← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Troubles in Paradise
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Kate Adie introduces Correspondents' stories from around the world. Today Ukrainian is...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC.
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This is from our own correspondent.
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You can hear the version of the
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programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline.
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But here's the latest edition broadcast on
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BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, can industrious South Korea, dominated by mighty corporations, become a more relaxed place? We visit a mega brothel in Germany where the pimps have been pushed aside. But has the business really changed? We take a journey down the Nile in Egypt, remarkably free of tourists, which is both good and bad news. And our correspondent discovers why the city she lives in is at the bottom of the happy pile. There are just three days to go until the pro Moscow authorities hold a referendum in Crimea, asking people whether they want to join Russia or remain within Ukraine. Though with greater autonomy for the region, Western governments and the interim government in Kiev have described the referendum as illegal. Meanwhile, Ukrainian soldiers and sailors remain blockaded in their garrisons by pro Russian armed forces and civilians. The Ukrainian journalist Andriy Kulikov has been to the Trouble peninsula and gives us his personal view on events there.
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Why am I not being drafted into the Ukrainian army nowadays? Well, there are two possible explanations. First, I know I am past draft age and hundreds of thousands of others will have to go into active military service before the nation needs me. Second, I guess is that the army does not need my specialization as a military translator. I was trained to translate English. It looks like all the effort that Major Afanasyev, our teacher of military translation put put into me and my fellow students back in our university years was in vain. Nowadays it turns out that most of us in Ukraine need no special preparation to speak to the probable enemy. That's because the most probable enemy now seems to speak Russian, a language well understood by the majority of Ukrainian citizens. It's my native language. In fact, I have always fiercely argued with those who referred to my mother tongue as the language of military occupation. Will I have to accept their point now? Another reason they don't need my linguistic skills is that the probable enemy keeps silent. In the Crimean village of Perevalne, I approached two soldiers with machine guns, in full body armor but without insignia, and asked them who they were and what they were doing here. They didn't answer. They just took several steps away from me, then stopped and stared at me, their hands on their weapons. I asked both in Russian and Ukrainian. No answer. The same thing had happened just a minute before with another four armed men by the gate that leads to the Ukrainian coast guards. Brigade stationed not far from Simferopol, the capital of Crimea. Russia says the thousands of troops which have appeared in Crimea are not the Russian army, but local self Defense forces. Moscow claims you can easily buy military uniform and other stuff at a shop just around the corner. Well, I can't buy any of it. I can't find any rifles or helmets on sale. Maybe because the stock was all sold to the alleged local activists who are laying siege to Ukrainian garrisons across the Crimea. But where have they bought their armored personnel carriers, trucks and helicopters from a special motor dealership? When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Elementary, my dear Watson. These silent, mysterious soldiers watched me talk to wives of Ukrainian officers behind the gate. These women have stood here for days on end in the hope that the garrison isn't stormed and shooting does not break out. They hope that those armed men, whoever they are, won't dare attack women as they seek to crush the Ukrainians resistance. The women are going to stay here until the standoff in Perevalne ends, hopefully without bloodshed. The women plead with me to tell my fellow journalists not to take photos of their children when they take the kids to see their fathers behind the fence. The children don't understand why their dads can't come home to see them. They don't yet appreciate what an armed forces oath means for their fathers. Maybe the fathers didn't know themselves until this silent war broke out. The Russian army has never been regarded as a probable enemy in Ukrainian military doctrine. For many Ukrainians, it is still next to impossible to believe that Russian troops can be the enemy at the gate. However, eliminate the impossible and still the truth defies belief. There are various war memorials scattered across the Crimean soil, most notably from the Crimean war of the 1850s and from the Second World War. Among the latter, there are a lot of monuments to the unknown soldier. It seems that the term the unknown soldier is acquiring a new meaning in Crimea these days, as Russia does not admit it is Russian soldiers whose numbers are growing here day by day and who will be here during the referendum. As for me, I don't want any new monuments to unknown soldiers in Crimea or anywhere in Ukraine. Maybe this war will remain pretty silent, not only because strange soldiers would not speak, but also because there are no more shots and explosions. Maybe, just maybe, we need a lot of luck and patience.
