Heathcliff O'Malley - a photojournalist on the roadtag:frontlineclub.com,2008-10-08:/blogs/heathcliff//502009-02-15T09:10:23ZMovable Type 4.23-enAustria's New Righttag:frontlineclub.com,2009:/blogs/heathcliff//50.32322009-02-03T14:44:00Z2009-02-15T09:10:23ZThe following comes from a trip I made in October, 2008.I've just returned from Vienna, Austria to do a story about the resurgence of the far right in the country. As you may have heard, the two parties fronted by...Heathcliff O'Malley
The following comes from a trip I made in October, 2008.
I've just returned from Vienna, Austria to do a story about the resurgence of the far right in the country. As you may have heard, the two parties fronted by Hans Christian Strache and Jorg Haider managed to win 29 percent of the vote in the recent general elections. Unlike the far right of old, the New Right as i like to call them don't goose-step down the Strasse's in brown shirts and red armbands, but prefer to wear button down chambray and chino's. No longer do they meet in beer hall cellars to plot their ascendance but now instead prefer trendy wine bars and youth disco's.
What I found difficult to figure out whilst I was out there on assignment was, why do 30 percent of white Austrians feel that life is so dreadful that they have to vote for the far right ? The streets are squeeky clean and relatively empty even in rush hour , the standard of living appears relatively high, there's a low crime rate and the immigrant population doesn't exactly appear to be taking over.
I live in central London and know what a densely populated multicultural city with a large immigrant population looks like, and Vienna certainly isn't it. So Why, why why ? In this day and age do I find it sickening that anyone could even contemplate voting for the likes of Strache or Haider. "Central Europeans are different" people say, is this true? Do the inhabitants of central Europe have a disposition towards Nazism, are the Germanic tribes inherently racist?
Apart from whinging about the number of Turks in their country, immigrants from the former Yugoslavia also had the finger pointed at them for putting a strain on Austria's resources. So except for the widespread xenophobia towards people originating from countries with an Islamic background that we witnessed, in fact anyone who isn't Austrian, whatever their complexion is to blame for the occasional crisp packet that is seen gently blowing down a Viennese street on a chill Autumn day, noisy neighbours that make you have to close your windows on a summers evening, waiting lists for social housing etc etc.
How dreadful for them! I remember as a child in Notting Hill having to close my bedroom window when the Spanish family down the road had their weekly, and rather nosiy family Sunday lunch in the garden, or when the reggae sound system set up outside our home rehearsed early on a Sunday morning for the Carnival. Did I wait with baited breath until I reached the age of 18 to run down to the nearest polling station and vote for the NF or BNP? No of course not, because in Britain I like to think that we tolerate other cultures and sometimes even embrace them.
What is worrying me though, with the credit crunch becoming more serious as the days go by and it's spread across the globe, and the long term fight against Islamic fundamentalism, could this phenomenon become worse? Could a tide of xenophobia sweep across Europe as it has in the past? Political views tend to polarize to the extremes when times are tough. Even in England perhaps? It's not a rare sight to see headlines in the right wing press in Britain about "floods" of immigrants from Eastern Europe undercutting the workforce and straining our welfare state. Similar sentiments to those expressed by many, but not all, on the streets of Vienna. In fact those same papers wrote similar headlines about Jewish immigrants in the 1930's. Could this happen elsewhere in Europe?
Now you might accuse me of being unfair towards Austrians, in fact 70 percent of the country voted for the more liberal parties, and that is true. We met plenty of nice Austrians who had no problem with living in a tolerant, multi cultural society , our translator and guide, himself a journalist, expressed the more liberal, majority view of the Austrian public. But 29% is still a large chunk of the population and many of them are young voters who care not about Austria's murky past and it's most famous son.
