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From Our Own Correspondent
The Revolt Against Austerity
00:27:50
'Crisis' and 'Hope,' two words which have continually cropped up in the Greek election...
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- [00:00]
Narrator
You're about to hear from our own correspondent.
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Presenter
We do two versions of the programme, one for the BBC World Service and this one's a download of the latest edition from BBC Radio 4.
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Kate Ady
It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Correspondent
Hello, I think we're almost there. Campaigners for Syriza, confident ahead of tomorrow's election in Greece, but their revolt against austerity is causing anxiety in capitals across Europe. In Malawi, misery. Just a few days of flooding, but a disaster which will last for years. Champagne, caviar, bowls of cherries the size of apples. Some of the stories doing the rounds at the World Economic Forum in Davos. And all aboard with Captain Beluga. We're sailing to the distant South Atlantic to see for ourselves an extraordinary wildlife success story. They were playing an old Leonard Cohen song at one of the final Syriza rallies in Athens ahead of tomorrow's landmark General in Greece. Perhaps not surprisingly, the left wingers apparently set for victory like the tone of the song. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. Of course, the ripples of a Syriza victory might take some time to reach New York, but without doubt they'll be felt swiftly in cities like Madrid and Rome as well as Berlin. Chris Morris has been out with the party's campaigners in northern Greece.
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Kate Ady
Night had fallen, but the foot soldiers of Syriza were still hard at work, leaflets in hand and a spring in their step. We were on the streets of Alefterupoli, literal translation, Freedom Town, going from bar to bar looking for voters to charm and cajole. I was with, among others, a civil servant, a self employed photographer and an unemployed English teacher. It's going really well, said Costas with a smile. I think we're almost there. And it was true. Politician has become a pretty dirty word in Greece, but the response from assorted punters was surprisingly positive. Are you going to vote for Syriza? I asked Pantelis as he perched on a bar stool. Probably, he said, raising his beer glass. All the rest have been rubbish, so why not give them a chance? There were a few smiles and a couple of backs were slapped, but the last few years have been no laughing matter. Maybe he wouldn't have even talked to us before, costas confided as we headed back down the street and the sound of music faded into the crisp evening air. The crisis has changed everything in our country. Crisis. It's a Greek word, of course. What else could it be? But it now dominates national discourse and personal conversations. Everyone drags the crisis around with them every day like a lead weight. Zafaroula was walking alongside us. She'd been planning to leave Greece for good and start afresh, but she'd decided to give it one more shot. I just thought Syriza understood that the crisis has been destroying us, she said. So I decided to stay and fight. There was a lot of talk about dignity and decency, all the things people believe they've lost, and another word cropped up time and again. It forms part of the slogan on SYRIZA's main election poster, and it sums up their appeal. Hope, it says, is on the way. We stopped in another bar, where a man sitting next to a pair of bongo drums was playing music from his favorite CDs. Drinks were ordered as I suggested that the slogan was a bit deceptive, that it's a lot easier making promises than running a country. Zafaroula shook her head. You have to give people hope, she said. Without hope, we have nothing. It's not just the poor who are looking for hope either. It's the aspirational middle classes, too. I met one man who had a big 4x4 he'd bought in the good times to help him with his business before work became impossible to find. The car is now sitting outside his house with no number plates. He he can't afford the road tax, the luxury tax, or anything else. And he can't sell because no one has the money to pay even half of what it's worth. So he's stuck in debt like his country, angry and looking for a way out. And that's what Syriza is offering a fresh start. Its critics scoff that its plans are unfunded and its economic theories long discredited. But Syriza seems undaunted. If it wins this election, it will call with its new democratic mandate for a European debt conference and for half of Greece's crippling debts to be written off in government. The party will no doubt be warned that it's flirting with catastrophe. But Greece is, perhaps it's always been, the canary in the coal mine, a warning of what could be coming elsewhere. It's been small enough to be saved in the past, to be bailed out, and it might well be small enough for another compromise to be found. But Europe's big problem lies elsewhere, in Italy and France. These are massive economies that give many policy makers sleepless nights thinking about the fear of long term stagnation and economic decline. As I write, I'm looking out over the rooftops at the twinkling lights of an Aegean harbor It feels idyllic. But Greece has been through a wrenching transition. More than a quarter of its economy has been torn away. The comfortable certainties of life have gone in a flash. And when people are told that their country is turning a corner but all they can see is a downward spiral, that's when they vote for radical alternatives. So what Greece could do is change the rules of the game. And if the political dynamic shifts, then the revolt against austerity could well spread to Spain and perhaps to Italy and France beyond. That's probably where the future of Europe will be decided. But Greece, a country that's crying out for help, will tell us which way the wind is blowing from the streets of Freedom Town and beyond.