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Andriy Kulikov now back in Kiev. By any measure, South Korea's economy has been a startling success story in recent decades. Emerging from a devastating war in the 1950s, the country decided to embark on a path of intense industrialisation. Now Korean manufacturing Manu Manu. Manufacturing brands can be found throughout our homes. But is it time for change? That's what Peter Day wondered in a recent visit to Seoul.
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On a Sunday morning, the superb National Museum of Korea is buzzing with activity. Dozens of groups of primary and secondary school children rapt with attention as teachers introduce them to the wondrous relics of their country's past. On show on three vast floors are remnants of a succession of Korean civilizations dating back at least 2000. The National Museum is simply one of the best in the world. When I first visited Korea in the early 1990s, it was a very different place with then seemingly extravagant aspirations. I went then to see the sprawling Samsung Electronics factory in the old city of Suwon. Just like their world famous Japanese rivals, Samsung had a showcase display about the House of the Future, in which elaborate Samsung gadgets played a major part. It was impressive, but slightly unlikely. Surely what the upstart South Korean companies were trying to do was to make their names in the global marketplace with cheap imitations of the wizard electronics made famous by Japan. And my doubts about Korean aspirations were immediately reinforced by a visit to Samsung's TV set production line. Just as in Japan, a big board displayed the daily morning's performance figures. A grim 15% of the TV sets they were making that day were being rejected by the quality inspectors to be sent back for fixing. A far cry, I thought then, from the absolute total quality manufacturing achieved on production lines in Japan. But oh, how it changed in the past 20 years. Some of the best known Japanese companies are now out of the TV business altogether. And Samsung has become simply the largest electronics company in in the world. Something has happened. When the Korean war ended in 1953, the country was in abject poverty. Recovery became a national movement backed by close government direction. Privileged family businesses rapidly became giant conglomerate engines of growth. Harnessing the huge determination of a workaholic nation, these family firms, run by dominant patriarchs, became mighty corporations. The Koreans call them chaebols, which means wealthy clans. And some are now international names. Samsung and LG and Hyundai. There are lesser known giants in steel and shipbuilding and construction. Though many have been hard hit by economic crisis abroad and a series of damaging corruption charges at home, they are a huge part of the way Korea works and they're still the place where many of the best and the brightest young graduates want to work. But now that it's risen to number 13 in the world economic league table Is this the way Korea itself wants to go on working? Amid the thrusting new cityscapes, the high speed trains and the fastest, most wired up society on earth, there are distinct signs of strain. South Koreans work more hours than anyone else among the richest nations. Some years the country has the highest suicide rate in the world. It also has an aging, shrinking population. Korean households are hugely in debt. They struggle to pay back big home loans. Many face huge outlays on private tuition. Parents want their children to get into the best universities and qualify for an esteemed career in the professions or working for one of those huge chaebols. Many school students study well into the night every night and troop off to places such as the National Museum on Sunday mornings. Korea's recovery rush was started by President Park Chung hye in the 1960s. Fifty years later, his daughter Park Geun Hye has embarked on a new direction. Her government is talking loudly about a so called creative economy, a big contrast to the manufacturing expertise of the huge conglomerates which have dominated the economy for so long. And what the Korean government wants it often seems to get. The recovery economy has worked wonders for South Korea for the past 60 years. But turning into a more relaxed, more creative, more normal society is a difficult thing to do. To the east, an aging Japan, much imitated by Korea, has been struggling with this normalizing process for more than 20 years. And it hurts. To the north, normalization is what aging China still has to do. Those children immersing themselves in careers past on Sunday morning at the National Museum may still have a lot to learn about the country's Future.
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Peter Day MPs this week call for changes in prostitution laws in this country. The all party group on prostitution wants a zero tolerance on curb crawling and tougher punishments for those who buy sex. And for pimps in Britain at the moment, it's the sex workers themselves who tend to be fined. In an attempt to make it safer for women, legislators in Germany legalised prostitution over a decade ago. But Damian McGuinness questions if much has really changed.
