← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
. The eye of the storm
00:28:03
Kate Adie hosts correspondents' stories from the United States, Russia, France, Italy...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC.
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This is from our own correspondent.
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You can hear the version of the
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programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline.
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But here's the latest edition broadcast on
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BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today we're in the eye of the storm with Isaac, the hurricane that fortunately never turned into a Katrina. A chilling meeting with some of Russia's ultra nationalists. Where did Julius Caesar really defeat the Gauls? A tale of archaeological skulduggery in Burgundy. And our correspondent takes a sentimental journey to a campsite in South Bohemia. The images of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 shamed the United States. Bloated bodies left unrecovered for days. Frail and elderly people waving desperately from their rooftops, begging to be airlifted. Families huddled in the Superdome, the refuge they could find. Lives lost, neighbourhoods destroyed. Three days ago, seven years after that catastrophe, a hurricane threatened the Mississippi Delta once more. And again the world's media made its way towards New Orleans. This time to see what Hurricane Isaac would do. Alistair Leithead was amongst them.
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There's a familiar feeling arriving in a city when there's a hurricane on the horizon. I'd been to this city before, seven years to the day in the same circumstances. And there are things you notice which are peculiar to impending storms and events like Christmas. There's a deadline. An unmovable, inevitable deadline. Every television station shows brightly coloured, real time swirling maps, current rain radar, wind speed and most importantly, track. Which way is it going to go? Who is it going to hit? The forecasters and weather modelers can tell you for sure where it will be in an hour, but in a day, in two days. Every model has a different prediction. Every map shows a cone of possible tracks spreading out from the eye of the storm. If you, your home and your family are in that cone, you have a lot of things to think about. Firstly, do you stay or do you go? How bad will it be? Will the levees hold this time? How secure is your home? Can the baby sit in the car for 10 hours of traffic jams? Will all that money spent on flood defences keep our home safe? What about the dog? The visiting journalist has different priorities but similar demands. Starting with a sturdy hire car. Water, food supplies, fuel. A solid hotel with a built in garage. Ways to pull power from the car. Cigarette lighter. When the electricity is cut, the supermarkets will soon close. They're busy and there's not much time. You need to get what you need fast and get out the water shelves empty first you want fresh fruit. Plenty freezer meals. Help yourself. People who know know the power goes off first. Frozen food thaws. Fruit spoils in the blanket of humidity that creeps into kitchens when air conditioners fall silent. Tin openers, forget it. They're long gone. They're well off by generators and plywood, if there's any left. Once stocked up, we made for the French Quarter. The roads on our side clear, miles of tailbacks heading the other way. There's something disturbing but enthralling about going against the crowd. But there's another feeling. Nothing like Christmas. The air of edginess and impending anarchy. When a hurricane hits, there's nothing anyone can do anymore. If you're in trouble and your phone is still working, there's no guarantee the person on the end of a 911 call can get help to you until nature's quite finished. The little white signs scribbled in haste and left in shop windows closed for the storm back in a few days. It's not written, but you could add, hopefully it's what people are thinking. And it's what people were thinking in New Orleans. With Hurricane Isaac coming, the Crescent City at the center of the cone and memories still roar of seven years to the day when those little notes were left and some people never came back to their homes or businesses. Katrina was huge and was devastating. True chaos. They talked about abandoning New Orleans and leaving it to the elements, but people here fight. They love their city and they rebuilt it. Billions were spent strengthening the levees protecting its core. When Isaac hit, it was a big storm, but the flood defences held. Power was lost in most places. There were some horribly familiar rooftop rescues outside the defensive walls. Some people lost everything. But New Orleans passed its first big test. People were confident before the storm, confident enough for many to stay. Isaac might have left a lot of cleaning up to do, but it's also left a sense that all that work to save the city was worth it. As the wind dropped, Tanya Tetlo's generator was keeping the fan turning, keeping baby Lucy cool. Tanya lost her home in Katrina, but stayed and bought a new house on higher ground. I used to say before Katrina that the wonderful and terrible thing about New Orleans is that it never changed, she told me. But since then, we've had a lot of change and it's been amazing. Riding out its first big storm since then has brought even more confidence that New Orleans is here to stay.
