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From Our Own Correspondent
The Flying River
00:28:09
Reporters around the world. Misha Glenny says surely it's a national emergency -- but...
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This is a download from the BBC. It's from our own correspondent. We make one version of the program for the BBC World Service, but this is the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ad.
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Hello. Today, Brazil's national emergency no longer being ignored by the candidates battling it out for the presidency. The one that got away was what Sweden's hunt for reds in October tells us about security fears around the Baltic. Why hope and joy are now just distant memories at a ramshackle port on the River Nile. And little green men, or just a trick of the light, the French civil servants paid to investigate strange sightings in the sky. The long process of electing a new Brazilian president will soon be over. The two candidates left in the campaign go to a runoff vote tomorrow. The last night they were involved in a final televised debate. 90 minutes of bad tempered exchanges. But many Brazilians are now fed up with the whole business, with the character assassinations, the claims and counterclaims, the electoral promises which many suspect would be dumped when the counting's over. Only a few years ago, Brazil was roaring ahead, growth at more than 7% a year. Today it's sliding into recession amid rising inflation and low investment. Misha Glenny in Rio de Janeiro says people there, and that includes the presidential candidates, know an overhaul of the economy is now long overdue.
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It's late spring in southern Brazil and the temperature is rising. In some parts of the country, it's already very hot. When I visited Campograngi, the state capital of Mato Grosso do Su, near the Paraguayan border, the heat hit me with extraordinary ferocity as I stepped off the plane. In some other regions, particularly the coastal areas like Rio, it's a tad cooler, but a lot more sticky. The high levels of humidity make it an even more challenging experience than the furnace of Campo Grande. And so now everyone is on tenterhooks, anticipating Brazil's most remarkable annual weather event. As spring morphs into early summer, the south awaits the arrival of the Flying River. This determined pilgrimage of clouds packed with precipitation first gathers far to the north of Rio and Sao Paulo, the great cultural and economic centers of the country. Incalculable tons of water rise from the Amazon river and its forests before beginning their great migration. Hemmed in to the west by the immense Andes mountain range, the Flying river swings round eastwards in a mighty curve to bear down on Brazil's central and south, interior and coastal lands. On arrival is unleash's deluge after biblical deluge. The downpour is so dense that it can reduce visibility in a matter of seconds to 2, maybe 3 meters. Last year I watched a massive tree being swept along a busy commercial road in the heart of Rio de Janeiro. As I waded through the torrent in shorts and a T shirt, a bedraggled and ghostly figure hopelessly seeking shelter. In some districts, such as in Rio's favelas, many of which are precariously balanced on steep hills, these rains bring destruction and death in the form of floods and landslides. But this year the south of Brazil has cast its eyes skyward desperately in the hope of any sign of the arrival of the Flying River. Most scientists argue that its absence last year was a deeply worrying consequence of of the deforestation of the Amazon and attendant global warming. The Flying River's watery cargo is sorely needed to relieve the suffering inflicted by a fearsome drought, the most damaging in almost a century, which has left large areas parched. This has been going on for months now. The drought has affected several states in the south, but it's doing most damage in the state of Sao Paulo, by some distance the most important commercial region of Brazil. It first affected outlying towns of the state, but has now led to the drying up of supplies to parts of the great city itself. In the countryside, whole reservoirs, usually 3/4 full at this time of the year, have been completely drained. Emergency measures and rationing have been introduced as people in the affected districts fill buckets and bowls in preparation for water shortages. This surely qualifies as a national emergency. Yet amazingly, until a few days ago, it was being blithely ignored by the two candidates competing in what is turning out to be Brazil's most closely fought presidential election in 25 years. Indeed, the electorate was becoming increasingly appalled with the strategy of both incumbent Dilma Josefi and her challenger, Ayesio Neves, who had turned the contest into an unedifying slanging match. A accusing each other of highly personal shortcomings. Somebody clearly explained to them that this was not going down well with the people whose votes they were trying to secure. Thanks to the negative campaigning, everyone knew that Djilma is a grumpy old thing and Iseo rather too flamboyant. By contrast, almost all Brazilian politicians, by the way, are habitually referred to by their first names. A warned of the rolling corruption scandal affecting South America's largest company, Petrobras Brazil, Brazil's semi state oil giant, all of which allegedly happened on Djilma's watch, either as CEO of the company or indeed as the country's president. Djilma pointed to the less than spectacular performance of Iasio's party, which runs the state of so Paulo, in dealing with the drought. This may turn out to be crucial. So Paulo is a swing state and the most populous in the country. Ordinary Brazilians are fed up with waiting. They've had enough of this attenuated election campaign as economic problems mount alongside the drought. But above all, they are tired of waiting for the return of the flying river, the one thing they hoped they could rely on.