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Correspondent
Chris Morris in northern Greece now, the words Arbeit Macht Frei immediately make one think of Auschwitz and we'll see them again, inscribed on the entrance to the Nazi death camp in Poland next week. For Tuesday marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, where more than a million prisoners were killed, 90% of them Jewish. And some 300 people who survived captivity there will gather for a ceremony at that gate on Tuesday, along with the world's media and guests. Once upon a time, not many people wanted to hear those survivors stories. But soon, as Kevin Connolly points out, the only way to learn what happened will be to read their accounts in the history books.
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Presenter
It was nearly 30 years ago that I first saw Auschwitz. Poland was still in the monochrome grip of communism back then and January with its sharp winds and sulphurous skies had drained what little colour remained from the landscape. There is a kind of shock of familiarity to the camp buildings even when you see them for the first time, because you see them so often in films and documentaries. Here is the archway with the cynical slogan Arbat Macht Frei fashioned in letters of steel. And there is the railway siding where SS doctors waited for the long slow trains of stinking cattle wagons that brought the Jews of Europe here. Their job was to sort the young and the strong to join the armies of skeletal slave labourers in the factories and on the roads, from the women and children and weak and elderly who would be sent straight to the gas chambers. It looked then, still looks today, very much as it looked when the last German guards fled, taking with them at gunpoint the tens of thousands of younger prisoners fit enough to be forced to march through Central Europe in the freezing depths of winter. They planned to murder the ones they'd left behind, around 7,000 of them. But they'd only managed to kill about 700 before the first units of the 472nd Regiment of the 60th army of the Soviet Union's 1st Ukrainian Front arrived at the camp gates. It was January 27, 1945, and the regimental name and numbers give you some idea of the momentum of the Soviet armies by that point in the war and the unimaginable scale of the fighting on what we call the Eastern Front. Stalin's Soviet Union probably mobilized more than 30 million men and women between 1941 and 1945. As many as 8 million of them died. Perhaps for that reason, the liberation of Auschwitz didn't attract at the time quite the level of global attention you might expect. There was a report in Pravda a week or so later and a Russian documentary unit was dispatched to film at the camp. But hardly anyone seems to have been immediately struck by the symbolic importance of what was there. The first soldiers to reach the gates didn't have a camera with them. Photographs you may see, of the liberation were staged a little later, with the prisoners greeting second Wave troops. In a sense, the lack of attention was not surprising. The Russians had already liberated the death camp at Madanek, further to the east, six months or so earlier. And a week after they reached Auschwitz, the Allied powers began the conference in the Crimean resort of Yalta, where they determined the shape of post war Europe. And of course, most of the eyewitnesses, the prisoners on those brutal forced marches, were dispersed all over Europe to other camps. Some who survived Auschwitz died in the epidemic of typhus that swept Belsen in 1945. Others found themselves laboring in underground factories to build V2 rockets or excavating a new complex of bunkers planned by the increasingly delusional Hitler. But there was something more too. In Israel a few days ago, I met a survivor of Auschwitz who was taken there as a young teenager and who briefly kissed his mother at that railway siding, not understanding that he'd never see her again. Like all the Jewish prisoners, he had his camp number tattooed on his arm. Some years after he was released, he asked a doctor to dye the bluish ink to make it disappear. But that had the effect of making the number bright red. So he had the number cut away. He wanted it removed, he told me, because for years to have been in Auschwitz was seen as something somehow embarrassing. Things have changed now and he was happy to help us understand how the camp had worked, what it had been like. As much as anyone can possibly understand who wasn't there, he keeps the strip of preserved flesh that bears his number. In a frame on a bookshelf. A symbol, like Auschwitz itself, of what we are capable of enduring and of what we're capable of inflicting too. But we should Remember, as this 70th anniversary approaches that there was a time when no one wanted to talk about Auschwitz and no one wanted to hear about it. A time will come when there's no one left alive who survived the camps. We should listen while we still can.
