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From Our Own Correspondent
The Lucky Ones
00:27:41
The best in news and current affairs story-telling. In this edition: a week after the...
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- [00:00]
Kate Adie
You have downloaded from our own correspondent. This edition is the latest one broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and here to introduce it is Kate Ady.
- [00:09]
Hello.
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Narrator/Presenter
Today, the earthquake in Nepal and why, despite thousands of dead, some believe the country got off lightly. The South American nation where having a miscarriage can get you a 30 year jail sentence. The story of the anti Semitic Hungarian politician who who learned he was Jewish. And can that really be the sound of leather on Willow at St Peter's in Rome? The Vatican, it seems, now believes that part of God's purpose is cricket. It was almost exactly a week ago at midday last Saturday, that Nepal was hit by that huge earthquake. Measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, it was the deadliest tremor there in more than 80 years. And today, while international aid is now arriving in some of the remotest worst hit areas, huge, huge problems remain. Hospitals are full to overflowing, medicines in short supply. Water, food and power are scarce. And many bodies are still thought to be buried amid the ruins of collapsed buildings. But Justin Rolatt, who's been part of our reporting team there this week, says some Nepalese believe they've been lucky.
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Justin Rolatt
We landed in Kathmandu less than 24 hours after the earthquake struck, heading straight to what quickly became the symbol of the crisis. The stump of the Dardahada Tower, the eight storey BR structure that used to mark the skyline of the city. It was a gruesome place, a wreck of rubble, reeking of death. A man whose house had been smashed when the tower fell told me he was convinced there were still people in the ruins. Two great diggers were sifting through the mounds of broken masonry. It was clear they were searching not for survivors, but for bodies. I got chatting with a cluster of Nepalese journalists. I expected a funereal atmosphere, heavy with the horror that had been visited upon their nation. But they were laughing and joking. We journalists are a hard bitten lot, but their cheerfulness surprised even me. I asked them why they seemed so unmoved. It's because Nepal has been so lucky, they told me. It seemed an extraordinary statement just hours after a massive earthquake has ripped through your country. There were heartrending stories. A school had collapsed into a layer cake of blue and white concrete, broken chairs spilling out into the street. It was Saturday, so the children weren't there, but about 45 people had been inside at a prayer meeting. A man whose father was among the dead told me the pastor had urged his congregation to pray as the earthquake hit. More than 20 people died there. Outside the capital, an Indian Air Force helicopter flew Us right up to the border with China, way up in the foothills of the Himalayas. It is very beautiful. Vivid green rice paddies cascade down the steep slopes. But look closer and the heavenly scene takes on another aspect. We flew over villages where every house has been leveled. Beside their ruins were makeshift shelters. Tarpaulins hung limply over a rope, flapping in the breeze. Whole families huddled under them. Our rotors brought up great clouds of red dust as the helicopter descended to what seemed to be the only level space for miles around. Horribly injured people were loaded onto the aircraft, but the sense of doom I'd expected was absent. People seemed resigned to what had befallen them and their communities. We met one man sitting by the rubble of two buildings. They're my houses, he told me, shrugging. The first fell down when the main earthquake hit, the second in one of the aftershocks. His family had escaped unscathed. Others weren't so lucky. One woman told me she had no food or water. Two members of her family had died, crushed, as her home collapsed. I can't even burn their bodies. She wailed. I had to bury them myself. And there was worse to come. The epicenter of the quake was in Barpak, a pretty little tourist town huddled on a hilltop above a stunning mountain valley. We tried to reach it by road. The rescue teams had cleared away great landslides, but 10 miles from the town and we had to turn back. After that, we were told it was a five hour hike. A local official gave me an extraordinarily poignant video footage shot just two weeks before the earthquake hit. He'd been visiting Bapak and had filmed the town celebrating Nepali New Year. It showed a happy community, women in traditional dress dancing, hundreds of people enjoying a disco in the town square. A few days after the disaster, the general in charge of the local relief effort showed me another video of Bapak. It showed a scene of apocalyptic horror. The town of around 4,000 people had been reduced to a jumble of rocks and splintered beams amongst the rice fields. So why were those journalists feeling lucky? They told me Nepalese people grow up in the shadow of disaster, knowing a big earthquake is inevitable. Pressure has been building in the tectonic fault that runs under Nepal for almost a century, they said. The week before the tragedy struck, seismologists at a conference in Kathmandu predicted an earthquake on this scale would kill not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of people. Despite the desolation of their country, my Nepalese colleagues felt they'd got off lightly. But fear remains the question we are all asking. One said to me is, was that the big one? Or is another great earthquake on the way?