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Misha Glenny in Rio South Sudan's civil war drags on with no end in sight. Negotiations seem to be going nowhere, and the Lullin fighting over recent months has more to do with the rainy season than any desire for peace on the part of the rebels or the government. This, the world's newest nation, is a woefully undeveloped place. There are few truly strategic prizes on its battlegrounds, but one is the town of Malakal, close to some of the country's richest oil fields. It has a commanding location on the River Nile and an airport with an all weather Runway. Little wonder it's been won and lost half a dozen times since fighting started in December. Tristan McConnell has been back to Malakal. He found a shattered town and a shattered people.
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When I last visited Malakal, it was a time of hope and trepidation. In late 2010, South Sudan was on the verge of realizing its dream of independence after decades of civil war. There was uncertainty, of course, but at the ramshackle port on the Nile, there was joy, too. Barges that had steamed upriver for days arrived, stuffed with people lugging their possessions, returning to vote in the coming independence referendum. They disembarked, greeting long lost relatives with smiles, laughs and a traditional clasping of the shoulder. They were home, and after generations of colonial rule and Arab subjugation, that home was soon to be theirs. Malakal was a cultural crossroads and trading centre close to the north south border. There was a mosque and a church in the busy market. Northern Arabs and black Southerners shopped and sold goods side by side. It was also prosperous by the region's low standards. There were imported items, overpriced hotels, lots of aid workers and a large teaching hospital. All that is gone now. The hope, the joy and the activity, along with much of the town in the civil war that has torn at South Sudan. Since December, Malakal has changed hands six times with each shift of control. It's been bombed, shot up, burned, emptied, looted and abandoned. Today it is a ghost town, inhabited mostly by soldiers. Long Grass is already reclaiming the outskirts, flowering creepers hang like bunting from disused power lines. The walls of abandoned homes and buildings are covered in beetling cracks and starting to split apart. To meet ordinary people, which is to say ones without guns, you go to the nearby United nations base where 17,000 of them have sought shelter. When the rainy season ends in the coming weeks, everyone expects another assault on the town and another change of hands. As I drove through town, I saw a shop I recognized. Back in 2010, a young Darfuri trader called Yusuf had proudly told me how he had built his successful second hand clothes business from nothing. Now it was nothing again. The shop was empty, the doors bent off their hinges, the walls charred. I hoped Yusuf had escaped. Even the hospital had been looted and burned. A doctor told me they had found 11 patients shot dead in their beds, including a mother and her infant child. Like South Sudan, Malakal has suffered many turbulent periods during decades of north south civil war and years of tentative peace. But David Cowd told me the recent fighting with was the worst he'd seen. I met David in a place called Wild Shalook. It used to be a sleepy village along the river from Malakal, but the population increased more than sevenfold as people fled the fighting in a flotilla of vessels. One boat capsized as it crossed the Nile in January, drowning 300 people. David is a sombre, softly spoken man in his mid-30s. Before the war, he he had been a civil servant in Malakal with a television set, two cars and two small houses. Life was good, he told me. When the war reached Malakal, he lost track of his wife and two young sons. A week after fleeing the town, David returned to find the body of his brother lying dead in his bed. Also in the room were four other men also shot dead. David didn't know who they were. It was months before he found his family again. They had escaped and were living with relatives in a village with no phone reception in between. David said he'd lost his mind, become a madman, sure in the knowledge that everyone he loved had been taken from him. As we spoke in David's makeshift home of sticks and plastic sheeting, his 6 year old practicing handwriting and his 4 year old using his dad as a climbing frame. David told me he wanted nothing more from South Sudan except to leave. This civil war so close, so personal, so brutal and so destructive, has vanquished hopes that had survived decades of previous fighting. Back in 2010, I'd met a courtier to the Shillook tribal king in his quiet, neatly swept compound in Malakal. We discussed what the future and independence might bring. Samuel Abandeng looked forward to the freedom, but warned that it would not solve his country's troubles. The bigger threat to an independent South Sudan is not from outside, he told me. It is from within. How right he was.
