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From Our Own Correspondent
The Stone Breakers
00:27:58
All of Europe is watching the Greek elections. Chris Morris says they could have a on...
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Hello, this is the from our own
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correspondent office at Bush House in London. You can check out what we're up to by signing up to our Twitter
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feed, but here's a download of our latest programme on BBC Radio 4, introduced
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as ever by Kate Ady.
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Today, the Greeks stocking up with emergency rations in case chaos follows tomorrow's elections. No question of school for the child stone breakers of Madagascar toiling all day so others can get rich. Koreans bow and applaud the British soldiers who fought in a war many here would prefer to forget. And we are off to the gate of a hundred pleasures for a taste of decadent pre war Shanghai. European eyes will be firmly on Greece tomorrow. Pointers to how the general election vote has gone are due in the early evening. The result could have profound consequences not only for the euro, but for the future of the European Union as well. The main contenders, the left wing Syriza grouping and right wing New Democracy Party, are at odds over whether Greece should reject the tough bailout deal imposed by its European partners. Chris Morris has spent the last few days touring Greece, where he's found people desperate to move on from the instability and uncertainty which have stalked their country for months.
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They were sitting in rows on small plastic chairs in the early evening sun. I'd just arrived at a suburban election rally for pasok, the Pan Hellenic Socialist Party, the former giant of Greek politics, and the mood was, to say the least, downbeat. But the most striking thing was this. I couldn't see anyone paying attention to any of the speakers who could remotely be described as young. This is a generational election in Greece. One pollster told me that if no one over the age of 65 voted, the radical left wing party Syriza would win an absolute majority. The sparse crowd shuffled on their seats and a faint ripple of applause drifted away on the wind. And then that mood began to change. A man walking past began to shout slogans. You're all thieves, he yelled. You've stolen everything. A few local youths joined in, more for a laugh than anything else. Let's all heckle the old guys. A brief scuffle broke out as some PASOK supporters tried to usher the protester away. One local party official was standing near me when a young man ran up behind him and hit him really hard on the side of the head. A single punch. He looked round, more shocked than angry, the expression on his face. This isn't supposed to happen, but these are volatile times in Greece. Huge amounts of cash have been withdrawn from the banks. Rumours abound of pharmacists running out of drugs and and ministries running out of money in a country which spent more than it earned for years. Politics is polarized and when the centre cannot hold, things fall apart. Pensions have been cut, benefits have been cut, and some people who still have jobs haven't been paid for months. The economy is moving backwards and the psychological pressure is palpable. I went to meet Sissy Karavia, author of a blog called Hard Day. She was at a dance rehearsal. We dance our problems away, she said. That's our motto. When we first met a year ago, she talked of people stealing from supermarkets because their salaries had been cut, and of parents having to pay to get the school toilets cleaned. So what's changed? We have even less money, she said, and we're even more tired. We've got used to living with less. But many of my friends are stocking up on food in case the worst happens. And what is the worst thing that could happen? Well, in a word, and it is a Greek one. Chaos. Most people still fear leaving the euro. The prospect of soaring inflation and unemployment. The end of the European dream. A minority ask, what could be worse than what we have now? Rip it up and start again. Everyone is looking for a better way. Which explains the extraordinary rise of the radical left in the form of Syriza and and its young leader, Alexis Tsipras. He's promising the Holy Grail. Stay in the euro, but take away the most acute pain. A complete renegotiation of the austerity driven bailout regime. His opponents say his plans are a pipe dream, that he'll turn Greece into an economic wasteland. A few days ago, I watched him walk onto a small stage in the northern town of Kavalla, flanked on one side by a statue commemorating the struggle of tobacco workers and on the other by a branch of Marks and Spencer's. It seemed oddly appropriate. This is a peaceful revolution, he declared, a revolution of the people. By the end of the week, he was addressing a much larger crowd in the center of Athens. And for the first time at a political rally here, I saw people actually looking enthusiastic. It doesn't mean Syriza will win, but it does mean the message is inspiring a little bit of hope instead of an awful lot of fear for the future. But how do you pay for hope in a globalized world, in a time of economic crisis? It doesn't come for free. So the main alternative to Syriza, the centre right party, New Democracy, is frantically trying to repackage itself as a safe pair of hands softening the bailout, but not abandoning it entirely. At an outdoor concert in an Athens suburb, it's an easy target. You're not new, sings a political satirist. And you're not democratic either. The crowd laugh and applaud and listen to the music and wonder how to vote. We need music. It's in our blood, says a woman in the audience sitting with her daughter. And we're a complex people, hard to understand. Maybe, she adds, everyone should just leave us alone. I know what she means, but right now there's not much chance of that.
