← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Tomorrow You Will Be Heroes
00:27:53
The human stories behind the headlines. Like any war, the one against Ebola is leaving...
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Transcript14 lines
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You're about to hear from our own correspondent. 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. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Tomorrow you'll be heroes. A promise for the Ebola volunteers in guinea, risking their lives, transporting the sick and burying the dead. First Greece, now Spain. The crowds turn out for Podemos and its campaign against corruption, austerity and the politics of old. They took away our most beautiful art. We hear how British soldiers made off with a priceless collection amassed over centuries by Chinese emperors. And it's off to France for a story about W.B. yeats and bizarre goings on at a cemetery on the banks of the Seine. African Union leaders meeting in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, have been discussing the economic recovery of the countries affected by the Ebola virus. They're talking of setting up a solidarity fund, as well as what they're calling an African Centre for Disease Control. The worst outbreak of the virus in history has resulted in close to 9,000 deaths, almost all of them in the West African nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Grania Harrington has been to the forest region of guinea, where the outbreak first began, to talk to people working with Ebola patients there.
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Drive through the main market in Zarakora, past the stall selling dried fish for stews, piles of peanuts and live crowing roosters, weave through the motorbikes and the children selling plastic pouches of water and Guinean flags, and head northeast on a quiet country road. There, in a silent clearing in the forest, is where you'll find the graves of the people who've died of Ebola. Here at the only treatment centre in the region. Each mound is marked by a small green sign painted with a yellow number. No names. That way, nobody will find out which families have been affected by the disease. Those who wish to visit must wash their hands in chlorinated water, have the soles of their shoes sprayed with disinfectant, and then find the number that corresponds to the name of their loved one. They can make a brief visit, accompanied by staff from the Red Cross, making sure not to spend too much time in this contaminated area. Sometimes, when a person is buried here, an imam will be summoned to say a brief prayer before a team in white protective suits, goggles and gloves buries the body. Sometimes nobody comes at all. Today, Isiaka Tunkara isn't wearing one of those white suits, the anonymous alien outfits which so terrify people. He's in jeans and A T shirt and looks like what he was before this outbreak began. A school principal in a provincial town. Before the outbreak in guinea, he'd never heard of Ebola. Now this shy, serious 30 year old leads a team of 10 young volunteers who risk their lives transporting the sick and burying the dead. Isiaka wasn't here when two of his team were buried in this graveyard in December. He was in quarantine, waiting to see if he, like them, had caught Ebola because of his work. He describes his lost teammates with pride and affection as brave and devoted men. They were friends. One was 45, a former teacher. The other was Iseaka's assistant. He was 18 years old when he died. Iseaka said, it was as if I also died. I didn't know what would become of me after that. We worked together. So after him, am I not next? He almost gave up after that, but he says humanitarian work is important to him. We travel back into town to Isiaka's cottage on the side of the main road. His pretty young wife, Saren, is taking washing off the line in the front yard, folding and placing each item carefully on her head in a neat stack. They've been married for a year and have a tiny eight month old daughter, Konkube. Saren tells me that when Isiaka is working, she can't sleep until he gets home. When he was in quarantine, she says, she stopped eating from stress. Since then, they live separate lives in this tiny house to minimize the risk that the family might become infected because of her husband's work. We live together, says Iseaka. We greet each other, we eat the same food, but the rest is separate. We don't use the same cups. We don't even use the same spoons. In this country, renowned for its hospitality, Ebola has cut them off from everyone else. They were evicted from their last house when the landlord found out about Isiaka's work. Saren says that when she goes to the market, people are afraid of her. The Red Cross called in a psychologist to help the volunteers after they lost their friends. Dr. Pierrot, a tiny, avuncular gentleman, is fond of military terminology. The fight against this virus is a war, he says, and Ebola is a powerful army. It ravages everything in its path. They're soldiers fighting this virus to save the health of the Guinean people. Like any war, Ebola will leave its scars in a place where family comes first, where people share everything just to get by. The disease has created new and powerful divisions between families. Neighbors, communities, we say goodbye to Isiaka and wish him luck. After a week with medical workers fighting this disease, I've lost the instinct to step towards him and shake his hand. But I hope the words of Dr. Piero are true. I tell them, he says, what you're doing isn't understood by the community today, but tomorrow, after Ebola is gone, you will be heroes.