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Correspondent
And that's Kevin Connolly in Poland. We have nothing. We've lost everything. That's what correspondents are hearing as they make contact with those people in the African state of Malawi who've been hit by severe flooding. As the casualty figures mounted, the president declared a state of emergency and appealed for aid from the international community. But the response, apparently has been disappointing. Rosie Blunt is a teacher who's been in Malawi for six months. She's been to some of those areas affected communities where homes have been swept away, water supplies interrupted, and where now they're worried about disease.
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Rosie Blunt
It's been a week since Cyclone Bansi hit Malawi. But looking out on what was once a bustling marketplace beside the Pelone river, the formidable red rains and mauling winds could have struck yesterday. Brown water laps at the windows of battered shops. The stench of sewage is pungent in the heat. Several people are paddling around in boats, hoping to reclaim some belongings. This seems futile, but they are desperate. When I left Malawi for a holiday to the UK in mid December, the plane took off over a rusty, parched landscape. Three weeks later, I returned to verdant, fertile scenery. The rains had arrived after a month long drought. Rain was, of course, a blessing and a relief. Before we would go for days without water in the taps, boreholes were getting frighteningly low. There were fears that crops would shrivel and die. Then those exquisitely refreshing warm showers arrived, interspersed with flashes of hot, steamy sun that dried up the puddles. The best of both worlds. Suddenly, torrential, ruthless, violent rain took over through the night. It hammered on the roof like a tantrum. The raindrops felt like knives on our skin. Paths and roads rushed with water. It did not stop for three days. The second night brought the winds. Roofs were ripped off and trees blown over. Electricity pylons were torn down and bare wires lay threateningly in the water. Since then, hundreds of people have been killed or are missing and hundreds of thousands have been left homeless. Floods don't just kill people by drowning them, they kill people by destroying crops, which means famine. They kill people by spreading disease. They kill people by Washing away homes, possessions and livelihoods, leaving nothing to survive on. This is not just a disaster that will last a few days or weeks until the ground dries up. For many, it will last for years. The other day I visited Palombi, a southern district and one of the worst affected. More than 20,000 homes were destroyed, each containing an average of five people, and some areas were submerged beneath two and a half metres of water as the floods have churned up the already rutted dirt roads, I am shown around the region on the back of a rickety motorbike. It's a long and bumpy ride. At the first village, Chimumbo, the chief points to his neck when I ask how high the water was. As far as the eye can see, the land is pure mud, with pathetic sprouts of green, revealing the ruined crops. Mounds of wood and brick sit amid the sludge, the remnants of houses. Most of the people who lived here are now at Mwemba Relief Camp, which has so far registered over 2,000 people. Fortunately, UNICEF has denoted three huge tents and there is a functioning borehole nearby. The displaced sit in the shade of trees. When I wave and say hello, they are friendly and respond to my limited Chichewa enthusiastically. At first glance, you wouldn't think that these families and individuals have lost everything they own shelter, food, animals and all their money, as people in villages rarely have bank accounts. But they are simply concealing their despair. How can you start again with absolutely nothing? I ask one man, a farmer, who simply says, I am waiting for somebody to help us. The second relief camp, which accommodates those who lived in the villages beside the Pelone river, is much worse off than Muamba. There are no tents, no boreholes and very limited food. Three buildings, each of around 10 square metres, house 713 people, including 193 children aged under five. The majority have to sleep outside. Despite the rain. The misery is far more palpable here. People sit slumped in the hot sun, appearing lifeless and hopeless. Children are malnourished and sluggish. No water, no shelter. Mosquitoes are biting, one old lady declares, at which the others muster a laugh. At least they can see the funny side. But malaria is rife, and sleeping outside increases the risks dramatically. Cholera is another very real fear, which Mundin Dazungu, programs coordinator for Catholic Development Commission in Malawi, describes as a ticking time bomb. Because pipes are blocked or destroyed, clean water supplies are cut off, she explains. People are bathing in streams and drinking the same water further down. They are going to the toilet. In fields which when it rains spreads into the rivers, few boreholes are functioning. Those that are could be contaminated. This is the cruelty of the floods. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. The rain we had hoped and prayed for brings only devastation.