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That was Tristan McConnell. Helicopters, battleships, special forces. They all spent the past week hunting for that suspected foreign submarine off the coast of Stockholm, and they found nothing. Yesterday, the Swedish authorities called off what had been their biggest anti submarine operation since the dying days of the Soviet Union. The presumed intruder, they said, had probably escaped into the Baltic Sea. But was the visitor a Russian submarine, as many suspect? Moscow's official government newspaper, the Gazeta, scoffed at the whole business. The eyes of fear, it commented, see danger everywhere. Chris Morris was with the massed ranks of searchers and says, sub or no sub, it's clear there are security implications.
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On a long, warm summer evening when the sun refuses to set, there are few finer places in Europe than the Stockholm archipelago. 30,000 Swedish islands and rocky outcrops, picture perfect holiday cabins painted reddish brown or yellow as mustard, and sailboats bobbing at anchor in a clear blue sea. But it's not necessarily where you choose to be when, like this week, the rain is lashing down, the wind is whipping off the Baltic Sea, the skies are a forbidding grey, and you're looking for the naval equivalent of of a needle in a haystack. Foreign underwater activity, that's what the Swedish authorities have officially called it. The tabloids dubbed it the Hunt for Reds in October. What it means is that they've been searching amongst the islands and skerries off Stockholm for a submarine that shouldn't be there, bringing back dormant memories of the Cold War. Back in the 70s and 80s, Sweden regularly scoured its territorial waters for Soviet substantial almost always without success. Once, a nuclear armed Whiskey class submarine ran aground near a Swedish naval base, causing a diplomatic incident that became known inevitably as whiskey on the rocks. Fast forward to today and a time when countries around the Baltic Sea are casting nervous glances towards a newly assertive Russia. After Crimea and after eastern Ukraine, they can't help but wonder what Moscow is planning next. The Kremlin laughed off suggestions that one of its vessels was involved in this latest maritime drama. It adopted an almost mocking tone towards Sweden's military response. But there were tantalizing hints. A coded message in Russian, allegedly intercepted by Swedish intelligence, sent from the archipelago to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, and a series of civilian sightings of a mystery vessel Possibly a Russian mini sub, which may have run into difficulty. We hate the fact that something's in our waters, an admiral leading the Swedish operation told me, but time is on our side and they are the ones wearing the watches. It is all deadly serious, but there have been moments of farce as well. A grainy photograph, thought to be the mystery sub breaching the surface may well turn out to be genuine, but it still brought to mind fake pictures of the Loch Ness Monster and a mystery man dressed in black and carrying a backpack sparked momentary talk of a possible incursion by Special Forces until he turned out to be a retired local minding his own business. I could see there were lots of military boats out and about, he said, but I was just going fishing. He didn't mention the one that got away. But it looks like the unidentified intruder will never be found. And if it was indeed a Russian sub, why was it there? Swedish defence experts have several theories. It could have been mapping or training. It could, of course, have been spying. Or is it even possible that it set out to be noticed just to send a message, Here I am. Catch me if you can? If so, it would appear to be part of a pattern of Russia trying to probe the defences of some of its near neighbors. Both countries like Sweden, which aren't in NATO, and and countries like Estonia, which are. Last month, Sweden protested to Moscow after two Russian fighter jets entered its airspace and across the Baltic. In Estonia, an intelligence official working close to the border was abducted by Russian agents and taken to Moscow. This week, a Russian surveillance aircraft took off from Kaliningrad and flew first towards Danish and then Swedish airspace. Finally, it entered the airspace of Estonia before being escorted away by NATO jets. All this activity is changing security calculations across the region. Sweden has already announced that defence spending is going to go up. And Latvia's foreign minister said the Swedish subsearch could become a game changer. It didn't feel quite so threatening as I stood on the dockside in the port of Niena Shamne, watching a naval vessel heading out to sea. The Russians are probably coming in and out all the time, said a passerby with a shrug. We just don't get to hear about it. Are Swedes nervous about all this?