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Grania Harrington, back now from guinea in West Africa. Tens of thousands of Spaniards are assembling on the streets of Madrid this morning for a rally organized by the anti austerity party Podemos. They, like left wingers across Europe, have been celebrating the series of victory in the Greek elections. Last weekend, the leader of Podemus said the Greeks are finally going to get a Greek government, not delegates of Angela Merkel. Podemus reckoned the results a good omen for the Spanish election later this year, and Tom Burridge tells us their message is striking a chord with an electorate disenchanted with traditional politics and tired of belt tightening and unemployment.
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La casta. It's a word which not so long ago had little meaning here in Spain. But it's become part of this country's political dialogue because it's been used repeatedly by a new party called Podemos to describe the country's traditional political and financial elite, who they say are out of touch, corrupt and much richer than the average Spaniard, who is, after years of recession and austerity, not very well off at all.
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La Casta.
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Shouted one of our taxi drivers in Valencia at the driver of a BMW who he thought was driving without caring for anyone else. We were in Valencia for a rally of Podemos supporters. The name means we can. And the truth is this party of left wing idealists could, just could win Spain's general election at the end of this year. They've already turned politics on its head. People have the power. The song booms around the sports hall in Valencia before the leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, arrives centre stage with all the razzmatazz and swagger of a US president. Yes we can. Yes we can rings out around the auditorium. No smart, expensive suit for this party leader, just a casual open neck shirt and jeans and his trademark ponytail. Before Mr. Iglesias speaks, it's the turn of the party's number two, Inigo Ericon, who with his Harry Potter like glasses looks like he's 16 years old. Mr. Errejon is 31. And this university lecturer speaks with passion and conviction, railing against corruption, against the politics of old, against austerity and against the suffering of Spaniards. Underlying it all is a call for justice. Why have the poor and large middle class suffered during a crisis caused in large part by reckless lending by Spain's banks, often at the behest of equally reckless politicians? We can't take any more. Luis Cesar, a well dressed 43 year old father and telecoms engineer, screams into our camera. The rich aren't paying enough taxes, too many people are living below the poverty line. And the analogies with Greece flow through the arena. Siresa Podemos, Unidos vencermos is the opening line of Mr. Iglesias speech in English. Siresa Podemos. Together we will defeat them. And his message to Germany and the other powers of Europe is stark. You warn of chaos if we win, he bellows. Chaos is 3 million Greeks without health care. Chaos is that a quarter of workers there are poor. And I don't want my country to become Greece. And that's why we need to win. The crowd loves it, and so do many millions of others. Not in this Valencian sports hall, because Podemos has begun to inch ahead in the opinion polls in Madrid, under surprisingly warm winter sunshine in the city's main park, I had asked people what they made of their politicians. Unsurprisingly, for me, the same word cropped up time and time again. Corrupt. Corruption. Corruptos. Corruption. The C word flowed thick and fast. And why wouldn't it? As I write, corruption scandals swirl through the pages of the Spanish press. So many it's hard to keep track of all of them. But politicians rarely resign here, and public trust in them has been seriously eroded. So enter Podemos, a new, clean party. Yes, its politics will be too radical for many. Podemos is considering imposing a maximum wage. It says it might carry out an audit of the country's growing debt to decide if parts of it shouldn't be paid. At this stage, it's far from clear if it can actually win a general election. But the party's anti corruption, anti austerity message is clearly getting through. You might think that an exciting, radical new party with young leaders would be predominantly a party of, yes, the young. But that sports hall in Valencia was packed with people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and some were much older. Among them was 56 year old Soledad Ramos. What's even more surprising about this glamorous and friendly senora in her beige coat whose daughter accused her of flirting with me I'm nearly half her age, was that she used to vote for Spain's right wing Popular Party, the one which currently holds power. Now she says she'll vote for Podemos. She too has had enough of seeing schools, hospitals and people here suffer. Given the deep divisions left by Spain's civil war, it used to be quite inconceivable that someone who used to vote for a right wing party could now be considering casting her vote for one on the far left. But not anymore.