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Just off the motorway, in a grey industrial estate near Stuttgart Airport, you can find paradise. At least that's what a huge neon sign above a multi storey building claims. The paradise on offer here is clearly not of the religious variety. This is actually one of Germany's many mega brothels where up to 80 women sell sex. Inside, men sip champagne on red velvet sofas hand in hand with tall beauties. The men in slippers and worn looking towelling bathrobes. The women towering above them, seemingly confident and jaunty wearing only high heels and makeup. In fact, strictly speaking, this isn't a brothel in the traditional sense of the word at all. The female prostitutes aren't employed here. They are tax paying freelancers with pensions and health insurance. Like their male clients, they pay an entry fee at the door. They can then use all the facilities from the dimly lit bedrooms with rolls of paper towels strategically placed on the bedside tables, to the dungeon with slings, chains and harnesses for customers with more specialised tastes. The women keep their earnings typically around $70 for a half hour session. But some pay to live here for weeks at a time before going back to a hometown elsewhere in Germany to parents who think their daughters are students. We have other women who have to look after kids or elderly parents and they can't do that on a low paid 9 to 5 job. Explain the rather incongruously named Heidi, herself a former prostitute and now the club's madam. The women here are, like many sex workers I've met in Germany, adamant that their job is just like any other. I remember meeting a dominatrix in Berlin who proudly showed me her workplace from the outside, an average apartment block. I regularly cycle past inside man size cages, chains on the walls and an impressive selection of whips. I wondered if the neighbours minded and hoped the walls were thick. Nearby, in eastern Berlin's swanky gallery district, there's a street where the prostitutes proudly look like Japanese manga cartoon characters. Leather thigh boots, waist length, pink or blue ponytails, tightly corseted waists, some freakishly wasp thin with with their lower ribs surgically removed. You can see them walking to work in the evening, looking surly, confident and tough, only switching on an alluring smile when their shift starts and they've reached the right street corner. But a 20 minute drive west. And there are dingier streets where the ladies are older and plumper, ribs firmly intact but resigned looking. When I was a student in the 1990s in the southern German town of Konstanz, I lived in a tall, narrow, medieval half timbered house. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, but had actually been a 15th century brothel. The staircase ran through the middle of the house so that prostitutes in their bedrooms could advertise their charms to clients going up and down. Sex has always been sold in Germany, but not always socially accepted. Twelve years ago a new left wing government promised a more open minded approach and legalised prostitution. If a woman wants to sell sex, she should be able to legally and safely, was the argument. Get rid of the danger, the stigma and the pimps. But now many who supported that left wing feminist argument have changed their minds. The conditions for the women, some say, appear to have got much worse, not better. It's thought 400,000 prostitutes now work in Germany, with increasing numbers of women flooding in from poorer Eastern Europe. Prostitutes here say the new arrivals are driving down the prices for everyone because they are prepared to sell sex for less money or even worse, are being forced to. The sex trade has become so big and hard to police that it's feared traffickers who force women to sell sex are harder than ever to find. Mega brothels with their security guards may be safer places to work than on the streets and. But it's still men running the show, only they're slick businessmen now, rather than pimps. Back at the Paradise Club, the owner suddenly appears beside us. This is clearly a profitable business. His permatanned and ageless, if somewhat immobile face exudes wealth and power. My daughter is at university in England, he tells me, smiling as much as his face will allow. What he doesn't tell me is how keen he'd be on his daughter offering paradise to 10 different Mennonites.
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Damian McGuinness it was all supposed to be so much better for Egypt. Three years ago, when the Arab Spring swept through the country, there was hope of greater political freedom and especially of more jobs. But the turmoil the country has suffered since has had a devastating impact on the economy. No more so than in tourism. Not many, it would seem, wish to visit such a volatile country, though that didn't deter Robin Denslow.