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And that's Chris Morris. A new attempt being made to bring together two arch rivals in a political crisis which has raged for three years on the island of Madagascar. The 15 member Southern African Development Community is trying to broker talks between the country's current president and the man he ousted three years ago. It hopes they'll smooth the way towards fresh elections to be held in a few months time. Luke Freeman, who's just back from this Indian Ocean island off the coast of Southeast Africa, says that while the political instability has clearly damaged the island's economy, some people are still prospering.
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You hear the quarry before you see it, echoing up from below, rising on the heated midday air, comes an incessant plink, plink, plink of hammers on stone. Then, as you near the edge of the vast pit, the breadth and depth of three sports stadiums, the earth opens up before you and you stare down into a huge grey bowl of granite and dust and human toil. The quarry of Ambatomaru, on the outskirts of Madagascar's capital city, Antananarivu, is a scene of intricately organized labour, full of grimy figures breaking, splitting, chiselling, carrying, hauling and loading rock all by hand. Not a machine to be seen. Gangs of men, barefoot or in flip flops, take turns to hammer iron bars into the rock face to make holes for dynamite. Skilled masons split the blasted rock into blocks of unerringly equal size. Loading crews fling these like rugby balls from hand to hand down a human chain to waiting lorries parked in the quarry bed. And dotted everywhere around the quarry are the stone breakers, the source of the constant plink, plink, plink. These are women and children who buy piles of misshapen rocks from the splitters and break them down with homemade iron mallets into small stones for building and road construction. The smaller they break them, the more they get paid. Around them, babies lie swaddled in the shade and toddlers crawl in the dust. Older children, though, are here to work. They are Deft and swift, grabbing a rock with one small hand, cracking it into pieces with the mallet, sweeping the pieces aside and starting again. Nothing else but this. All day, every day. I Approach Two brothers, 10 and 11 years old, who are working their way through a pile of rocks nearly as high as they are. They barely look up, just go on plinking with dusty faces and bleary eyes. I ask for a hammer and one of them reluctantly gives me his and I clumsily split a few stones. A faint smile forces its way across the boy's face. Then the other catches it and they almost laugh. But then they go back to their work and their faces set back into tedium, as if shutting down their minds were the most efficient way of passing the dreary day. Like their father before them, these two boys have worked here since they were eight. Today they will earn about 30 pence between them. Half of that they will spend on food to take to their mother, who is ill in hospital. SHE coughs blood, they say. The other half will go towards the sum their father owes the moneylender. For medicine, there's no question of ever going to school. If you follow the groaning, overladen trucks out of the quarry, they take you to the construction site, whose appetite for granite keeps these children in work. Here, a completely different Madagascar is emerging. New neighbourhoods of luxury villas and exclusive compounds where sports cars gleam behind electronic gates. Many of the residents belong to the new group of super rich that has emerged since the 2009 coup d'. Etat. International observers suspect that much of the new wealth belongs to leading political and military figures close to the new internationally unrecognized regime, and comes from unregulated exploitation and export of Madagascar's natural wealth. Precious stones, gold and rosewood from the shrinking forests. There is clearly a lot of big money floating around Madagascar at the moment. One commercial bank made some 8 million pounds in profits last year, much of it through channeling capital to foreign banks. It's clear that in the three years since the coup, government investment in education, health and infrastructure has fallen severely. The poverty rate has risen dramatically, and it's believed that nearly half a million people have lost their jobs. So there is no shortage of people willing to work the quarries by hand, and no shortage of children whose parents can't afford to send them to school. And with the demand for stone on the rise, more are joining them in the drudgery. Wherever you're listening to this. If it's daylight in Madagascar, children are sitting in the dust, breaking stones to live all day. Every Day. Plink, plink, plink.