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And That's Tom Burrage. 2015 looks like being an important year in British Chinese relations. The Duke of Cambridge is to visit China, and there's talk of a state visit to Britain by their president, Xi Jinping. China, of course, is becoming an ever more significant trading partner and investor, and we can expect plenty of talk about our bright and mutually enriching future relationships. But will the past cast something of a shadow over this script? There's one place in particular in Beijing which symbolizes a deep, unhealed historical wound in relations between our two countries. Chris Bowlby's just been there.
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There are piles of rubble, fragments of walls and archways hinting at past splendors, pathways leading between open spaces, trees and lakes. You might think this site of the old Imperial Summer palace in Beijing, sounds like a tranquil ancient monument, a place for connoisseurs of Chinese history to while away an hour or two contemplating the passage of time. But where I was, next to the ruins of an ornate fountain, was anything but tranquil. It was swarming with crowds of schoolchildren in uniform, and busloads of Chinese adults hustled along by guides, many from the Culture Ministry, armed with megaphones, amplifying their shrill commentary. They were telling the story of how this place, known by the Chinese as Yuanming Yuan, or Garden of Perfect Brightness, was once a spectacular collection of buildings and art. And then, in 1860, a joint British and French force arrived at the end of the Opium wars and burnt it to the ground. These scorched ruins have been described as China's ground zero. They're a potent symbol in the Chinese leadership's patriotic education program, introduced after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The Communists decided they needed a new justification for their rule, so they presented themselves as the party of a strong China, a China that would never again suffer humiliation at the hands of the West. But this is not just about burnt buildings. It's also about many thousands of lost works of art. I was given a personal historical lecture by one stocky, defiant visitor dressed in a simple Mao suit adorned with army medals dating from the 1950s Korean War not only did British soldiers destroy this place, he told me, they also took away our most beautiful art. Before the Summer Palace's destruction, it was extensively looted by British and French troops helping themselves to the extraordinary collection of porcelain, paintings, clothing and ancient manuscripts which Chinese emperors had amassed. And what gives added piquancy to this story is that the British commander when this happened was the 8th Earl of Elgin, the son of the Lord Elgin, famed for his association with the sculptures removed from Greece. If you read this Lord Elgin's account of events, you find stern explanations of the need to teach the Chinese emperor a lesson, especially after British individuals who'd gone to negotiate a ceasefire were tortured and murdered. It's also clear that looting was a kind of army tradition, meant to supplement meagre military pay and compensate families of soldiers who'd been killed. At the same time, he expresses regret and guilt at the scale of destruction and the plunder of so much beauty. Today's China would like much more open acknowledgment of that guilt. Looted art is a particularly potent symbol of national grievance. Imperial collections might once have been despised by Communists. Much art was destroyed by Red Guards during the Cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s. But today's government in Beijing has been building lots of new museums to encourage its idea of patriotism and wants to fill them with Chinese cultural treasures. Retrieving some of the Summer palace loot would help. The first task is to find out where it all ended up. Outside the main library in Beijing, I met Liu Yang, a restless researcher who spent 15 years tracking things down. He flipped open his laptop to show me hundreds of images of items from the Summer palace, now in British and French homes and museums, or surfacing in Western auction catalogues where they sell for huge amounts. He told me he gives talks to Chinese adults and school children, where he shows them pictures, too, of a Pekinese dog, the first of its breed to reach Britain. It was taken by a soldier from the Summer palace, presented to Queen Victoria and named, somewhat insensitively, Lootie. Its portrait still hangs in the royal art collection. Most Chinese I saw at the Summer palace site were fixated on another kind of animal image carved heads of zodiac animals looted in 1860. Lots of eager visitors were photographing replicas of the heads in a souvenir shop. Unfortunately, the shop didn't have one souvenir I'd heard about, a National Humiliation cigarette lighter designed to remind Chinese smokers of Western cultural crimes. But the site as a whole, buzzing with activity and indignation, suggests this moment in history and the awkward legacy it's left behind remains firmly at the forefront of modern Chinese minds.