Austrians we spoke to who admitted to voting for Strache's Freedom Party, often started their sentences, with "I'm not a racist but... "a line I've heard many times myself spoken before following up with some racist vitriol. Many spoke of "protest" voting to force the ruling mainstream social democrats and conservatives into rethinking some of it's policies towards immigration, perhaps that's all it is, a protest vote, as happened in France several years back when Le Pen's party shocked the nation with a large share of the vote in the primaries before floundering in the main election. But it's a dangerous gamble nonetheless for Austria, this was a general election and the far right are now a force to be reckoned with in the heart of Europe.]]>
A journey through Putin's Russia part 4tag:frontline.headshift.com,2007:/blogs/heathcliff//50.26812007-12-08T02:14:40Z2008-12-11T19:30:35ZWe arrived in Tyumen early morning after another overnight train ride and were greeted by our next guide, a BP interpreter who on first impressions appears to be a bit of a snob, but we warmed to her slowly, first...Heathcliff O'Malley After checking into the city's main business hotel of the same name, a soulless but efficient Sheraton clone, we explore the town, famed for it's Oil wealth. It's the most modern looking city we've come across so far on our journey, but it feels somewhat empty, perhaps because of the blisteringly cold weather and appears to have about the same charisma as Calgary, another town that has rapidly expanded due to oil.
There are brand spanking new shopping malls and boutiques selling designer kitsch that only new money could possibly find tasteful, and several sushi bars that surround an empty main square where music is piped through loudspeakers to almost no-one at all.
Tuymen-ites appear incredibly proud of their wealth and show it off an attitude very reminiscent of Maggie Thatcher's London in the eighties. In one of the Sushi bars we met a Yulia , a charming woman in her who happily boasted about how she flies abroad on shopping trips spending her husbands money and how they own 4 properties, one of which we later visited.
We also popped by a private English school that had just started it's first term , for the children of resident foreign businessmen, which was temporarily in borrowed space from a local state high school. They only had 7 pupils when we visited, as the other families were keeping their children in Moscow , waiting for the new premises to be finished .
That night Adrian and I scoured around in the snow around the empty city for an Irish bar that took us forty minutes due to wrong directions from the hotel.
The only thing Irish about it appeared to be the awful U2 background music, and alas with no expats and a closed kitchen so we made our way back to the hotel, which this time only took two minutes and instead resorted to dining in the Hotel restaurant ,where naturally we were their only customers.
After another night train, I was getting tired of them by now, we were greeted by two eccentric play-writes in Omsk, our mission here was to find surrounding villages that were now near deserted as disenchanted agricultural workers moved to the cities, Tayana and Oleg did their utmost for the next two days to obstruct us in our quest in the nicest way possible.
With no malice on their part at all, it became obvious that they were in fact devout Russian Orthodox Christians who were under the spell Varvara, an 80 yr old Holy Woman who lived outside town in a monastery she'd had built independently from the church.
So our first day was spent at Chez Varvara's, a collection of Log buildings, Churches and Chapels in a silver birch forest clearing about 70 km's from town.
Varvara appeared after sometime waiting at the gates, dressed in a black habit headscarf and overcoat with the obligatory crucifix around her neck, which Tatyana immediately rushed over to kiss and then gently pressed to her forehead. We of course were also expected to pay homage, so I ventured forth kissed the cross and then bumped it with my forehead with a resounding clang , that probably startled the crows into flying out of the surrounding trees.
After this we were led on a tour of all the chapels and the main church and were expected to cross ourselves in front every religious icon we came across. I of course always got myself mixed up with the whole crossing thing, I'd in fact been thrown out of my local cub scouts as a child when my feigned Catholicism was finally rumbled by my failure to cross myself properly.
We then had a lunch of frozen raw berries, cream, bread, gherkins and chai , whilst Adrian made his interview. Our departure was further delayed by a few words of wisdom from the old lady for each of us and a hard smack on the forehead each as a blessing.
The following day went no better, and this time instead of an empty village we were taken to yet another monastery, until we finally managed to bully Oleg into knocking on a few doors whilst we were there. At one of these doors we met Lyuba a widow pensioner in her seventies who like so many others of her age saw her savings lose all their value in the economic meltdown of the nineties and looked back to the old days of Brezhvnev with rose tinted glasses.
Afterwards we were treated with a VHS cassette documentary of a mass winter baptism in a nearby frozen lake. It was a bizarre evening but one I wouldn't have missed for the world, and although the trip didn't go according to plan we learnt a lot about the importance of faith to many people in Russia today.
