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From Our Own Correspondent
The Tourists Have Gone
00:28:16
Stories from reporters around the world. In this edition: empty hotels and a deserted...
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Transcript13 lines
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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.
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It's introduced by Kate Ad.
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Hello. Today, grievances in Greece, politics in Poland. People in 28 European countries prepare to vote, but do they have anything in common? The tourists have all gone after bombs in Kenya yesterday. British holidaymakers fly home, leaving behind them a deserted coastline. We hear about the disaster in Central America which ended Scotland's last period of independence 300 years ago, and visit a city even Parisians want to move to. How has a grimy old port been transformed into a dynamic artistic powerhouse? Millions of voters across Europe are preparing to vote on who they want in charge of the EU and what they want it to do. Should it be pushing on with the project of ever closer union or moving in the opposite direction? British voters are somewhat lukewarm about the institution and even more so about the process. Only about a third of eligible voters usually turn up at the Euro ballot box, well below the EU average turnout of about 43%. But we are by no means the least interested. Only about a fifth of the Czechs, Slovaks and Poles cast their votes, perhaps surprising since they are the club's newest members. The loudest arguments this time are the existentialist ones. Is there really any point in having a European Union? As Chris Morris explains, that's a theme which politicians all over Europe are tapping into.
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I've met all sorts of people over these past few weeks. There was the Red army veteran who helped defeat the Nazis, paying his respects at a war memorial in Riga. It'll take at least an hour to tell you my story, he said, tapping the medals lined up in rows across his chest. If we have coffee, it'll take two hours. If we have vodka, more than three. However long it takes, everyone has a story to tell. There was the life coach in Warsaw and the Petonque player in Marseille. We try to enjoy life, he said. That's what it's there for. There were the two men on a park bench playing speed chess in Sofia and the young woman with a part time job and a need for more walking past the Greek parliament in Athens. No one can imagine what's happened here over the last few years, she said. There are so many stories, you wouldn't believe them. Actually, I would. A country that's been through economic meltdown has no need to make anything up. But from grievances in Greece to politics in Poland, the only thing all these people have in common, apart from the dubious pleasure of being interviewed by me, is, is that they're Europeans. They live in different countries and lead different lives. But next week they're eligible to vote in the same election. Except, of course, it isn't really the same election. There's one parliament, yes, but there are 28 elections in 28 member states. And they do say all politics is local, don't they? Sometimes it's national, but only rarely has it ever been European. But now there's an effort to change that, because there are two forces in this European election season that are pulling in opposite directions. There's an anti establishment surge, a plague on all your political houses. Much, but not all of it is Eurosceptic. But there's also a bigger effort than ever before to try to create that elusive sense of being European. You may not have heard of them, but the European Federalist Party is fielding candidates in six countries, and I'll try to keep an eye on how many votes they get. More significantly, the biggest political groups in the current parliament have also put forward their candidates to be the next president of the European Commission. There are presidential battle buses and campaign tours. There have been several presidential debates. The theory is that if voters think they can play a role in picking the leader of an often remote institution, then it will suddenly seem less remote and may be more democratic. National EU leaders may yet throw a fly in this carefully concocted parliamentary ointment. They may choose a candidate of their own for the top EU job. An unseemly institutional row may soon loom large. For now, though, the focus is on the voters and on how many of them will actually bother to cast a vote. Use your power, says the advertising slogan on billboards as you walk through the terminal at Brussels Airport. Choose who's in charge in Europe. The picture shows a carefully choreographed group of citizens smiling for all their worth. But beyond the politically committed Europeans, the party activists and the Eurocrats, does all the effort to whip up campaign fervor really have that much effect? This time it's different, declares another parliamentary slogan. The copywriters have been working overtime. Yes, it is different. This time, there will be more MEPs than ever before who question or even despise the institution in which they've been elected to serve. And that may be no bad thing, because it will sharpen the debate and prevent politicians from falling back on platitudes. There will be federalists who want all in and skeptics who want all out. But most people I've met are somewhere in the middle, open to the idea that Europe can help them, but not entirely sure how, and a little disenchanted with a system they don't quite understand. So that's the conversation that will last well beyond these elections. What is the EU really for? And can a way be found to satisfy those who want more Europe as well as those who want considerably less? The official motto of the European Union tries to cover both bases united in diversity, whatever that means. For now, it's probably doing rather better at being diverse than it is at being united, because this is a union which is struggling to frame a narrative, still trying to find a story to call its own.