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Chris Bowlby there, and he's made a documentary about the destruction of the summer palace. You can hear it on Radio 3 tomorrow evening at 6. 45. Next to one of the most isolated nations on earth. Bhutan, a country of some three quarters of a million people, is sometimes described as the last surviving refuge of traditional Himalayan Buddhist culture, and its government is keen to preserve it. It has worked hard to keep foreign influences at bay in the past. Surrounded as it is by some of the biggest mountains of the world. This has been a relatively easy task. But today, with the Internet and television providing windows onto the rest of the world, and with tourist numbers on the rise as well, there are mutterings that a unique heritage is under threat. Mark Rickards has been to investigate.
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Any visit to Bhutan has to begin with a rather unnerving aerobatic manoeuvre. Approaching the country's only international airport at Paro, the pilot announces that there will be what he describes as a rather steep turn, assuring us that this is perfectly normal. What soon becomes apparent is that there's no straight line up for the Runway due to a mountain in the way. Maybe not surprising, in a place often described as a hidden Himalayan kingdom, it's an extraordinary arrival in an extraordinary country. Bhutan has for years been protected not only by its isolated location, but by its policy of keeping strict control over access to the outside world. But now things are changing. The Internet has brought Facebook and Twitter, and the Bhutanese are proving keen to get connected. The outside world at last has a way of infiltrating the kingdom of the Thunder Dragon. This leaves their precious cultural life at risk. Bhutan is famous for colorful and noisy festivals, a part of its rich Buddhist history, with ceremonial chanting, dancing and celebrations which often last for days. I'm on my way to witness the festival called Jura Yakcho, an annual event which takes place in the remote Jura Valley, a day's drive from the capital, Thimphu, I need to time my journey carefully. As part of the modernization of the country includes the completion of a new road going east to west across Bhutan. And it's closed twice a day to allow the blasting to go ahead. Queues build up as people wait patiently amongst the diggers and piles of gravel, listening to the distant thumps as the hillside is dynamited. After getting past these roadblocks and crossing some of the high passes, there's a surprise. A modern town, complete with row upon row. Of suburban looking flats. I'm told that a whole village is being moved and rehoused in these rather unprepossessing surroundings. It's not what I expected. Progress in the form of a grid of tower blocks in an otherwise pristine Himalayan landscape. The country continues to defy any stereotypes I might have been harbouring. After a long descent into the Jura Valley, I find my hotel has been built on a Swiss model, complete with a wood burning stove in each cosy cottage built around a little garden. It's a gentle bucolic scene and Jonas speaks perfect English. I don't feel as if I'm in a place far from home and I'm beginning to wonder if Bhutanese cultural life has already quietly evaporated. As night falls, I'm taken up to the monastery at the heart of the village. The wind has picked up and the prayer flags are flapping madly in the chill mountain air. In the courtyard, a group of dancers begin to sway and turn to a hypnotic rhythm. I am led into a small straw filled barn where there's a distinct smell not unlike methylated spirits. This, I'm told, is the local pub. Maybe I am a little further from home than I thought. I take an obligatory gulp of the spirit, apparently distilled on the premises, and furtively dispose the rest behind my back. Others around me are getting merrily plastered on this lethal hooch, but I head to the main event, the fire dance, hoping that the inflammatory mixture of straw and raw alcohol plays no part in the performance to come. In a darkened hall draped with rich red curtains and elaborate painted murals, the audience waits silently for the ceremony to begin. There are a handful of Western tourists, but very few people outside of Bhutan have ever witnessed what is about to take place. The air is thick with incense. In the flickering firelight, masked figures begin to move in the shadows and there is a low drone from great long Tibetan style horns. A sudden clash of cymbals brings the dancers to life and they thread amongst us in strange, angry devil masks, waving flaming torches, stamping and staring. We are all suddenly in the center of a drama. It's a bit like finding yourself on the set of Doctor who, only this is for real. When the fires eventually die down and the dancers retreat, the audience seems transfixed. No one is disappointed, since the villagers of Jura are caring for their culture and recognize its value. Their festival can compete with the Internet and television, at least for now. And the young Bhutanese I met saw no conflict between the two. In fact, what better way to share photos of the Fire festival than on social media. Since returning to the uk, I have received a steady stream of photographs as well as polite messages that often say no more than hello, sir. The Bhutanese are reaching out beyond their borders, giving us a rare glimpse into their long hidden world.