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Alastair Leithhead. The trial and jailing of the Pussy Riot protesters has provided Another opportunity for liberal voices in Russia to be raised against Vladimir Putin's policies and presidency. But in recent months, there have also been demonstrations by nationalists objecting to what they see as Putin's lenient attitude towards immigration. The most extreme amongst them are ultra nationalists known as skinheads, who blame immigrants for a rising crime. Tom Esselmont has been trying to find out what makes them tick over the years.
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I've met some pretty hardened Russian men on my travels. Muscular guys able to handle their drink and most importantly, fond of a joke. But rather like the ice in a Siberian winter, there are those who take a far colder, harsher view on life. They call themselves skinheads. Although shaven heads are no longer mandatory. In recent years, skinheads have been held responsible for many of the far right attacks on immigrants across Russia. Many of the perpetrators have been locked up. Some have since been freed. Maxim is one such former convict. We meet in the garden of a Moscow burger restaurant. We sit not far from the sizzle, sizzle of beef on a grill, surrounded by the yelping and chanting the of children hyperactive after sugary drinks. It wasn't perhaps the most appropriate place to meet a notorious ultra nationalist, one who's done time for incitement of racial hatred, especially one whose nickname, te sac, means machete. But then, where was munching on his burger? He made it clear to me that he was angry, fearful, and by the looks of his two young, well built henchmen, possibly quite dangerous. I think immigrants should be housed in separate workers villages, he told me. He went on to explain how he felt they were sponging off society and putting Russian women in danger of attack. Then he got out his knife. I looked up at him, expecting a menacing smile. Instead, all I saw was mischief, an eyebrow raised, as if he had just learnt how to make the gesture. And then he leaned over to his henchmen, whispered something in their ears and they giggled. Have you ever had to use it? I asked, trying to bring him back to the interview. I told you not to ask such stupid questions, he said, putting it away. He gave a twitch of the eyebrow to his two bodyguards and who then laughed in that sinister way that doesn't involve smiling. The comment took me back to a video I had watched on the Internet before setting out. It showed a man, possibly from Central Asia or the Caucasus, being dragged through a forest like some dark horror movie. But this is real. There are screams, which may have been added later, but then the man is tied up and killed. The details of how he's savagely murdered are too horrific to watch. Those who've studied the video assure me of its authenticity and say the killing is the work of a far right gang. No authority seems to have the power or desire to take it off the web. It's part of the lawlessness of Russia, a country where the armed ultra nationalists seem to have almost been given free reign to take the law into their own hands. The police have started to arrest the most violent of them, but with no rehabilitation. Their opinions remain the same, but then perhaps they would have done anyway. These men all take the same anti immigrant view as Tsach, but some are better educated and articulate their campaign more effectively. Rahman is a law student who wants to be a customs officer. In his spare time, he he gains entry to squalid basements, trying to check the papers of migrants who live there. Then there's the lawyer Dmitry, who spends his Sundays away from his family in the countryside with his gun, practicing firing at paper targets so that if it comes to it, he's ready to take on the immigrants. I met the worldly Russian neo Nazi Niels, who'd studied Nietzsche overseas. He saw himself as quite the uber human. In every interview, I was trying to understand why these people felt the way they did. I asked myself, were they born like this? Would they beat up any non white person they didn't like? I decided not. But things might change. All of them tried to twist the conversation. If they didn't like the questions, smiles would quickly evaporate, turning into venomous, dead serious glares that meant one change the subject. The men I met had a number of things in common. They didn't drink. They despised modern drunken vodka shot Russia. They despised Putin for having, they believe, tolerated multiculturalism. And they all shared a total lack of irony. The members of Russia's far right exist in a weird, dark, mysterious world, one they want all fellow Slavs to inhabit. And therein lies a problem for the skinheads and hope for those who oppose their views. They may have the power to attract a following of other youngsters through their Internet campaigns and sheer street credibility. They may be able to skirt the law to take on someone they don't like. They may be growing as a political force, it's hard to say. But they don't own Russia. And although many Russians are strongly nationalistic, most of them would never like to let the skinheads have their way.