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Correspondent
Rosy blood in Blantyre, Malawi. The air corridors above the Swiss Alps may be a little congested today. The World Economic Forum in Davos is coming to an end and thousands of delegates will be making their way home. This year's gathering has once again generated headlines. Prince Andrew publicly denying those sex allegations. The European Central bank announcing quantitative easing. Ireland's Taoiseach talking of a chasm of disconnection in Europe. Christine Lagarde predicting a rise in US interest rates in a few months. Time for correspondence there. It's an unusual event to cover. There's not much action, a great deal of security, and a constant feeling that the really big story might actually be unfolding somewhere else, quietly out of on the Forum sidelines. Kamal Ahmad has been part of the BBC team there this week.
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Narrator
There is no better illustration of the faint whiff of the ludicrous that hangs over the World Economic Forum high in the Swiss Alps than the argument over, of all things, private planes and how many that may or may not be arriving here. The easy hit for critics of gatherings of very rich business leaders, politicians and central bankers is that it is completely divorced from reality. Of course, to an extent it is. But what you are actually seeing at Davos are many people who live a life pretty much divorced from everyday reality 52 weeks a year. It is just that this week they are visible. The fact that the Forum is at the Swiss ski resort, a few miles from the upmarket location of choice Cloisters, just adds to the sense of the otherworldly. But back to those private planes. There was a flurry of excited reporting at the start of the week when figures appeared to suggest that that there would be 1700 of those markers of true wealth flying into Davos for the World Economic Forum. And that, ho, ho, ho, was for a meeting that was supposed to be discussing climate change. What better proof do you need? The critics cried. Davos is just one pretty big contradiction. Except the 1700 figure wasn't quite right. Or, to be more accurate, it needed context. Firstly, every week, on average, 850 private planes travel in and out of Davos. Rich people generally like skiing around here. There are a lot of very large private chalets dotted around the mountainside. Secondly, the 1700 figure referred to plane movements rather than actual planes. So a part of that number will be one plane travelling in and out of Davos between other jobs. Even the hyper rich tend not to like their plane standing idle. They may even with whisper it, share them. What this tells us about the wider Davos is that it is always worth testing the initial simple take. As Yuri Katanen, the former Prime Minister of Finland and now European Commissioner for jobs and Growth, told me, matters are always more complicated than they first seem. Yes, Davos does have its peculiar traits. The billionaire business leaders who would rather jump in a limousine with blacked out windows than walk the 500 yards between conference venues. And there are the parties, which rock on long through the night in those private chalets dotted on the mountainside. They often come complete with ice bars serving champagne, caviar and bowls of cherries the size of apples. But there is serious work done here. The Portuguese economic Minister summed it up when he told me that he was in Davos to speak to the millionaire bankers because he wanted them to invest in his country. And if they invest and back businesses, then that is a route to wealth creation and more jobs in a country wracked by austerity and with a youth unemployment figure touching 35% in five days. Here he can meet people it would take a year and a lot of air miles to usually see. The discussions are substantive. Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International, said she was here to make companies feel uncomfortable, and there are few venues in the world where the titans of Wall street, in this case Gary Cohen, the president of Goldman Sachs and a man with a bone crushing handshake, would be held to account over the issue of inequality. He admitted to me that banks needed to do more, and he hardly blushed, of course, as one chief executive said to me over the usual Davos breakfast of hams, cheese and strong coffee, this place is very good at admiring a problem. The test is, does anything change? Well, talking might be only part of the solution, but it is a part. Yes, there are interminable windy sessions full of platitudes and warm words, but there are also hundreds of more private meetings. This is where technology entrepreneurs looking at new ways to use robotics in healthcare can meet investors who want to find a home for their money. And economic ministers from countries often excluded from the cosy club of the G7 can share the stage with those who control global and vital capital. South Africa and Malaysia, to name but two have taken over whole buildings here on the main promenade and clad them in the colours of their flag. I don't know whether, of course, any of their Representatives arrived by private plane
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Correspondent
and that was Kemal Ahmed in Davos. Now it's not every day we hear from South Georgia. This remote and inhospitable British overseas territory in the South Atlantic was at its most newsworthy when it was occupied by Argentine forces in the run up to the Falklands War in 1982. Captain Cook claimed it for Britain back in the 18th century and it went on to pay its way as a major base for seal and whale hunters. The largest blue whale ever caught, more than 25 yards long, was landed there in 1912, and a few years later, South Georgia became part of the heroic story of the explorer Ernest Shackleton. Today no one lives there apart from the British government officer, a postmaster and sundry scientists with their support staff. Perhaps it's this relative absence of humanity that's encouraged the island's wildlife, for that is thriving, as Juliet Ricks has been finding out.