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And that was Mark Rickards. A year long national and international celebration of the life and works of The Irish poet W.B. yeats has just got underway. The government in Dublin has set aside half a million euros to fund projects celebrating the 150th anniversary of the poet's birth, which comes round in June. Hugh Scofield in France, meanwhile, has unearthed a story about the Irish nationalist heroine Maud Gone, who was a muse of the great Irish poet back in the 1890s. She lived in Paris and had a baby and then the baby died. But let's have Hugh take up the tale.
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When I was growing up in Dublin in the 1970s, the memory of Maud Gone was still very present. She'd been dead less than 20 years. The name brought back the heady romantic days of pre1916 Ireland and the burgeoning movement for cultural and political freedom. Maud Gonne wasn't even Irish. She was the daughter of an English soldier. But having lived in Ireland as a youngster, she adopted the cause with an all consuming passion. Maud Gone was also Yeats's inspiration, obsession and muse. They never married, they may never have had a physical relationship, but they were sole brother and sister. And many of Yeats poems about women tread softly because you tread on my dreams are about the actress, activist and indeed fellow spiritualist who he first met in 1889. Now the story I have to tell is set in Paris or near Paris, which is where Maud Gonne was living at this time. She'd taken as a lover an older man, a right wing French politician called Lucien Millevois. She was an Irish nationalist. He was a French nationalist obsessed with recovering Alsace and Lorraine from the Germans. They were both, incidentally, also nastily anti Semitic and later sided against the Jewish officer Dreyfus in the famous spying affair. Anyway, in 1890, Maud Gann had with Lucien Milvois a baby boy, George. She didn't tell Yates this fact and he, poor SAP, persisted in thinking that the baby was adopted. But then in 1891, the baby boy died. Maud had him interred in a mausoleum which he had specially built in the cemetery at a place called Samoa sur Seine. It's a little riverside town about 30 miles south of Paris. And like other well off Parisians, Maud rented a house there. I came across George Gon's story recently when I was reading Yeats biography by the Irish historian Roy Foster. But I was intrigued by what followed. According to Foster, two years after the baby's death, Gonne did something most extraordinary. She was, as I have said, a spiritualist. More accurately we should probably say a theosophist. She believed there were mysterious forces to be discovered governing the universe and. And among these forces was the eternal human soul. Grief stricken, Ghosn asked a theosophist friend if it was true that a baby's soul could be reincarnated. On being told yes, it was, she then contacted Lucien Milvoir, from whom she had now separated, and they made a rendezvous at the mausoleum at San Marcio Sen. And there in the crypt, next to George's little coffin, the two of them had sex. The express aim to create a new body for the dead baby's spirit. Well, this had to be investigated. I contacted some Yeats scholars and they corroborated the story. Yeats later wrote that Gane had told him that she made love with Milovois next to the coffin. And why would she make it up? Plus there's the incontrovertible fact that nine months later, in September 1894, Maud did indeed have a baby. Her daughter Iseult, later a tragic figure in her own right. I called the mairie, the town hall at Samoa sur Seine, to ask if they were aware of this odd tale concerning their cemetery, whose other famous occupant by the way, is the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. By the purest fluke I got put straight through to a local councillor, Josette Dufour, who knew exactly what I was talking about. The ne' e voir, she said, come and see. And so on a winter's day, there we were fumbling with a key at the Gon mausoleum, A Grecian style edifice in white stone taking up the space of a large garden shed. Inside there are two metal panels on the ground, padlocked lift them. And there on a trestle table in a corner of the cavern beneath, extraordinary to behold, the small wooden coffin of baby George exactly as it must have been left in 1891. And here the metal ladder down which Maud gone and her mustachioed and possibly slightly bewildered older lover, Lucien Milvoir climbed. And somewhere in that small space, next to the corpse of her one year old toddler son, the couple contrived to couple.
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And that was Hugh Scofield on Maud Gone, whose life reads like a novel. More stories of all sorts. In our editions on Thursday and Saturday of next week. Do join us. Goodbye.