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And that was Lou Creman in Madagascar. The conflict in Korea in which more than a thousand British soldiers lost their lives, is sometimes referred to as the forgotten war. The fighting in the Korean peninsula broke out only five years after the end of the Second World War. In this country, it proved unpopular from the start. Even today, it's little commemorated, its battles and heroes little known, but it deeply affected the lives of many British people. Those who went to fight, of course. Their families too. A group of British veterans has just been back to Korea and Jackie Bird went with them.
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They were an incongruous sight amid the frenetic morning rush hour of Seoul's main railway station. As an array of coffee clutching commuters in suits hurried past, a group of British war veterans, dapper in regimental blazers, military berets with a cluster of well polished medals began to muster on the equally well polished concourse. They were heading for the climax of a five day visit to this cosmopolitan capital, a city that most had last seen flattened and smouldering 60 years before. But as the group of veterans, some with walking sticks and a few in wheelchairs, began to make their way to the platform, something surprising happened. Station workers bowed as they passed. Staff in the kiosks and small shops stopped selling their coffees and pastries and broke into spontaneous applause. Even some of the commuters hurrying past slowed and made obvious their respect for their elderly visitors. South Korea is a 21st century economic powerhouse, and it's a grateful one. The Korean War of 60 years ago May be a footnote in Britain's public consciousness, but its mass loss of life and the sacrifice of the American and United nations forces who came in its hour of need is ingrained in South Koreans, young and old. In 1950, military conflict was the last thing threadbare Britain needed. It had just emerged from the Second World War and hadn't the stomach for another. By necessity, it dispatched to Korea a fighting force mostly made up of young national servicemen. The majority were teenagers who'd never ventured outside their hometowns. When they were packed off to a distant Asian peninsula, their meager 16 weeks of training couldn't prepare them for what lay in store. Ferocious hill battles, trench warfare and attacking human waves of well drilled Chinese. After the war ended in a face saving armistice. Territorially, the sides were almost back to where they started. This inglorious culmination did nothing to remove the apathy on the home front. The men came home to indifference and many have long nursed a sense of injustice. As one told me we were only young. We'd start to talk about our war and be told away. Lad, that was nothing. I was at Dunkirk. So we just stopped talking about it. In Korea, these ill equipped, inexperienced young fighters had witnessed horrors beyond imagination, but had returned to a Britain that simply didn't want to know. Today's bullet train trip from Seoul to Busan in the far south of the country, was a chance for the veterans to pay tributes to their fallen comrades buried in the Commonwealth cemetery. The South Korean government picks up most of the bill for these revisits, as it calls them. Those who come can bring a partner. Usually it's wife, sons or daughters, loved ones who've spent a lifetime listening to a story of war and who find themselves written into this final chapter. As the train sped past unprepossessing countryside, I fell into conversation with John. Too young to fought in the war, I presumed he was accompanying a veteran. He quietly explained his quest was to find the grave of his father, who'd left for a belated national service when John was 4 years old and never came home. John had only just learned of the revisit programme that had enabled his trip, and as we spoke, it seemed the hurt of a conflict ignored wasn't restricted to those who fought in it. People would ask me what happened to my father. He told me when I said he died in the Korean War. They didn't know what to say. They had no idea British troops were even involved. John's mother had remarried someone who'd never wanted another man's children. The consequences of this faraway war had seeped down through generations. At the cemetery, torrential rain falling vertically and unrelentingly from a leaden sky added to the poignancy of the occasion. The skinny, cocky young servicemen who bounded off troopships 60 years ago were now a fragile cargo. Young Korean helpers eased the infirm across the slippery, sodden ground and hauled wheelchairs up saturated inclines as the wife's and middle aged children huddled under a canopy. The veterans stood to attention in the face of the elements, dignified in the intensity of the moment and lost in their memories. A small Korean military band played Abide with Me as the downpour intensified and the skies grew darker. Old men must have been chilled, but they never complained as they were given time to roam the cemetery with its hundreds of small Union flags and A4 sized plaques marking grave. They found their former friends and they knew they were the lucky ones. They'd come home. I last saw John alone, upset and kneeling by the grave of the father he never knew killed in a war we forgot to remember.