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Chris Morris in Riga, Warsaw, Marseille, Athens, and this morning, back in Brussels. Asia's longest running war ground to a halt exactly five years ago when the Sri Lankan army finally defeated the separatist militant group the Camel Tigers. The island's Sinhalese dominated government hailed and continues to hail its achievement. The only country to defeat terrorism, it says. But it's plagued by allegations that it committed war crimes in its final offensive, which left tens of thousands of civilians dead. It says it will not cooperate with a UN investigation announced in March, insisting it's on the path to ethnic reconciliation. But is it? Our Sri Lanka correspondent, Charles Haviland, who arrived there weeks before the end of the war, has been considering the evidence.
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I've just been in the Vani, the arid northern tract of Sri Lanka that was the Tamil Tiger's last stronghold. Each time I return to the north, there's more visible progress. What were rutted dirt tracks are now smooth metalled roads. The military is everywhere, but many people seem to rub along quite well with them. Despite the ethnic difference. The the soldiers are Sinhalese, the villagers Tamil. In a move loaded with symbolism, security forces were lavishly celebrating the Buddhist festival of Vesak all over this entirely non Buddhist region. But in true Vesak tradition, they were handing out food and drink to the locals, and adults and children were smiling. Yet five years after the war ended, Sri Lanka still feels like two countries. Take the issue of how to commemorate the war. Every year, the government mounts a massive military display to honor its 2009 defeat of the Tamil Tigers, or LTTE. This year, the pageant is in the Sinhalese heartland, the far south. To Prepare for it, 40 schools have been closed for a week. Yet in the Tamil north, the army has banned anyone from publicly marking the anniversary, telling Jaffna University students that to do so would be an inducement to terrorism and death threats against two university Teachers have been posted on the campus. It is true that were public ceremonies allowed in the north, they would not be celebrations but solemn acts of mourning. It is also true that among some students there remain pro? Ltte sentiments. The government asks who would want to mourn the defeat of those deemed to be terrorists. Certainly many in Colombo and all over the south would not. Time and again people here tell you of their relief that they can now send their children to school without fearing the bus will be bombed by the militants. But the fact is that for many in the north, there is more to mourn than to celebrate. Go into any dwelling in the Vani, whether a brick built house or a makeshift coconut thatched shelter, and you will hear tales of horror. I talked to a 47 year old woman called Seroja. Five years ago she lost her husband, his sisters and their children 15 people in one shell attack against the Tiger held zone where they also kept civilians. Four days later, she herself was injured in her thigh, waist, stomach and chest. Now she is unable to eat or breathe comfortably. Such stories are typical across the North. In fact, Saroja said she felt no need to mourn in public and her family held private mourning ceremonies. But even speaking in private is dangerous up here in Mullivaikal, the hamlet that received the final devastating military onslaught, I photographed a beautifully restored school and our team wanted to chat to some resettled people. Immediately, plainclothes police officers on bicycles appeared and stopped us. If we had entered anyone's house, they would certainly have interrogated them. Afterwards, as the officers chatted to us, we noticed colorful pieces of clothing, a school bag, flip flops, a photograph album protruding from the soil. Now levelled the mundane belongings of people who died in this very place. In events not yet fully explained. To attain national reconciliation, the these people's stories will have to be related around the country. But the Colombo based media virtually ignore them. The government, stung by a recent UN Human Rights Council resolution against it, says firm security is needed because the Tamil Tigers are trying to regroup. Last month the army gunned down three men in the north, saying they were leading this bid. Meanwhile, human rights workers have been arrested or issued with gagging orders. Others have fled Sri Lanka. It is hard to know whether the stories of a Tiger revival are true, but many Sri Lankans are skeptical. I've recently met several former members of the ltte. Those I asked about a possible revival say it's merely a scare story. They in fact hold checkered views of the militants and of the government. Some have nostalgia for the ordered but harsh regime. The LTTE ran in the north, but others have a degree of respect for the Army. According to one, 90% of them are good. What they all told me, though, is that the authorities are harassing them by constantly monitoring their movements, preventing them from leading normal lives. The government is now gearing up for its huge war victory celebration. Canada has now announced it will boycott the ceremony, as, in the words of its high commissioner here, it perpetuates roles of victors and vanquished. Sri Lanka today is still riven by that fault line.
