surely they can help us. India's tea industry is worth £2 billion a year, and in this north eastern belt several estates sell their branded products to high end stores in Europe and America. The United nations children agency UNICEF says that even in the better run tea estates in it's found a range of violations that includes trafficking like vegeta, child marriages, lack of food, schooling and low wages. The workers and their families who were meant to be looked after by the tea companies are one of the most backward and marginalized communities in India. While collecting the washing, Bijita speaks more about her ordeal in Chandigarh of being constantly hungry with beatings that continued on a daily basis and and of being paid nothing for her work. One day her mother appeared and Bajita was freed. By then some government welfare was getting through about £15amonth at least. It was something. Now I'm at school again and all I want to do is be a teacher, vegeta says, draping a shirt over her arm, a smile spreading across her face. Then, just as suddenly, she grimaces. When I was with that family, I tried to read at night, but they caught me and they beat me. She clutches the shirt in panic, looks down and wipes away a tear. I can't go back to that life. Please never I can't.
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Humphrey Hawksley in northern India now, we hear plenty about those Asian tiger economies. China, of course, South Korea and Vietnam too. But one of Asia's island nations refused to roar. The Philippines for decades was beset by political instability, rampant corruption and endemic poverty. But now things are changing. The Philippines has become the business outsourcing and call center capital of the world. Add to that its long established tradition of sending migrant labor, primarily housemaids, all over the rich world, and you have a uniquely Filipino model of economic development. Right now it's one of the fastest growing economies in all Asia, but its population is also rising fast. Stephen Sack has just been to Manila to find out if growth can outpace that birth rate.
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When I arrive at the state run Housemaid's Academy in Manila, morning exercises are well underway. A squad of uniformed cleaners is poking feather dusters into all corners of the sitting room. In the kitchen, trainee cooks are immersed in the finer points of salad preparation. The academy has the feel of a soap opera set, each room meticulously dressed to ape the reality of a grand residence. Below stairs is a classroom filled with old fashioned school desks. And here, I'm told, the trainee house servants take lessons in hygiene, respect and personal finance. The Philippines government schools tens of thousands of maids, chauffeurs, mechanics and gardeners every year with the express purpose of launching them into long term service abroad for the state. It's a win win. These economic exiles there are currently some 10 million of them send back foreign currency, which is the lifeblood of the Filipino economy. And the extraordinary exodus of labour acts as a safety valve in a country struggling to provide homegrown jobs for a population rising by more than 2 million every year. We are proud of what we are doing, Sir Maria, one of the trainee maids tells me. We we are national heroes now. That was a phrase first coined in a government propaganda campaign, and it's clear that the 20 young women now gathered around me, all immaculately uniformed and polite to a fault, desperately want it to be true. It can't be easy leaving your families behind. I suggest we have no choice, replies Evelyn, an elfin figure no more than 5ft tall. I have a baby at home, but no way to support him. The the wages I earn in Kuwait will mean my mother can raise him. Many of the other trainees nod in sympathy. Almost all, it seems, are facing the prospect of separation from their children for at least three years, possibly many more. Their reality will be prolonged servitude in an alien culture. The mood in the academy has darkened half the young women before me are now weeping alongside the remittances of overseas workers. There's a new phenomenon keeping the Philippines economy afloat. It's known as bpo. Business process outsourcing. You could call it the rise of the call center economy. More and more Western companies have moved their low cost back office operations to the Philippines. We've overtaken India, dine Tubbs, a manager at Transcom Call Centres, boasts as we survey her army of Filipino telephonists handling calls on behalf of a UK parcels delivery company. It's midnight in Manila, 4pm in London, and the phones are red hot, as they will be till dawn. British companies love us, says Dine, because our English is not accented. The brightest graduates from our universities fight to get a job here. We only take the smartest kids, and after we finish training them, they even get your British sarcasm. One third of the Filipino population is under 15 years old. The country may have found a unique niche in the global economy economy, but current rates of economic growth, though impressive, will not sustain a population projected to double from 100 to 200 million within 30 years. Which is why Jane Judea may just hold the key to the Philippines economic future. Jane isn't an entrepreneur or a politician. She's a reproductive health worker who spends her days in some of Manila's most squalid slums. Thanks to a law pushed through by the government last year, she's now permitted to offer the poorest Filipinos free access to condoms, the contraceptive pill, even sterilization for women who want it. The Catholic Church, which commands the loyalty of 90% of Filipinos, fought the initiative tooth and nail, but the clerics lost. Jane introduces me to Sherilyn Gonzalez, a whey faced woman of 30 with 10 children and another on the way. I ask Sherilyn whether she's happy. I'll be happy when I've had the baby and can get sterilized, she says. My eldest has just dropped out of school and we can barely afford to educate the others. I tell my children to have two kids, then use contraception. If the next generation of Gonzalez's heed her advice, their country's future is promising. If not well, Tens of millions of young Filipinos may find themselves stuck in a poverty trap and still dependent on overseas labour as a means of escape.