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Narrator/Presenter
And that was just in Rolat next to El Salvador, a country with some of the strictest abortion laws in the world. Up until 1998, women could have an abortion if the pregnancy was a result of rape or for health reasons affecting the mother and baby. But then, under a new conservative government, the law was changed. Abortion is now totally outlawed. But what's worrying human rights experts is the way in which the law is being applied. Some women who have miscarried naturally have been locked up for a minimum of 30 years. There was some hope earlier this year that the legislation would be relaxed. A woman who had been jailed was pardoned after it was proved there'd been errors in her original prosecution. But Katie Watson in El Salvador says there are still women there doing time for crimes they say they never committed.
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Katie Watson
I meet Alba in the courtyard of San Salvador's women's prison. It's meant to house 150 inmates, but Alba tells me it's holding closer to 2,000. Many women sleep on the floor because there aren't enough beds. Alba's just 27 and has been in jail for five years. She does have a bed. It's a small comfort, as she has another 25 years left of her sentence. Alba's in prison for killing her baby, a crime she says she never committed. The proud mother of two little girls, Alba fell pregnant with her third child after she was raped. She didn't tell her family she'd been attacked, letting them believe she was still with the father of her two children. One day, she was out with her youngest daughter and she started to feel ill. She got home and went into labor. Once the baby was born, Alba rushed with him to the house of a neighbor who was a midwife. In her haste, she tripped and dropped the child. But she says he was still alive when she picked him up. The baby later died, and the neighbor, instead of helping, told the authorities Alba had killed the infant. To this day, she says she can't understand why. Every so often, Alba stops. Tears well up in her eyes. She tells me that her daughters no longer visit. The last time she saw them was a year ago. This part of the world is deeply conservative. El Salvador isn't the only country in the region with such strict abortion laws. But the way the law is implemented has human rights groups worried. Activist Sara Garcia says it's misogynistic and that women from poorer backgrounds using public hospitals suffer the most. They arrive at hospital. And the very moment that they are asking for their right to health care, she tells me, they are being denounced and persecuted. The presumption of guilt is frightening. Yes, there are women who could be lying, but obstetric complications are not uncommon. And even if you are desperate enough to try and perform your own abortion at huge risk, not just to your baby, but to yourself, is it a case for the law or a matter for medicine? A further problem is that the law doesn't just punish the women. Doctors also have to inform the authorities if they suspect an abortion has been carried out. One tells me that during her medical training she was told that they had to call the police every time they suspected there'd been an abortion, even if they didn't have proof. But in a private hospital, medical staff aren't monitored as closely. If you're paying the doctors, it seems they're unlikely to inform on you. El Salvador's constitution says that human life starts from conception. Children therefore have a right to be born. But what about the woman's right to continue living? The doctor tells me of stories where women died as a result of ectopic pregnancies, where the embryo implants outside the womb and cannot survive. This may be a life threatening condition for the mother too, but it doesn't have to be yet in these cases. The doctor's report stated there'd been a heartbeat and noted in capital letters, it's against the law to stop this pregnancy. And as a result, the mother died. I go to see San Salvador's auxiliary bishop to try and get some answers. Gregorio Rosa Chavez believes that life is a gift and to destroy it is murder. He goes on to criticize the feminist movement and what he calls its hidden agendas. He says to me, as a journalist, you understand this sort of thing can happen. But as a woman, I tell him I don't. How can you ignore the health of a mother? She has a history, maybe a family, and also has a right to live. He replies, there's no question it's difficult, but the baby is the one who takes precedence. Not far away, I meet Marina Cortes. In her late 50s and a mother of eight. Marina sells underwear in the market and next to San Salvador's cathedral. Her view is that abortion is always wrong, even in the case of incest or rape. I ask, there are loads of women who are raped and get pregnant. If you don't want them, then you give them away. If you abort, she tells me, you are a child killer. Even those women who are cleared of the charge are associated with that label forever. El Salvador seems to regard women mostly as life bearing vessels. Those who fail to live up to that role are condemned.