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That was Jackie Bird with the veterans in South Korea. Many fine words were spoken in Cuba this week at the funeral of Teofilo Stevenson. He was the Olympic gold medalist whose principles led him to turn down the chance of earning millions in a fight against Muhammad Ali. What is a million dollars, he famously said, compared to the love of my people? His death came as the Cuban athletes bound for this year's Olympics were winding up their training and preparing to fly to London for the Games, which start next month. Sarah Rainsford is in Havana, where there's been much discreet speculation about whether the current crop of boxers and runners will display the same revolutionary zeal which drove Stephenson all those years ago.
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As I stepped out of the lift into the funeral parlour, the noise hit me. The room was full of family, friends and fans of Teofilo Stevenson, and everyone seemed to be speaking at once. He was Cuba's greatest boxer, once its most famous figure after Castro, and huge numbers of people had come to remember him. Fellow Olympic champions, many in their tracksuits, jostled alongside everyone else. Stephenson's open coffin stood in a side room, draped in the national flag, red boxing gloves resting on top. The crowd filed in slowly, taking it in turns to stand alongside in an honour guard. The boxer was just 60 when he died, and I saw a few people wiping away quiet tears. But most seemed there, less to mourn than to commemorate a sporting legend. Teofilo Stevenson brought home three consecutive Olympic gold medals for Cuba in the 1970s and 1980. A poster boy for the Communist sports system with a destructive right hand, he was unrivalled in the amateur ring for many years, a world champion several times over. But when he turned down millions of dollars to fight Mohammed Ali, he also became a powerful symbol of loyalty to Cuba's revolution. The fight with Ali would have been a fantasy clash between the two greatest heavyweights of their generation. But Fidel Castro had banned professional sport as corrupting. Stevenson would have had to defect, and he claimed the affection of millions of Cubans was more important. As a champion, Teofilo was the greatest, an example to all of us. Stephenson's protege and a retired heavyweight himself, Felix Savon told me when I spotted him towering above the funeral crowd. When he stopped fighting, he taught me his tricks and. And they were the secret of my success, Savon said. He went on to match his mentor with three Olympic gold medals of his own. I never got the chance to meet Teofilo Stevenson, but Savon's own story has many parallels. Both boxers were plucked from humble backgrounds and honed into top athletes. And like Stevenson, Savon could have gone on to make a fortune. In a recent interview, he told me he was offered $5 million to fight Mike Tyson, the best professional heavyweight of his own gener. That fee was later doubled, he said. Sitting in his modest pink painted bungalow with a broken down larder in the garage, a small state pension and five children, I wondered how on earth he'd resisted. We fought for an ideal to defend our country, savon explained, proudly, recalling the years when professional boxing promoters were buzzing round him. But then he added, I'm not my own master. I'd have had to abandon my country and my family to fight Tyson. And you can't be happy like that, not for all the money in the world. Instead, Savon fought on for Cuba. A small room in his home is testament to his achievements, its cabinets full of trophies, silk boxing ropes and battered gloves. Two of his three Olympic golds are draped casually over a wooden bust of the boxer on a shelf. But when I asked him which item he treasures most, Savon immediately pointed to the badly framed prints on his wal. My 27 photographs with Fidel Castro, he said, patting me. I assume, he thought gently on my arm. As he spoke, Castro's tributes to Teofilo Stevenson appeared in Granma, the Communist Party newspaper. No other amateur boxer in history shone so brightly, castro declared, hailing Stevenson's talent first, then his loyalty. And so it was the patriot and the true Olympian as well as the maestro that the crowd stood and applauded here as Stevenson was driven through the streets of Havana this week for one last time. As his coffin was lowered into the grave, a woman broke into the national anthem, and it quickly rippled through the crowd. He was always an inspiration here, and he'll be even more so now, the retired athlete Alberto Juan Torena told me, contemplating the future of Cuban sport and this summer's Olympics as he bid farewell to a legend. Teofilo Stevenson will always be in the heart of the Cuban people. He will never be erased, quantarena said as the funeral crowd began to drift away, leaving the boxer's grave heaped with fresh flowers.