At the train station it was an emotional send off on their part, after the hugs and blessings were over we left them standing on the platform at -10 degrees as we once again drifted off into the night this time bound for Novosibirsk.
a few pictures can be seen at the Daily Telegraph. ]]>
A Journey through Putin's Russia Part 3tag:frontline.headshift.com,2007:/blogs/heathcliff//50.26802007-12-07T09:54:57Z2008-12-11T19:33:38ZFor the next stage of our trip we took another train to Yekaterinburg for about 24 hours in second class where we had to share a compartment with an elderly couple Konstantin and Galia on their way to the oil...Heathcliff O'Malley They shared with us their food for journey including a version of the meat pasties we'd been told were a Tatar delicacy in Kazan, we offered our cheese and salami in return which Galia turned her nose up at, but Konstantin an Athletic fifty something semi retired oil engineer who'd only recently taken up smoking, would happily sip our Vodka when he thought his wife wasn't looking.
Yekaterinburg is the bustling capital city of the Urals region and was the site of the murder by Bolshevik revolutionaries of Tsar Nicholas and his family in 1918 and in the 1990's suffered from open Mafia warfare on it's streets, resulting in thousands of deaths, evidence of which can be seen in Shirokorechenskoye cemetery with it's Gangsters row of gaudy marble mausoleums. We were greeted on the train platform by our next translator and driver duo, Sacha ,our translator , attractive and well connected with an easy going personality and Valery, our driver, a bit of a player from Moscow, who liked to drive as fast as possible whenever he could and had a rather comical Hip Hop dialtone on his mobile.
It had begun to get very cold at this point around -7 degrees , at least for an Englishmen anyway, and one of my Canon Cameras, ironically the pro version , had begun to malfunction after short bouts of being outdoors and I had to revert to using one camera for outdoor work, which was frustrating and meant having to change lenses all the time.
First stop was a rehabilitation centre for drug addicts founded by a state Duma offical with alleged dubious mafia connections, Yevgeny Roizman.
Here we were introduced to the enormous Sergei "Boxer" Kolesnichenko, director of the "Clinic of the Yekaterinburg City without Drugs", who's arms were almost as big as my waist. He gave us a tour of the facility, policed by musclemen in their twenties, who mostly claimed to be former "sportsmen", a euphemism for a members of a particular Mafia "Grupperovka" in the nineties called Uralmash , named after the factory suburb of the city it came from.
Inside a caged room up to fifty men were handcuffed to their bunks, a technique used for the first 27 days of their stay, which is often an involuntary one.
In recent years Putin has tried to rehabilitate the Stalin's tainted image which was swept under the carpet by his successor Nikita Krushchev, and now four decades later the tyrant who managed to murder at least 20 million of his own people is now making a comeback and becoming a symbol of the days when Russia was a superpower. Now some of the crimes committed during his time in office are being glossed over once again.
A good case of this revisionism was close by to the next city on our visit, Perm in the Urals.
About an hours drive from the city is the infamous labour camp Perm-36 which was a labour camp for Political prisoners from 1946 until it's closure 1988. It is now a museum and memorial to those that suffered political repression under the Soviet regime. Under new guidelines set down by the Kremlin in an advisory book for teachers not only is Stalin's role as a dictator revised but also that of the Gulags, being painted as an unpleasant necessity for Russia's security and advancement.
We met a teacher with her class from a local a school who were on a tour of the facility who felt that it was important for her students to learn about the horrors of the past and intended to continue bringing children there, she wasn't aware of the new guidelines from Moscow.
I find it hard to believe that someone as evil as Stalin, who killed far more people than even Hitler could manage, could anyway be rehabilitated into society, but apparently he has a 55 percent approval rating from Russians in a recent poll. What can explain such a phenomenon? Have the Russian's suffered so much in history that they can't even differentiate good from evil anymore, or are they simply willing to bury their heads in the sand as long as they have a steady salary and food on the table.
Perhaps this explains Putin's own extraordinary popularity in Russia, when asked in recent polls the incumbent President Is voted by the people as the "Russia's Greatest Leader since the Revolution" and Stalin second. Hopefully I'll build a better understanding of the Russian psyche during this journey.
Next Tyumen and Omsk.]]>
A Journey through Putin's Russia Part 2tag:frontline.headshift.com,2007:/blogs/heathcliff//50.26792007-12-03T19:51:15Z2008-12-11T19:35:57ZOur drive to Samara is helped along grandly by our miserable second Tatar translator Ilnur who drones on continuously about Tatar self determination, the Golden Hordes (heard that before), how immorally behaved his other housemates were when he studied in...Heathcliff O'Malley A less tolerant soul would have probably just opened the passenger side door and given him a gentle nudge, and I might have if my stinking hangover hadn't sapped all my energy.