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I asked.
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I've no idea, he said. I've lived here for 35 years, but I'm Turkish. The plot thickens.
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Chris Morris in Stockholm. Now, everyone at some time or another believes they've seen something up there in the night sky. Something odd, something unexpected. And even the most grounded individuals have asked Themselves. Could it have been a flying saucer? A ufo? A visitor from outer space? Well, of course. So often apparent sightings can be explained away. Perhaps it was a weather balloon high up in the atmosphere. Maybe a shooting star or even a trick of the light. But if you do want to report it, who do you turn to? The authorities aren't always sympathetic to callers who ring, even if they are completely sober with questions about little green men. In France, it's different. Their government has a UFO department and Chris Bachman's been paying it a visit.
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You don't need a time machine. When you visit the French Space center headquarters in Toulouse, it's already a throwback to the 70s. Green lawns sweep onto wide boulevards with stout, long, rectangular office blocks on either side. It's almost Soviet style. In the heart of southern France, there are few signs of life, even though 1500 people, most of them civil servants, work in boxy offices along narrow, unappealing corridors. France has the biggest space agency in Europe, the result of the 1960s space race and the then President De Gaulle's grand determination to keep France independent of the United States by building its own satellites, rocket launchers and providing elite space research. An offshoot of all that. France is the only country in Europe to maintain a full time state run Unidentified Flying Objects department. There used to be one in the UK and another in Denmark. They closed down years ago due to budget cuts. France's UFO unit consists of a staff of four and around a dozen volunteers who get their expenses paid to go on site and to look into reports of strange sightings in the skies. The team is called gipaine. That's a French acronym for study group and information on non identified aerospace phenomenon. Its boss is Xavier Passo. Surrounded by dozens of books on UFOs and stacks of documents, he tells me his mission is to be as transparent as possible about strange sightings and a follow up on each one that his team receives. They publish their results on their website, which receives 30,000 hits a month. The team receives on average two UFO sightings a day. This the department insists an 11 page document is filled out. The idea is to provide details, including photographs where possible. But it's also aimed at weeding out jokers and time wasters. If someone claims to have seen strange lights in the skies, the UFO team might go online to see whether the observation took place on a flight path. It can trace commercial air traffic going back more than a week. The team also has access to military flight paths and is in touch with the air Force and air traffic controllers. Sometimes, if its staff are really intrigued by photos they've seen, or if there have been several witnesses to the same sighting, they'll call the local police to ask whether they can be considered credible. They might even check with neighbors to see whether they were out drinking that night or perhaps smoking something other than cigarettes. Xavier Passo says many of the people who get in touch are smokers, puffing away outside in bars or their own homes at night and gazing at the stars. One of those boxy offices houses yellowing archives going back to the 1950s. The documents I look at contain eerie accounts of strange things encountered in the skies by fighter pilots on routine reconnaissance missions. For what it's worth, and for those who suspect there's conspiracy afoot, M. Passo tells me he's never covered up a UFO sighting. I take a look at some amazing photos of strange lights and circular forms caught on camera. One taken by a motorist of a white ring shape above Marseille, is particularly grabbing. But the team figured that one out. It wasn't invaders from Mars, just the reflection of a small interior overhead light in the car. In fact, the department can explain away nearly all these phenomena. And believe it or not, the most common culprits are Chinese lanterns sent up at night. During parties, the investigators often telephone the local town hall to ask if perhaps there'd been a wedding going on at the time. Balloons and kites floating in the skies also get mistaken for alien craft. And space debris and falling meteorites giving off strange lights are more common than one might think. But There are some 400 UFO sightings going back to the 1970s that the team cannot explain. One, an alleged flying saucer landing near Aix en Provence in 1981. They take very seriously. There were landing marks and multiple witnesses. So are there really little green men? Well, the jury's out on the color, but there are many working here as well as others around the world who are convinced this there is some life out there. And does the use of French taxpayers money on UFO research make sense, particularly in these times of budgetary constraint? That probably depends on whether you just saw an alien. And in the words of those ghostbusters, who you going to call?