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Sarah Rainsford in Havana after two decades of frenzied demolition, many of the remaining buildings of the Art Deco Shanghai have been revamped and restored. The area, which used to be known as the French Concession, has become a chic, manicured district of boutiques and bars, while the stately stone architecture of the Bund has been returned to its former glory. But Fuchsia Dunlop says there's one place that stands out as a symbol of the city's polyglot glamour in the 1930s, between the two world wars. And she's been there for a night out.
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Dao bailermen take me to the Gate of a Hundred Pleasures. I ordered the taxi driver, and we sped off through the cool Shanghai night. At a crossroads near the Jing' an temple, colored lights pulsed up the facade of a grand Art Deco building. The name of the Paramount dance hall, Bailmen, or Gate of a Hundred Pleasures in Chinese, blazed over the door in red neon lights. I paid the driver and rode the lift up to the fourth floor, where I took off my coat and slipped on my dancing shoes. I'd been intrigued by the idea of visiting the Paramount for years. In its heyday in the 1930s, it was one of the world's legendary dance halls. A place where Chinese tycoons and gangsters mingled with pretty girls and foreign adventurers in an atmosphere of giddy modernity. Barely a decade before that, the idea of men and women dancing together had been scandalous. But Western style social dancing had taken Shanghai by storm. And this was the smartest ballroom. Of course, like the rest of Shanghai's decadent pre revolutionary past, the old dancing scene disappeared. After the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1956, the Paramount closed later to be turned into a cinema for revolutionary films. By 1990, the building itself was crumbling and falling masonry killed a passing pedestrian. But then a Taiwanese businessman, Zhao Shichong, came to the rescue with a multi million pound refurbishment and the Paramount's famous cantilevered floor sprang into life once again. Occasionally in China when I've passed one of the open spaces where retired people gather in the evenings to dance, I've lingered for a while and joined in for a waltz or a quick step. But dancing at the Paramount is a more formal affair. You can't just drop in and hope that someone will ask you to dance. Instead, you have to bring your own partner or hire one for the night. In the glory days of ballroom dancing in Shanghai, men bought tickets on the door and exchanged them for dances with professional hostesses. These days a woman is allowed to hire her own man. When I entered the ballroom, my dancing instructor and date for the night, Mr. Cao, was waiting for me, elegantly dressed in a black shirt and pinstripe trousers with slicked back hair. A professional dancer from Anhui province, he'd been working at the Paramount for nearly a decade. And there was the famous dance floor surrounded by tables and banquettes illuminated by a grand chandelier and some multi coloured lights. On the stage, a small jazz band were playing a waltz as part of their set. Mr. Tsao led me out on to the floor and although my dance steps were rusty with his expert lead and a few embarrassing tangles, I found myself remembering how to waltz. Over the rest of the evening, he took me on a crash course of all the dances I'd once learned and long forgotten. The fox trot and rumba, quickstep and jive. A few other couples danced around the floor, but never more than a dozen, and the surrounding seats were sparsely populated. Most of the couples, Mr. Cao told me, were students with their hired instructors. The female teachers in elegant qi paos, traditional Chinese dresses, the male ones sleek in their black trousers and shiny shoes. Any of the old Paramount crowd. The Shanghainese who had danced here in the 1940s, I guessed, were probably past their dancing days or no longer around. Later in the evening, a Japanese tour group joined the fray, no doubt hoping, like me, for a glimpse of glittering, decadent pre war Shanghai. But that old Paramount magic was elusive outside. Shanghai was enjoying another golden age as a fashionable international city. But it had nothing to do with ballroom dancing. On the Bund, the restored colonial waterfront, the rich and glamorous of the day were sipping cocktails and tasting modernist cuisine, while in the former French Quarter, bright young things were eating pizza or dancing to garage music in the latest night club on the Paramount dance floor. My nostalgic fantasies crumbled every time the live jazz gave way to a session of recorded international pop and it was hard not to be disheartened by the near deserted floor. But the gyves and jitterbugs were as fun as they always are and the best exercise I'd had in ages. And when Mr. Tsao and I settled into the gentle pace of a waltz as the jazz band played, I closed my eyes to the disco lights and was able to imagine myself back in a vanished era.
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Fuchsia Dunlop there, getting just a hint of how it was in glittering pre war Shanghai. That's it. Next week I'll be here with more from our own correspondence on both Thursday and Saturday mornings. Do join us. Goodbye.