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Tom Esselmont Across Europe, politicians are beginning to put their holiday clothes back into store, getting ready for an autumnal return to matters of state. In Italy, they'll have a new political force to contend with. The five Star movement have been set up by comedian Beppe Grillo. But it considers itself a serious alternative to traditional parties. Informal and unstructured, it defines itself by what it stands the Euro, austerity measures and corruption, amongst other things. And the movement's been doing increasingly well in local elections. The recently installed mayor of Palmer is a five star man. Alan Johnstone's been to meet him.
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The mayor's office in Palmer's medieval town hall is everything you might expect, a centuries old seat of power in what's been a wealthy Italian city. You can almost feel the weight of tradition. Aristocrats, dukes and duchesses stare out of old oil paintings. A thick marble desktop balances on the heads of carved golden lions and a chandelier hangs beneath a vaulted ceiling. But there's nothing at all traditional about the new mayor who now sits under the chandelier. Federico Pizzarrotti represents the coming of people power in the politics of Parma. A few months ago, he was just another commuter, a rather slight, smiling man on his way to a job in it. But he stood for election as the five Star movement's candidate and surfed into office on a wave of contempt for the city's regular politicians. Mr. Pizzarrotti's never been elected to anything before, but suddenly he finds himself in charge of quite a major city, which is actually nearly a billion dollars in debt. He acknowledges that of course, he and his fellow five star councillors have absolutely no experience in this sort of area, but they do have experience of life, he says, and good judgment. And they will simply apply those things to the running of Palmer. They'll act in the people's interest. And that, Mr. Pizzarrotti would say, is what marks his movement out from Italy's traditional parties. In the eyes of the five star citizens, the political establishment is utterly self seeking, irredeemably corrupt. A tall, thin, 25 year old student called Marco Bossi, a spokesman for the movement on Palmas council, put it like the party system had failed the city, he said, and the people have taken charge all across the country. He went on, too many people didn't feel represented. The solution, he said, was either to emigrate or to try to change Italy. And the movement aims to embody that change. It wants to be everything that the established parties are not. There's no five star membership list, no offices, no structure, no formally designated leadership. The aim is for the view of every single activist to count as much as any other. And at the movement's core is the idea that Citizens need to participate continually in decision making. If a hospital is to be built or closed, everyone who might use it has a right to have a say. But you might argue that faith in the wisdom of crowds can be overdone, that the masses can have moments of madness too. And I asked the five star student, Mr. Bossi, if there wasn't a danger, that in all that mass consultation there'll be masses of talk but not so much action, that big controversial decisions might be slow to emerge, that something like paralysis might lie in store for Palmer rather than swift and efficient government. He replied that the new regime might be slower to arrive at decisions, but that when it did, they would be better decisions because they'd been endorsed by everyone. Although the Five Star Movement rejects the notion of hierarchy and leadership, it certainly feels like it has a leader, or at least a sort of citizen number one. He is Peppe Grillo, one of Italy's best known comedians. He's a shaggy haired bear of a man, a bouncing ball of energy barracking and blasting the establishment. For example, Mr. Grillo advocates a public trial for everybody who's ever been elected to office in Italy. Each of them would be made to account for any unexplained wealth, for any extra apartments, or the odd mysterious half million euros in the wife's bank account. It's around a stream of thoughts like that that the Five Star movement has coalesced on the Internet and rapidly become a serious force in Italian politics. And as Beppe Grillo rocks the establishment, he's coming under increasing scrutiny. Some see him as a dangerous populist. One critic has described him as whipping up a wave of feeling that threatens to sweep away the structures of Italian democracy. A raucous Pied Piper leading people to disaster. But Parma is where the Five Star Movement's ideas will be tested for the first time. The new mayor, Mr. Pizzarotti, knows that all of Italy is watching. But he doesn't seem too fazed. He says he'll set about his big challenge in the same way he would set about trying to eat an elephant. He will do it bit by bit.