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Narrator/Presenter
Katie Watson now what happens when an anti Semitic politician suddenly learns he's Jewish himself? Does he deny it, dispute it, try to keep quiet about it? Well, not in the case of the former Hungarian far right politician Chanad Segidi, who was a senior figure in the Yobik Party and member of the European Parliament. He discovered three years ago that he was Jewish and that his grandmother, now in her 90s, was a survivor of Auschwitz. So he left the extreme nationalist party and set out on a remarkable personal journey to learn and to practice his Jewish faith. Nick Thorpe accompanied him when he went to talk to some Hungarian teenagers about the past and the present.
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Kate Adie
Only seconds before he goes on stage, Chonad Seguri paces the school corridor like a bear in an unfamiliar forest. Then the headmaster's introduction is over. The pupils who pack the hall are clapping enthusiastically and the big man is going up the steps, the blood roaring in his ears. The confidence returns and he plays to the crowd just as he once did at party rallies or as a member of the European Parliament. He comes across a bit like the American singer Johnny Cash. Hello, I'm Chonad Segade and the school children of the Peeres Secondary School in Seged hang on every word I'm speaking to you here today, says the tall, chubby faced man with small, intelligent eyes. Because if someone had told me when I was 16 or 17 what I'm going to tell you now, I might not have gone so far astray. As deputy leader of the radical nationalist Jobbik party in Hungary, C' nad Seguri co founded the Hungarian Guard, a paramilitary formation which marched in uniform through Roma neighborhoods, and he blamed the Jews as well as the Roma for the ills of Hungarian society until he found out that he himself was one. After several months of hesitation, during which the party leader even considered keeping him as the party's tame Jew, as a riposte to accusations of anti Semitism, he walked out. Not a man to do things in half measures, he has now become an Orthodox Jew, has visited Israel and the concentration camp at Auschwitz, which his own grandmother survived, he discovered that his grandmother wore long sleeved shirts or a plaster in summer to cover the tell tale concentration camp number tattooed on her arm. As his old personality collapsed, Chonad performed radical surgery on himself. He even set fire to copies of his own biography. I believe in the resurrection of the Hungarian nation. Today he speaks to the students without notes, sometimes striding along the stage, sometimes sitting back in a chair, but keeping their attention with a mixture of confessions, family histories and jokes. His Voltefas seems complete. There are giggles from the girls, awkward squirmings from the boys in the audience as he describes his circumcision. Then come the did you know any Jews before you discovered your own Jewish roots? How do you react when you hear antisemitism expressed today? Were you a practicing Christian before you practiced Judaism? Was it hard to break with your party? The answers are straightforward. Anti Semitism doesn't need Jews because it's based on false premises. It's the projection of one's own fears and lack of self esteem. He had a Protestant wedding but was never christened. Every rupture is hard, but he tried to do it peacefully and state firmly his own mistakes, and also did his duty to point to the extremism in his old party. Later we meet in a Budapest flat in a popular pedestrian street, one of several he rents out. While once he sold far right paraphernalia like T shirts and flags, he's now moved into real estate with equal success. It's as though everything he touches turns to gold. What does he think of the new, more moderate direction imposed on his former party by leader Gabor Vona? I ask, if Mr. Wanna succeeds, might he even consider rejoining it, this time as a practicing Jew rather than an anti Semit might? Cunhat seged? HE LAUGHS Only the BBC would ask me that question. Vonna had to turn to the centre. But the party is still full of people who joined it for its radicalism, its nationalism, its extremism. And they don't want anything less now. So there is a limit to how moderate it can become. But there's no way back into politics for him, he insists. Still a patriot, he defends his people from the slur of racism. Hungarian people are not basically anti Semitic, although there is an anti Semitic discourse in society, he says. In fact, Budapest is a great place to be a Jew in, he beams. With its kosher restaurants and synagogues, its Jewish shops, you can practice your culture and practice your faith here. You might get funny looks if you wear a kippah, a traditional Jewish skullcap. But you won't be spat on or physically threatened, as you might be in France or Belgium, he says. The paradox of Hungarian nationalism continues. The man who used to fly its banner is that we are proud of our own achievements, but we're not willing to look at those of other peoples. We're afraid their Cultures might be as valuable as ours.