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Chris Bachman there with the UFO hunters in Toulouse. Now, Austria's magnificent Alpine scenery has inspired visitors, famous and otherwise for centuries. The the country's largest lake, the 13 mile long Atersee near Salzburg, has long been a favourite spot. It attracts holidaymakers from the cities of Linz and Vienna and from countries further afield. They come for the magnificent mountain views, clean water to swim in and the famous Rosenwind, a breeze which crosses a castle's rose garden and fills the air across the lake with the smell of roses. Bethany Bell, who was there the other day, tells us how it also caught the imaginations of the painter Gustav Klimt, the composer Gustav Mahler, and Felix Salton, the man who wrote Bambi.
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I walked cautiously along the narrow path in the woods above Attese. Every slight sound made me turn alert. Was that shadow the branch of a tree? Or was something moving in the bushes? I tried to walk as quietly as possible, doing my best not to step on stray twigs or rustle through the golden fallen leaves. I was looking for a deer. This was the forest that inspired the Viennese Jewish author Felix Salton to write A Life in the woods in 1923. The book was banned by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. But the story of the young faun found a huge new audience worldwide when Walt Disney made it into an animated film in 1942. There's still lots of deer in the forest, a man in the village of Unterach, on the shores of Lake Attesee, told me. I see them frequently, but they're shy. Felix Salton was both a nature lover and a keen hunter. Death in his story is never far away, and neither is the sharp fear the animals have of man and his guns. But in one scene at the end, he describes the death of a poacher. Bambi learns that even men with weapons are mortal. I came into a clearing. Below me were the deep turquoise waters of the Lake Attersee, cradled by the mountains. To my right was a huge 19th century villa with a white turret where Felix Salton used to stay. The villa, known as the Berghof, had been bought in 1890 by a composer, Ignaz Bruhl, as a holiday home. Bruhl must have been a generous host, because his house quickly became a magnet for many of the musicians, artists and intellectuals of fin de siecle Vienna. The aging Brahms stayed there. So did the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, and the writer and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gustav Mahler, who used to spend some of his holidays composing in a hut on the shores of the lake. In a nearby village was also a visitor. He's said to have performed his second symphony in the Berghof. One evening a historian friend told me that Atesee was where many Jews and artists used to come on holiday for the Sommer Frische, the summer freshness. The Catholic bourgeoisie would go to the neighbouring Sankt Wolfgang Lake, while the court and the high aristocracy would gather in nearby Bad Ischel in the mountains. Unfortunately for the court, there was no lake in Bad Ischel, but they just had to put up with that because Emperor Franz Josef was passionate about the hunting there. The stags, the chamois and the grouse. Another fan of Ateze was the painter Gustav Klimt, who spent many summers there with his friend Emilie Flge. And it was the lake which inspired him to start painting landscapes. He would spend hours watching the play of light on the ripples of the blue green water, which he'd later try to capture on canvas. Emily, a fashion designer, was a pioneer of reform dress for women and men, rejecting the corset and embracing loose, flowing garments. Later that day, I borrowed a little wooden rowing boat and set off to explore. Out on the lake, the horizon seemed to expand. It was sunny. The mountains were etched in vivid clarity against the cloudless sky. There was no wind. All I could hear was the lapping of the water and the soft splash of the oars. I thought of Amelie and Klimt, photographed in a similar boat, both wearing long caftans. Modern houses have been built in the village of Unterachnau, but some of the elaborately carved 19th century villas remain. And if you look closely, you can still make out one or two of the old wooden boathouses that Klimt painted in his landscapes of Unterach, with its thickly wooded hills. The next day, I returned to the forest above the lake, still looking for a deer. I didn't find Bambi, but when I looked at the book again, I realised why. Why can't we go to the meadow? Bambi asks his mother. She tells him it's too dangerous to go out in the daylight. Why are we safe here? Bambi asks. Because the bushes shield us, she says, and the dry twigs crackle and last year's leaves lie on the ground and rustle to warn us if anybody's coming.
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Bethany Bell, there on the shores of the Attesee, walking in the footsteps of Marla Klimtand. Bambi. And that's it. More stories from correspondence around the world on Thursday and Saturday of next week. Do join us. Goodbye.