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Stephen Sacher and you can see the film he made in the Philippines on the Hard Talk program on BBC2 on Thursday morning. Now, opening up airports to international flights can bring in useful revenue, but it can also bring serious problems. And plans to do just this on one of the islands of Indonesia may be exciting the locals, but they're also causing them concern. Indonesia, with its dazzling coral reefs, white sand beaches and tropical jungles, already attracts thousands of visitors every year. At the moment, most of the tourism is concentrated in just a few places, like Bali and more recently, Lombok. But Heather Simons has been to an island further east where the wildlife is the principal attraction. The local airport will soon receive international flights and that will mean a sharp increase in the number of visitors.
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Dried leaves and branches crunch and crackle beneath my feet. My guide is brandishing a long, forked stick. Our only defence, and just meters away, is a dragon. I've come to the island of Komodo in Indonesia, home to the world's largest venomous reptile, the Komodo dragon. My guide smiles. This one is around 35 to 40 years old. He says it's over 2 meters long and currently basking in the morning sun. All is calm, but it's looking at me. And when it swishes its long, tapered tail, I feel a thrill of fear at its latent power. These giant lizards are wild and dangerous. Back in the 70s, one tourist was eaten. All they found, my guide says gleefully, was his sunglasses, his camera and a pool of his blood. Walking on through the dry forest, we come across a black pig rootling through the fallen palm leaves. My guide tells me the people on the island are Muslim, so this pig is safe from them, but it's not safe from the dragons. Perhaps the dragons, he muses, are Christian. Whatever their religion, the dragons are becoming a big draw. People come from across the world to see them and get close to their raw, cold blooded ferocity. For most, the journey goes via the nearby island of Flores, through its port town of Labuan Bajo. In the past year, the town has had an estimated 50,000 visitors, more than double what it had just five years ago. The foreign currency is pouring in and walking down the main road, you're never far from wet concrete. As the little town grows around you, the rest of the island is desperately trying to cash in. Anyone with a car will give you an overland tour of everything the island has to offer, from staggering waterfalls to ancient paddy fields, from little native villages to multicolored volcanic crater lakes. But alongside the enthusiasm for economic growth, there is also concern and misgivings. Inland, in a town called Bojawa, where the air is moistened by the jungle and the surrounding volcanoes are perfectly cone shaped, I meet Benny. He runs a hostel and is proud of Flores and all the wonders it holds. But he's seen what's happened to Bali since the tourists arrived, and he doesn want the same for Flores. In Bali, he says, you walk along the road and you are the only Indonesian. The white men drive on mopeds with bare chests, and on the beach, the women are in tiny bikinis. He looks at me. One is ok, he says, but that many? It's disgusting. And for the people of Bali, scantily clad women are the least of their worries. In a shared taxi or kijang, racing along the newly resurfaced Trans Flores highway, I meet Felix. Felix. He lives on Bali, but has come to Flores to meet a friend who moved here after getting married because he could no longer afford a family home there. Everything is so expensive, Felix tells me. To buy land is difficult because everywhere they want to build hotels. Just as the people of Bali are heading east to Flores, so too are the tourists. And it's about to get easier. The airport in Labuan Bajo has a shiny new terminal, which, if all goes to plan, should see international flights arriving later this year. A lot is being done to try to make the growing tourism industry on Flores more sustainable and to make sure the money gets to the local population. Wherever you go, whether along a path to visit a waterfall or into a cave to seek out bats, a smiling guide will take payment to show you the way. Villages now have visitor books and donation boxes, and ticket offices seem to be springing from the dust near any site of natural beauty. But already rubbish is becoming a problem. Gutters rattle with empty water bottles, and plastic bags float among the fishes in the coral reefs. Right now, the island is humming with potential. The people are excited to share their beautiful homeland with the rest of the world. With its new airport close to completion, Flores is on the brink of a tourism explosion. The only question is what the fallout will be.