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Alan Johnstone, Keen readers of the Asterix books will know that the Battle of Alesia was where Julius Caesar beat the Gauls, subjugating the whole of France to Roman rule. Except, of course, for Asterix's one tiny village, which in fiction staged a resistance. But there's fierce debate about the exact location of the actual site of Alesia. Officially it's in Burgundy, but an alternative theory now places it near The Swiss border Hugh Schofield's been to investigate.
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When you drive east from Dijon, you first cross the fertile fields of the Saone river basin, and. And then you start climbing very quickly. You're in lush, dramatic scenery full of gushing streams and escarpments and meadows grazed by red and white Montbelliard cows, reminding us that we're in the Jura, home of La Vache Quierie. But it's not of livestock we've come to talk, but of stockades, not of cheeses, but of sieges, not of cattle, but of a battle. My meeting is with Sorbonne classics professor Daniel Danielle Porte, a doughty woman with owlish specs, known to her devoted followers as the Goddess. She's going to tell me about one of the biggest acts of archaeological imposture ever committed in the name of political and financial expediency. How that fraud is preventing the excavation of potentially the most important Celtic site in Europe. And how, if only the experts could see beyond the noses on their faces, then the truth would out and. And she wouldn't be just the leader of a cultish band of believers, but hailed as a visionary. After two days of explanations, she's going to have me half convinced. Half convinced. Anyway, here's the story. It's a good one. No one knows where the Battle of Alesia took place. It was a turning point marking the defeat of the Celts and the start of Roman rule. But no one knew where it happened. There was one strong candidate, a village called Alice St. Reine in Burgundy. And in 1864, by imperial decree no less, Napoleon III ordained that this was indeed the place. Flash forward a hundred years. Archaeologist Andre Berthier has never accepted the official thesis. He's developed a method for identifying historical locations. It's all about understanding the texts. So he goes back to the only source for the Battle of Alesia, which is Julius Caesar himself. In his De Bello Gallico, Caesar describes the town of Alesia. It's on a high hill bounded by two rivers with a broad plain in front, and so on. All details, which for Berthier, immediately exclude the official site. So he pours over military maps of northeast France, identifies 200 potential locations, eliminates them one by one, then comes here to a place called Chaude Cottenay in the Jura. And Eureka. Today you can see what he means. It does look like what Julius Caesar says. But Berthier went further. If this was the place, it wouldn't be enough to say it fitted Caesar's texts. There'd have to be physical Evidence too. So he looked. And on top of the hill where the citadel of Alesia would have been, among the woods and the undergrowth, he found it. Today it's Berthier's pupil, Daniel Port, who carries on his work. She shows me what she says is part of a 10 meter high wall which would have been part of the rampart. And here's a rare anthropomorphic menhir, a standing stone cut in the shape of a woman. This would have stood at one of the entrances. We know from Diodoros of Sicily, says Daniel, that Alesia was an important Celtic religious center. Old already by the time of the battle. The remains we found all fit that picture. So why isn't it all being properly investigated? Well, here it all gets murky. According to Daniel, the authorities are refusing permission for an excavation because they fear what was revealed would expose the fraudulent nature of the official Alesia site in Burgundy. And they can't have that because a multi million euro museum has just opened at the official site. She goes further. A lot of what was supposedly found at the official site was actually planted there, she says. In the original excavations, workers then spoke of finding so much stuff it was as if, quote, it had been put there. There was even a treasure chest containing Gaulish coins that just happened to be in exact proportion to the various Gaulish tribes mentioned in Caesar as having taken part in the battle. More evidence for her of what we might facetiously term skuldiggery. So who to believe? I'm torn. I so want Daniel to be right. But that, that very impulse makes me suspicious. If you want something to be true, doesn't that make it less likely to be? I mean, maybe she's a crank, but then just because it's a conspiracy theory doesn't mean it's not true. And actually I can't quite believe Napoleon III capable of planting evidence. As I said, I'm half convinced. Half.