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Mohammed Rahim looked out across the banks of the Nile and said that his hometown, to which we were heading, had now become a ghost town. We just set out on one of the finest and until now, most popular river journeys in the world. From Aswan in the far south of Egypt, down to the very ancient town of Luxor, surely the most spectacular archaeological site on the planet. I was here for a birthday party. A friend had hired a dihabiyya, a traditional Egyptian sailing boat, which was actually pulled along by a tug for most of the time. For a week long celebration, Mohammed was on board as an expert Egyptologist, showing us around the monuments of ancient Egypt. This is a strange time to visit Egypt, simply because there are so few visitors. The upheavals since the fall of Hosni Mubarak have frightened off tourists. According to the tourism minister, last year was the worst in modern history, with 5 million fewer visitors than in 2010. And this year might be no better. On February 18, a tourist bus was attacked in Sinai in the northeast of the country and three South Koreans and an Egyptian were killed. The Islamist militant group Ansar Bayt al Maqdees then warned all tourists to leave Egypt or face attack, which meant, from a purely selfish point of view, that this was a great time to sail down the Nile. There were no foreigners and often just a handful of Egyptian tourists at spectacular sites like the Philae Temple or the Kom Ombo Temple, while one leading hotel offered luxury suites at a third of the price of a mediocre British bed and breakfast. Normally the Nile is busy with giant tourist ships, some of them looking like four storey floating blocks of flats, ferrying visitors between the sites. But now the river was largely deserted, with some 250 of those boats in mothballs. They were moored along the river bank, sometimes eight deep. The far smaller boat on which I was travelling hadn't been used for three months and. And when I left, the captain said he had no further bookings, which is terrible news for Mohammed. He's an expert who can read hieroglyphics like a newspaper and is used to showing Hollywood celebrities around the ancient temples. But I don't work for the public sector, so I don't have a regular salary, he said. If I'm not working, I'm just sitting at home with my family. My wife's also an Egyptologist. Some of my colleagues have had to sell their belongings or their cars to survive. They've had to move their children out of private schools. I'm lucky. I haven't had to sell anything yet. But if there's another bad season, I'll have to, and it will be terrible to move my children. In luxor, he said, 70% of the population depended on the tourist trade and they were all suffering. He put the blame firmly on the Muslim Brotherhood, now officially declared to be a terrorist organization, and the ousted president, Mohammed Morsi, who is now on trial. I'm a Muslim, he said, but these people just want to destroy Egypt. But hadn't Morsi been democratically elected? The election, he said, had not been fair for the traders of Luxor and for many Egyptians. The one hope now is the army chief, Field Marshal Sisi, who they expect to stand in and then win the presidential elections scheduled for April. Across the river from Luxor in the Valley of the Kings, the souvenir sellers had already decorated their stalls with pictures of Ceci. He's like a father to me, said one. He'll come down hard on the terrorists and then things will get better. Not Everyone was optimistic. One taxi driver turned out to be a soldier, a commando on leave from the Sinai. He didn't think that the violence in Egypt was going to end and that visitors would continue to stay away. He is married to a Scottish girl, and once he leaves the army, he plans to move to Scotland. It's finished here, he said. Egypt desperately needs tourists, and there are hopes that they can be wooed back to the south. Direct flights have resumed between London and Luxor, and there's now a new direct flight from Paris as well. But visitors will only return if there is continued peace and security. There are still bitter memories of the 1997 massacre, when an Islamist group killed 62 people, both tourists and guides, at the Deir el Bahari temple near the Valley of the Kings. When we visited, Mohammed pointed out the army lookout posts on the hills above. For him and the hoteliers and traders of Luxor, the next few months will be crucial.
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Robin Denslow In Egypt, where they're hoping for calmer waters every year, tables are drawn up about which is the best city to live in, which the most romantic or the most expensive, or a dozen other categories. Clearly, any of these can be open to question. Still, despite their shortfalls, we do seem to enjoy having some guidance to follow or even gloat over. For Charlotte Ashton moving to Singapore, the latest survey results weren't very comforting.