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Heather Simons in Indonesia now. It was once the sound of Central and Eastern Europe. You'd hear it everywhere, at bars and restaurants, shows and weddings. Gypsy music. It was never, by the way, called Rommel music. It's frantic, rhythmic stuff. You can dance to it. There are violins, there are love songs. And there's melancholy. Lots of melancholy. But does that music have a place in the modern world? Could it be that it's gradually fading away? Nick Thorpe has been investigating and he begins his research in an old Austro Hungarian city in Serbia.
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Ontal Dragic, known as Uncle Tony to his friends, is feeding his pigeons when I arrive. It's a typical Balkan scene at dusk, a crumbling single story house backing onto a courtyard with a gnarled pear or plum tree in the middle, a pile of half chopped wood, a lazy cat asleep on top of an old cupboard, and a sudden flurry of wings. He leads me through his kitchen, past a parrot and a photo of himself on the wall, much younger in an ironed white shirt, cradling a double bass installed on an ancient sofa. He takes me through a pile of black and white photographs of the gypsy orchestras of yore. I turn on the radio now, he laments, but there's no music worth listening to. If the old guys were to wake from the dead and hear this trash, they'd smash their instruments. Uncle Tony is a gypsy and proud of it, one of the last survivors of the great dynasties of Hungarian gypsy musicians in Subotica, a town in the north of Serbia, this was the capital of Hungarian gypsy music in the old Yugoslavia. They gloried in a country where every restaurant worthy of the name had live music until dawn. When I was born, my grandmother put a bow in my hand and that's how I came to play the double bass, he explains. There were several streets where only musician families lived. Tony had his own band. From the age of 14, the kids gathered each afternoon in the streets with their violins. They knew the birthdays of all the prominent people and serenaded outside their homes in the hope of food, drink or small change for cinema tickets. That music has all but died out now, he laments. There's no demand for it in the restaurants and those who once sponsored it. The managers of the big restaurants and hotels are no longer with us. Hungarian folk music and Hungarian gypsy music overlap, though just how much is a matter of controversy. When the composers Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodai set out through the countryside collecting folk music at the beginning of the 20th century, the villagers told them they would fetch the Gypsies to play it for them. No, we don't want to hear gypsy music. We want Hungarian music. Cried the composers. But only the Gypsies can play it, explained the exasperated peasants. The music the tribes of Gypsies brought with them as they straggled across Europe from India in the Middle Ages, was strongly influenced by the music of the countries they passed through. They became masters of it all, developing a gypsy style of their own that thrived under the patronage of the landed gentry between the wars, was revived under communism, but is now withering on the vine. Mickey Lukac guides me round the Talentum Reiko building near Budapest's east station. He's probably Hungary's most famous player of the cymbalom, a sort of hammer dulcimer, which looks a bit like the inside of a piano and is played with astonishing results with two rods with what looks like candy floss on the ends. This was the building where, from the mid-1950s, the communist authorities encouraged gypsy music. Young children were brought here from poor villages and taught music discipline and foreign languages. And when they were finished, they were guaranteed a job. The state run National Entertainment Centre allotted them a restaurant night after night, and the grand boulevards of Budapest swarmed with restaurants. In the 1960s and 70s, under communism, an average Hungarian family could afford to eat out once a week, and the fiery music on offer was as important as the fiery dishes washed down with ample quantities of brandy and wine. That world died overnight. With the return of capitalism, the new owners cut costs and families couldn't afford the new bills. Some musicians found refuge in jazz, Mickey explains. But about half gave up music altogether, he reckons, and got jobs as security guards or parking attendance. A good proportion of Hungarian jazz musicians today are of Roma origin. There's a famous hundred member gypsy orchestra in Budapest, and bands of Hungarian gypsies still play the ballrooms of luxury cruise liners and roam the decks, looking nostalgically homewards to their landlocked country. And music schools try to teach young musicians to present their talents on social media as well as on stage. Music opens your soul to another world, says Mickey Lukac. It can also heal the one you're in. As a child, he suffered from terrible migraines. A thoughtful doctor prescribed the cymbalom, his father's instrument. The sweet sound of the hammers on the metal strings dissolved the pain.
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Nick Thorpe, with the Gypsy serenades, which I recall in Serbian restaurants, were so intimate the violinist's elbows went into your soup. That's it. We'll be here again next Thursday and Saturday. I do hope you'll join. Join us then. Goodbye.