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That's Charles Havilland in Colombo. Police in Kenya are on high alert this morning after the two explosions near a busy market in the capital, Nairobi, yesterday. Ten people were killed and some 70 injured. The explosions came as hundreds of British tourists were being evacuated from Kenya after the Foreign Office in London warned of a high threat of attacks, mainly from Somali Islamists. The travel writer Rob Crossan was on the Kenyan coast recently. He says these developments will come as a further blow to a local tourism industry which was already in trouble.
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The breakfast bar at the beach resort is about 25ft long. The linen covered tables groan under the weight of bowls of perfectly ripe bananas, polished trays full of sausages, scrambled eggs, grilled tomatoes and bacon, and jugs brimming over with freshly squeezed pineapple juice. Yet the lines of tables that stretch out into the horizon with the Indian Ocean slurping and slapping against the vanilla coloured sands beyond are all empty these days. For the couple of dozen guests meekly taking their breakfast plates into the farthest corners of this gargantuan room, a holiday along this stretch of coastline is more like a one way trip on a static version of the Marie Celeste, albeit one with a better supply of omelets. The tourists have gone, says Amy, a white Kenyan woman who runs an adventure sports business. They still come to safari, but they've stopped coming to the coast. People say it's the global recession, but that hasn't stopped Tanzania getting tourists. And they're just next door. I follow Amy's distracted gaze out onto the deserted beach in front of us. I'd fled the ghostly breakfast buffet and ridden a mountain bike along the coastal road to Diani and home to the Forty Thieves Beach Bar. This establishment, with its thatched roof bar was until recently, I was told, a frantic hub for cocktail sipping honeymooners. There were kite surfing thrill seekers, too, and the odd batch of weekending British soldiers on leave from the military training base in Nanyuki. Now, thanks in the main to the rise in terrorist attacks in nearby Mombasa and the hangover from the Westgate shopping mall siege last year, visitor numbers have plummeted in this region of pristine coral, shimmering palm trees and buttery sands. The hoteliers, bar owners and tour guides don't agree on how sharply visitor numbers have dropped in the last two or three years. 65%, say some others 80 or even 90% behind. Amy in the 40 Thieves Bar 5 Bar staff chat with each other, idly swiping their arms at the flies that congregate around them. One barman who doesn't want to be named tells me we have no customers and we should be packed out at this time of year. My neighbour used to run a day trip excursion company for visitors, but he's had to stop now. He's now fishing again. But the money isn't the same. I wondered how long it would be before this group of woefully underemployed bar staff would themselves be reverting back to subsistence farming, boat building and the other more traditional means of employment available in this region. Not that the large resort hotels are doing themselves many favors in their attempts to attract the kind of moneyed Western tourists who can afford the high flight fares to this part of East Africa. One German hotel owner shows me around a gleaming new collection of holiday bungalows that has just opened. I want to make people from California feel at home, he says. Seemingly he has failed to realise that the vast, rather sterile holiday homes he has built, complete with swimming pools and flat screen TVs, may not be particularly appealing to a visitor who is perhaps hoping for a semblance of Africa here rather than one of Orange County. I wondered if something less at odds with the local environment would be built if Kenyans, not Europeans, were the owners and managers of these places. On my final night, I joined some other travel writers from the UK for an al fresco meal on the beach, which one of the other empty hotels has laid on. As the orange orb of the sun dips into the molten waters, a high wind sweeps into shore, scattering sand onto our plates of ravioli. Behind us, a local musician drafted in by the hotel plugs in an electric keyboard, expecting to hear some Swahili language tunes. We are instead serenaded with versions of Sacrifice by Elton John and the Lion Sleeps Tonight. Do you like the music? Our waiter asks us. None of us have the bottle to respond that Perhaps covers of 1980s Western pop hits aren't the best way to win back the free spending holiday makers that this region so desperately needs. I'd cut prices if I could, but I'm already making a loss, says one hotel manager before I begin my long journey home. I watch him walk away, past an empty swimming pool and the lines of empty tables, their linen cloths flapping in the gentle ocean winds.