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Juliet Ricks
I feel as though I've landed in a 3D surround sound smellsation David Attenborough film the beach is a blubbery mass of burping, farting, lolling elephant seals. Mothers nurse pups, one born before our eyes. And great bulls lie docile until a sudden lurch into violent action at the approach of another male. Snappy fur seals stand self importantly above the morass, where while pure white snow petrels swoop over the heads of thousands of elegant, squawking king penguins parading along the shore or chilling out with their oversized, fluffy brown chicks. It's an incredible sight and for once I am not about to tell you that it's all threatened with extinction. Quite the reverse. South Georgia, one of Britain's remotest outposts. Two days sail from the Falkland Islands and there's no airstrip, is not only preserving its wildlife, but it is also righting the wrongs of previous generations, helping decimated species recover from the time when this was a world centre of seal hunting and whaling. It all started with Captain James Cook. In the 1770s, the famous explorer was the first to set foot on South Georgia and reported back that it was full of fur seals. Hunters were quick to respond and by the end of the 19th century, the fur seal was all but extinct. Hard to believe. Now, South Georgia, home to 90% of the world's fur seals, has over 3 million of them. So successful is their recovery that it's even prompted concerns that the competition for food may be slowing the recovery of the great whales. I wander through Grytviken whaling Station, a rusty skeleton of a previous way of life, evocative in falling snow, 175,000 whales were caught and killed here before it finally closed in the 1960s. Whales were once so plentiful that early whalers didn't even need to leave the bay. Today, whales are rarely seen from Grytviken, but they're recovering in the waters beyond, now part of the Southern Ocean Whale sanctuary. Our ship's Russian captain, the wonderfully named Captain Beluga, tells me that in his 22 years in these waters, the biggest wildlife change he's seen has been a dramatic rise in whale sightings. We spot multiple blows, as well as several vast fin whales and a few knobbly headed humpbacks sailing around South Georgia. Our ship is followed by a host of seabirds, including the iconic albatross. Albatrosses are the most threatened bird family in the world, with some hundred thousand a year killed as bycatch of longline fishing and trawling. Not though in South Georgia, without any loss to the fisheries, simple measures have been introduced and enforced here that mean albatrosses are very rarely killed. Unfortunately, South Georgia's albatrosses range right around the globe and will remain at risk until all fisheries are albatross friendly. So we feel particularly lucky to be treated to the sight of the largest bird in the world. The wandering albatross. Landing in the tussock grass beside us. Completely unconcerned by our presence, it opens its primeval beak to regurgitate half digested fish for its vast downy chick. Minutes later, we spot another rarity, the endemic South Georgia pipit, the world's southernmost songbird and South Georgia's other most threatened species. At least it was threatened. The pipit lost 70% of its habitat to rats, brought here on sealing and whaling ships. In treeless South Georgia, birds nest on the ground, making their eggs easy prey for rats. As global warming saw glaciers recede, rats were able to spread yet further. The prognosis looked dire until in 2010, the South Georgia Heritage Trust, a small, privately funded charity, launched the largest and most ambitious rat eradication programme ever attempted. The rat team, now starting the final phase of this 7.5 million pound project, has an extraordinary task. Most of rugged South Georgia is still unexplored, mapped only from the air. In the next three months, during South Georgia's notoriously unsummarry summer, the team must fly their former air ambulance helicopters low over jagged rock and ice to accurately drop 95 tonnes of poisoned rat bait across 140 square miles. The first two phases of eradication have been staggeringly successful, as we're pleased to confirm by spotting pipits in places where they've not been seen for decades. If the final phase can rid South Georgia of the last of the rodents, the experts say it could allow 100 million more seabirds to return to breed here. Yes, you heard that right. 100 million extra birds. Now, that would be a sight to delight even David Attenborough.
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Correspondent
Good news for the pipit, but looking grim for the rats of South Georgia. Juliet Ricks there, bringing us to the end of another edition. More stories from far and wide on both Thursday and Saturday morning next week. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.