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Narrator/Presenter
Nick Thorpe in Budapest. Forty years ago today, the usually teeming streets of Saigon were empty. Three days earlier, the city had been taken by the forces from the North. The Vietnam War was finally over. Those citizens who hadn't fled were staying at home. They didn't know if the violence would flare up again, whether they should go to work or if there'd be any food to buy in the market. Among those who'd lost their lives during the fighting was North Vietnam's first female war correspondent. She was 28 at the time. Four decades after the end of the war, her family is still trying to find out exactly what happened to her. Hwang Li says it's a common yearning in a country still trying to come to terms with the conflict.
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Huang Li
On a wide road south of the central Vietnamese city of Da Nang, trucks and cars are wheezing past five star resorts and luxurious beachfront homes. I'm traveling on Highway 1, the main route connecting north and south that until recently was in many places just a single track. The wartime bomb craters are gone. Instead, the area is covered with lush green paddy films. Here and there, old country houses are embraced by elegant betel nut and banana trees. The only visible reminders of the world that lasted two decades are the cemeteries of Communist soldiers. There are many of them along this road. Rising from the middle of each graveyard is a tower engraved with the words, the fatherland remembers your sacrif. I am en route to Zui Suen district, where, on a spring night in 1969, the first woman North Vietnamese war journalist, Hsieung Ti Sun Kuy, was killed. She was shot while traveling with Viet Cong guerrillas. They were chased by South Korean Marines, allies of the Americans. The guerrillas escaped, but Kui had been wounded and was left behind. She was never seen again. Gui was my mother. It's 40 years since the war ended, but her remains still have not been found. My family has visited the area many times. I have reached out to US And Korean veteran groups for information. We have even employed clairvoyants. We excavated the entire area by hand. All that's been found is a single button and a hair clip. My mother's story and the question of what happened to her, still causes us great anguish. We are, of course, no isolated case. There is barely a family in Vietnam which doesn't still grieve. For someone who was lost in the conflict, the past is never truly gone. Kuy left behind her husband, also a war reporter, and their baby daughter, me. I grew up never knowing my mother. Six years later, on 30 April 1975, the day that South Vietnam fell into forces of the north, my family was pulled into both jubilation and frightening uncertainty in the North. As a member of the Giant Pioneer Brigade, I was marching through the streets of Hanoi, head held high, waving a self made communist flag and singing revolutionary songs. Just days earlier, after years away, my father had returned from the war. He finally broke the news of my mother's death to the family. Although her death had been suspected, my grandmother trembled and quickly grasped the side of a carpet. She stood like that in silence for a long time. I clutched my grandmother's hands, feeling lost. That was the first time I saw my father since I was a baby. At that point, we didn't know whether we should feel sorrow or happiness. At night, we mourned my mother's death. In sunlight we laughed. In darkness we cried. That's the way it was. In the following days, we set aside our grief to celebrate the return of my father and the end of the war. We were also excited about a reunion with the other half of the family that lived in the south. But 900 miles away in Saigon, some family members were imprisoned for fighting against the North. Some chose exile. They later resettle in the west. Forty years on, a few family members still refuse to return home to Vietnam, as the past remains an open wound for them today, my family avoids mentioning the conflict at our gatherings. We remain deeply aware that good memories for some could cause pain to others. For decades on, since Vietnam was reunited, members of my family still refer to each other as the down south half or the up north lot. One half talks of the conflict as the Vietnam War and the other as the war against America. Yet we survived, and my mother is remembered in the country. On a trip not long ago, I found a street named after her in the city of Da Nang. We think of her almost every day. I have not given up hope that we will eventually find her final resting place and discover what happened to her.