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And that was Rob Crossan on the Kenyan coast. Four months to go now until the referendum that'll decide whether, after 300 years of being part of the United Kingdom, Scotland becomes an independent country. As the voting nears, there's evidence that support for independence has grown in the last few months, and the debate over what going it alone might mean for Scotland is growing in intensity. History, of course, does have evidence to offer, but how should it be interpreted? Alan Little's been to Central America to consider the role that that region played three centuries ago in bringing to an end the last independent kingdom of Scotland.
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We landed near the border with Colombia, close to where the Isthmus of Panama is at its narrowest, on a little airstrip wedged between the blue sparkle of the Caribbean and the green intensity of an impenetrable forest, and boarded a little fiberglass boat with a single outboard motor. We made our way west, parallel to the coast, bouncing roughly in the surging surf until we came to the island that is still called Caledonia. In the time of our forefathers, a village elder told us white people came here, Scottish and Spanish people. We liked the Scottish more than the Spanish, for the Spanish attacked us and drove us inland, away from the coast, and the Scots did not. But there were battles and many ships were sunk. The story of the ill fated Scots colony at Darien survives in the oral history of the Kuna Indians, who are the only people who have ever settled successfully in this inhospitable place. In 1698, a fleet of five ships sailed from Leith Docks outside Edinburgh, carrying 1200 settlers to found a colony at Panama. It was the place where the poet John Keats would later locate stout Cortes gazing at the Pacific for the first time. And all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise. Silent upon a peak in Darien, the Scots found a large sheltered harbour with a supply of fresh water. They went ashore and built a fort they called Fort St. Andrew. Three centuries on, we hacked our way through the forest and found a trench they had dug to provide the fort with a defensive moat. It is a wide gash filled with seawater, cut through the solid coral rock by 17th century hands. The first canal in Panama, possibly built by Scotsmen under a punishing tropical sky. It is pretty much all that's left of the colony they named Caledonia and the town they called New Edinburgh. For even before they made landfall, the colonists had begun to die. Tropical disease, malaria, yellow fever, something they called the bloody flux cut them down even faster on land. Somewhere beneath the tangle we hacked through, there is a Scottish cemetery with hundreds of graves. No one has ever found it. The forest is too dense. Within nine months of setting sail from Leith, on a wave of national euphoria, most of the colonists were dead. A second fleet sailed in 1699, not knowing that the colony had already been attacked and burned to the ground by the Spanish and abandoned by its few survivors. The disaster helped end Scotland's independence, for the colony had been funded by public subscription, an early example of a financial mania. Public bodies, town corporations, members of Parliament, landed gentry and thousands of private citizens, sea captains and surgeons, apothecaries and ironmongers, sank their life savings into the scheme. Between a quarter and a half of the available wealth of Scotland was spent and lost. And it was the role of England that was most bitterly resented. Scotland, though an independent country, shared its head of state with England. King William was monarch of both kingdoms. English merchants and the English Parliament saw the Scottish venture as a threat to the trading monopolies they enjoyed. King William issued a decree to all the English colonies from Canada to the Caribbean. There was to be no trade with the errant Scots and no assistance, not so much as a barrel of clean water, was to be offered to them. Few of the 3,000 Scots who went made it home. Those who did found an impoverished country which within a decade accepted union with England. The Treaty of Union of 1707 included a clause in which the English government agreed to pay a sum of money to the Scots to compensate the Darien investors for what they had lost. Darien still resonates as Scotland prepares to vote on independence. Pro union Scots see in it a cautionary tale about the dangers of over ambition. But when a nation is rethinking its future, as Scotland now is, it also looks again at its past. Some now argue that the story reinforces the case for independence. For it proved that when Scotland and England place themselves under one government in London, as they were under King William, that government will, when the interests of the two countries conflict, inevitably favour the cause of the larger and more powerful partner. The sum of money England paid to the Scots was known in the treaty as the equivalent or the price of Scotland. The poet Robert Burns was scathing about the Scottish Parliament that voted to accept union with England. We were bought and sold for English gold, he wrote decades later. Such a Parcel of rogues in a nation.
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Alan Little when you hear Parisians say, now that's the city I'd like to move to, you know, it's got to be somewhere a bit special. These days, Nantes is regarded as one of the country's very best places to live. In the last 20 years, it has transformed itself from a depressed industrial port to a buzzing urban playground. It's shown a real talent for blending the new with the old. There's a dramatic new Palais de Justice. Old dockside warehouses are being converted into bars and artists studios. Plans to build a new airport though, have not gone down well. 20,000 people turned out to protest against the plan earlier this year. The riot police have to be called in. Kjersti Lang has been to visit this capital of the western Loire to see why it's regarded as France's most dynamic and artistically vibrant city.