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Hugh Schofield. Rob Cameron's made a sentimental journey this summer. In 1992, he spent two weeks with a couple of friends on a South Bohemian campsite. It was a life changing experience, one that prompted him to make the Czech Republic his home. Twenty years later, he and his original holiday companions have returned to the campsite to see what's changed.
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There are times you should pay attention in school and the lesson where they teach you how to recognize various farm animals is definitely one of them. It was one in the morning on a steep hillside in South Bohemia. There we stood, four middle aged men on a fool's errand of recreating a 20 year old holiday about to be gored to death in a meadow. It's got horns. Doesn't that mean it's a bull? One of us said. Not necessarily, said another nervously. It could be a cow. We stumbled on through the wet grass, summoning tired legs to tackle what felt like an almost vertical slope, slithering on cow pats and stinging ourselves on nettles, trying to avoid the menacing gaze of the huge, silent beast breathing heavily nearby. It was a cow. Several cows, in fact. They skittered away as we passed them. A few seconds later we'd negotiated the electric fence that contained them and reached a forest clearing. It was here, in this clearing, 20 years ago, that I decided I wanted to move to Czechoslovakia. The clearing housed a small campsite called Haina Hora, Gamekeeper's Mountain. It was just outside a pretty little town called Wimperk, deep in the Schumavar forest, close to the German border. You could stand in the clearing and watch shooting stars overhead. When you got bored of that, you could go into town and drink the best beer in the world for 10p a pint. It was simply paradise. How I ended up there is a long story, but I spent a blissful two weeks that summer with a trio of friends from Ireland, hiking Bohemia's woods and fields by day, quaffing its fine lagers by night. We were restless souls, I suppose, unhappy in dead end jobs and looking for life elsewhere. Twenty years on, the four of us stood in the same clearing, trying to make out the contours of the little wooden chalet with where we were due to spend the night. The camp was still there, run by the same owner, a man named Pavel, who'd greeted us and our nostalgic endeavor with warm enthusiasm. He even claimed, improbably, to remember us. Pavel was 67 now, on his second marriage to a much younger Ukrainian woman who cooked us borscht for breakfast. I'm thinking of selling this place, to be honest, he said to me, casting his eyes around the campsite he'd run for the last 33 years. Some Dutch people offered me a good price, but I turned them down. Who knows what they would have done with it. Armed with my old photos, we set about revisiting previous haunts, trying to jog 20 year old memories and pausing to reflect on how much and how little things had changed. For a start, the country we first visited in 1992 the no longer exists. It quietly consigned itself to the history books at midnight on December 31st, 1992, when the Czech Republic and Slovakia were born. Both are now members of the eu. The border crossings are gone, as are the guards who once leafed suspiciously through our passports. The ancient Trabant cars in the pictures have disappeared. The Czech carmaker Koda, too is no longer a laughingstock. It's now part of the Volkswagen group and makes some of the most popular cars in Europe. Otherwise, Wimperk appeared pretty much unchanged. It was already a sleepy town in 1992. Now it seemed to have slipped into a coma, the victim of the slow flight to the cities that's emptying Czech towns everywhere. For a better sense of the town's history, we ambled up a steep lane to Wimperk Castle, home of the local museum. Once again, we brandished my photos from 1992, in particular looking for a courtyard where I'm shown leaning against a concrete hammer and sickle, a relic of the recent communist past. We found the courtyard, but no monument in its place, a huge pile of stones. Intrigued, we went inside and actually found an old photograph of the monument in better days mounted on a granite plinth. In 1958, to to mark the 10th anniversary of the communist takeover, we asked the woman at the ticket counter what had happened to it. She laughed at my photo and pointed at the heap of rocks. It's still there, under those stones. Standing in that courtyard, staring blankly at a pile of stones where my 23 year old self had once posed for a photo, I was suddenly hit by the elasticity of time. The past may feel awfully distant, but it's never that far behind.
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Rob Cameron well, this episode is now behind us, but there'll be more from our own correspondence at the same time next week. Do tune in. Goodbye.