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It was Christmas, but as my husband and I waited for our luggage in the shiny arrivals hall of Changi airport, the Internet delivered tidings of no joy. Check this out, posted one friend on my Facebook wall with a link to a survey of 148 countries in which Singaporeans were revealed to be the least positive people on earth, at the bottom of the happy pile, along with Iraqis, Armenians and Serbians. Good luck in Misery City, he wrote. Over the next few months, a happiness battle kicked off around us. Singapore's politicians reinforced their commitment to well being, and StarHub, a mobile network provider, launched an advertising campaign called Happiness Everywhere, full of smiling Singaporeans dancing to plinky plonky guitar music. On the other side, there emerged, mostly on the Internet, an army of discontented souls who applauded the survey for validating their sense that life just seems to be getting harder and more expensive as Singapore gets richer. I chose to ignore the public hyperbole and concentrate on what I encountered personally. And sure enough, we found plenty of happiness in the free public barbecue pits of Singapore's beautifully kept parks, for example, always full of jolly families and groups of friends enjoying an evening in the tropical heat over a cool box of beer and in the broad, toothless grin of the septuagenarian vendor at our local food court who served me my daily dose of delicious fresh pineapple juice, and at dinners with our Singaporean friends who didn't seem to moan any more than the rest of us. Sure, they are battling soaring property prices and the tedium of the corporate ladder, but coming from London, that was hardly unfamiliar. We got on with life on the immaculate island where social housing estates look like spotless toy towns, crime is pretty much nonsense, and you can get a delicious bowl of noodles for £2. If we were living in the misery capital of the world, it certainly wasn't affecting our own sense of happiness. Until I got pregnant. 10 weeks of morning sickness ensued, turning my daily commute into a 45 minute gauntlet. One morning the nausea finally got the better of me just as I'd stepped onto a packed train. Worried I was going to faint, I crouched to the floor, holding my head in my hands. And so I remained completely ignored for the full 15 minutes it took to reach my station. Nobody offered me a seat or asked me if I was okay. For the first time, Singapore had made me feel unhappy. I'd been vulnerable, and Singaporeans, I felt, had let me down. As I sat recovering on the platform, I wondered if this was part of the story behind those Gallup Poll results. By this time, a follow up to the original survey had been published, and according to the figures, Singapore had cheered up quite a lot. But all I could see was a massive compassion deficit. Or were my fellow passengers that morning just unusually uncaring? Oh no, I'm not surprised at all, said a Singaporean friend later that day. My sister's seven months pregnant and she fell down a packed escalator the other day, had to crawl to the nearest railing to heave herself up. Nobody helped. Another Singaporean friend was equally unsurprised. I slipped down a drain last year and cut my leg, she said. It was bleeding badly. But nobody stopped to help. Perhaps they were all in a rush. Our friend Marcus offered deeper analysis over brunch in a trendy cafe. That's not his real name, by the way. In this authoritarian democracy, the majority of people are very reluctant to go on the record with anything remotely negative about Singapore. And negative Marcus is We're programmed to think only about ourselves, he exclaimed. The only thing that matters is money. Helping people isn't important. Marcus is Chinese Singaporean but was educated in Canada. After five years back home, he's desperate to leave again because he says Singapore makes him unhappy too. The problem here is that we measure everything in dollar bills. Personal identity, self respect, happiness, your sen sense of worth. It's all linked to how much money you have. But only the top few percent earn serious cash, so everyone else feels worthless and apathetic. We went on to discuss the numerous theories about whether it's materialism making Singaporeans unhappy or uncaring, or the fiercely competitive education system, or Confucianism, or the government's historic emphasis on economic growth above all else. Happily, my morning sickness has passed, but despite becoming visibly pregnant, it was still rare for anyone to offer me a seat on the packed commuter train without my having to ask first. I don't know if I'd have had a better time in London, but in the Singaporean rat race, you're certainly on your own. An unhappy conclusion, I'm afraid.
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From Misery City Charlotte Ashton trying to smile through it all. That's it for this edition. I'll be back with more happy and not so happy tales from our own correspondence on Saturday morning. Good bye.