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I first learnt about Nantes extraordinary transformation through puppets. Giant puppets the size of two story buildings. The biggest one was called the Sultan's elephant. He weighed 50 tons and it took 22 puppeteers to manipulate his limbs. As he made his way across Central London. In 2006, hundreds of thousands of Londoners lined the pavements to see the elephant from Nantes in one of the most spectacular pieces of street theatre ever performed in the capital. You can still find the Elephant in the redeveloped docklands of Nantes, taking tourists for a stroll on his back. He and his fellow giant marionettes are made by some of the same engineers who once worked in the city's shipbuilding industry. They belong to a street theatre company called Wild Deluxe, who travel all over the world entertaining millions of. This July, a new group of giants will cross the Channel to take part in a show in Liverpool. That's a city with which Nantes has a long standing affinity. Both are Atlantic ports that made fortunes through the slave trade and shipping. Both fell on hard times in the latter half of the 20th century when much of the world's shipbuilding industry moved to Asia. Ten years ago, the docklands known as the Ile d' Nant were were a wasteland of derelict warehouses and factories. Now there are gleaming aluminium and glass buildings, shiny new cafes and public artworks. Nantes is no longer a depressed Rust belt port with no jobs, but a cutting edge Atlantic City, famous in France for its annual music festival and as a home for artists, designers and Internet startups. The key to its transformation has been a huge public investment in art and culture that began under the former mayor and later Prime Minister of France, Jean Marc Heraud. I made my first visit to Nantes to Meet the puppets on this visit, I'm with a group of English artists, performers and designers. Most of them are from Liverpool and Manchester, and they ache with envy as we're shown around a city where huge sums of taxpayer money have been poured into the arts. The star in our firmament is a man described as the Leonardo da Vinci of the 21st century. He's the British designer Thomas Heatherwick. He's 43, but looks younger, with curly brown hair, a round, boyish face and twinkly eyes. Heatherwick, who made the spectacular 2012 Olympic cauldron, has been commissioned by the city of Nantes to design a passenger ferry. Over dinner in a frighteningly fashionable cafe serving seafood, tapas or le finger food, as it's described on the menu, Heatherwick gets out his iPad and shows me some of the projects he's currently working on. There's his garden bridge across the Thames in London, a museum of Contemporary African art in Cape Town, a university in Singapore, a park in Abu Dhabi, and a major redevelopment of Shanghai's waterfront. But the Nantes ferry will be the first boat he's ever designed. It's curvy with huge tubular tentacles, and it looks like an exotic steel sea creature. The man responsible for commissioning it is Jean Blaise, Nantes head of culture and our host at dinner. This boat is a work of art with a function, he explains as he tucks into a plate of fried oysters. It will transport locals and tourists along the Nantes estuary to the neighbouring city of Saint Nazaire. En route, they will pass 29 huge art installations that currently line the riverbank, making the Nantes estuary one of the largest outdoor galleries or sculpture parks in the world. Neither Thomas Hetherwick nor Jean Blaise speak each other's language, so I'm translating, which gets a bit tricky when they start discussing hulls and how the boat will be powered by green energy. After a couple of glasses of wine, I can't seem to find the words for sustainable development in French. Suddenly, Heatherwick switches the conversation to wind turbines. Why can't they look better? He exclaims. And why are they always white? Absolument, agrees Jean Blaise. I will have a word with the head of the edf, the state electricity company. Perhaps you can design us some beautiful wind turbines. On the way back to my hotel that night, I walked past the Jules Verne Museum. The French science fiction writer came from Nantes. His tales of extraordinary journeys around the world in amazing machines were inspired by his childhood in the port city, watching the ships come and go. As I stroll along a waterfront which Jules Verne would no longer recognise. I muse to myself that he would have approved of Thomas Heatherwick's extraordinary sea serpent boat travelling down the river of his childhood home.
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And with that from Kirsty Lang, still troubled about the French for sustainable development, we've reached the end of another edition. There'll be two next week on Thursday morning as well as on Saturday. Do join us. Goodbye.