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Narrator/Presenter
And that was Huang Li. Now, we all know Pope Francis is a football fan. Well, he's from Argentina, isn't he? And there was that photo of him at the last World cup where he was trying to convince us that he was supporting both Argentina and Germany in the final. But this isn't just personal, is it? The Vatican clearly believes sport is useful. Embracing it is an effective way of reaching out to people, particularly perhaps in places where Roman Catholics may not be in the majority. So why stop at football? Are other sports also part of God's plan. Tom Holland's just been to Rome, aware there's now another game which has caught the Pope's attention.
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Kate Adie
Quo vadis. As we rattled over the flagstones of the Appian Way, the ancient road that leads south out of Rome, our driver pointed to the words emblazoned on a restaurant awning. It means, he said, where are you going? I knew the story. Coivvadis was what St. Peter was supposed to have said when fleeing the Emperor Nero's persecution. He had met the risen Christ on the Appian Way. I am going to Rome, Jesus had answered, there to be crucified again. Peter, shamed by his master's example, had turned back. Arrested, he had been martyred in the Vatican. Catholic tradition commemorates him as Rome's first bishop. The first Pope. Two thousand years on, and the Appin Way, with its legend of Peter meeting Christ and all the various churches and catacombs that line it, is a place sacred to Christians from across the world. Now, though, it has a new claim to fame. I had come with 10 other middle aged Englishmen on a short visit to Rome that was to culminate in a field just off the ancient road. Already on our trip, we had attended a homily by the Pope, shared a mass in a crypt beneath St. Peter's and been hosted to lunch by the Pontifical College. All these experiences, though, were mere warm ups. Antipasti to the main course. Two days after our arrival in Rome, I and my fellow travellers were off to the Appian Way on a most improbable mission to play the Vatican at cricket. It was a return match. The previous summer, the Vatican cricket team had come to England on their first ever tour, a visit that had culminated in an interfaith clash against the Anglican Church. The team to which I belong, the authors 11, had played one of the warm up matches. We had lost off the last ball. Now we had our chance for revenge. As we arrived at the Hippodrome, which hosts the Vatican's cricket pitch, I had to pinch myself. In the distance I could see the auburn hills where the ancestors of Romulus had lived before the founding of Rome. And the Pope has his summer residence. The view could hardly have been more Italian. Yet there I was in whites and cap, preparing to take part in the most English of sports. Except that cricket is no longer exclusively or even principally an English sport. The Vatican team included a single priest from England, but otherwise consisted entirely of young and alarmingly fit looking seminarians from the Indian subcontinent. Walking from the bus to the makeshift hut which served the ground as a pavilion. I spoke to one of them. Amir Bhatti, the Vatican's wicketkeeper, was from Karachi in Pakistan. He was in his fourth year at the pontifical seminary, he told me, and in another couple of years would be returning to his home country as a priest. And might he be heading there before that? I asked. On a Vatican cricket tour? He smiled. I would love to, he said. It would be a first step of friendship and a testimony to our faith. So might a Victorian have spoken? In Britain, the association between sport and godliness is no longer all it used to be, but in St Peter's it still has considerable purchase. Father Eamon O', Higgins, the manager of the Vatican cricket team and its chaplain, confirmed for me that the football loving Holy Father had readily given them his blessing. Pope Francis had sat for a photo with the touring party to play the Church of England and even signed their bats. Cricket was believed by the Vatican to be a part of God's purpose. The tour to England had been used by the Catholic and Anglican hierarchies to promote the Global Freedom Network, a joint initiative against slavery and people trafficking. Looking to the future, Father Raymond shared his wicketkeepers hope that cricket might provide the Vatican with a bridge of friendship to the Muslims and Hindus, the Buddhists and the Sikhs of the Indian subcontinent. Quo Vardis. Sitting on the outfield watching as our batsmen slumped to an ignominious defeat against the bowling of assorted Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan seminarians, I suspected that I was watching the future of the Catholic Church. Its gaze at the dawning of the third Christian millennium is firmly set on asia. And unlike St. Peter fleeing Rome down the Appian Way, it would seem to have no intention of running away from the challenge.
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Narrator/Presenter
And with Tom Holland in Rome watching cricket among the churches and catacombs along the Appian Way, it's the end of another day's play for us. Back next Saturday with more stories from around the world. Until then, goodbye.