After a brief stop to talk to an Islamist activist who's suffered repression from the local authorities, including a spell in jail, we stopped for a Big Mac meal in an Industrial eyesore of a town by the name of Naberezhnye Chelny, we finally arrived at the Volga Hotel on the bank of the famous river by the same name, which then winds it's way down to Volgograd (Stalingrad) and finally to the Caspian sea.
The Hotel reception area is exactly what you'd imagine your first contact with a State run hotel to be. A great cavern of a reception hall, designed to make you feel incredibly small, with melancholic staff sitting behind a crumbling desk , and a team of builders attempting to modernise the interior , whilst trying not to damage fading murals painted during the grand days of the old Soviet Republics. A huge Industrial city, with close links to the space programme, it also hosted the second home to Stalin's government during "The Great Patriotic War" (or WWII to you and me, most Russians still believe we didn't join the war until 1944 unless they're from Murmansk).
Adrian finally shuffled him off to his room and left me to finish my lunch watched by the staff and other guests who were whispering in each others ears. The problem travelling in a country that still suffers from acute paranoia is that it also rubs off on oneself. Later we accompanied the Colonel to his daughter's grave on what was a very dark grey day, and one couldn't help feel sorry for this man who suffered the loss of his own child to what appears on the face of it to be gross negligence on behalf of an ailing health system riddled with problems on an enormous scale.
Our other focus in Samara is on the issue of Aids and Drug Addiction, and we meet a number of people and drop in centres and meeting and hearing very touching stories. I myself have never known anyone with HIV, and meeting with people and hearing about their journey into first drug addiction and then living with HIV was an experience I won't forget in a hurry. Samara is a major transport hub, and heroin that comes in from Afghanistan via Tajikistan and the other central Asian republics flows into the city giving many a release from the frustrations of day to day life in a provincial city with limited job prospects.
The problems that young people face in Russia today on a social level seem no different to that of the rest of us in the West but are somewhat amplified by the scale of the population, the poverty, and the indifference of their government . That be said I'd like to see anyone govern a country as vast as Russia and do a perfect job, we in the west certainly aren't perfect, the U.S.A in particular has a pretty poor track record when it comes to public healthcare, but I do feel that a lot more could be done by the Russians.
I wouldn't be sad to leave Samara and the coming of the first winter snows that it bore witness to, the memories of a glorious past evoked by monuments around the city may have faded now to the same colour as the weather, but the city's inhabitants reinforced further in my mind how alike people are across the world, but at the same time how the lottery of your place of birth can alter your life irreversibly for better or worse.
a few of my pictures can be see here. ]]>
A journey Through Putin's Russia Part 1tag:frontline.headshift.com,2007:/blogs/heathcliff//50.26782007-11-28T06:55:09Z2008-12-11T19:39:28ZMy trip to Russia started with a phone call from the picture desk, saying that they might want me to go to Russia in the next few days . It all becomes clear the following morning , if I want...Heathcliff O'Malley This is a dream come true, I've always wanted to travel across Russia, and although my partner is 7 months pregnant, I feel I have no other choice but to take the assignment regardless, and hope it'll be ok with her when I tell her later in the day.
I get a day in Moscow before the journey begins, take a walk around Red Square, which I found really disappointing, through the GUM shopping arcade (beautiful but soulless), and along the Metro which seems to spew out a never ending stream of people.
With the relentless traffic jams overhead on what seem to be the world's widest urban roads and those on the subterranean system below, god knows where the city fits them all. That night Adrian Blomfield, the Telegraph Moscow correspondent and I took a night train to our first destination, Kazan .
Kazan, capital of Tatarstan, is a thriving city undergoing major modernization, and one of the "semi-autonomous" Republics of Putin's Russia. It sits alongside the banks of the Volga, is Oil rich and has the largest population of Muslims outside the Caucasus.
We're taken around on an "official" trip of the city escorted by two government minders who are working for a media relations subsidiary called Tat Media. We're shown Lenin's old University and various other sites like a couple of tourists before our first meeting, breakfast with the World Congress of Tatars, who welcome us with a mountain of sweet and savoury pastries including "Ichpichmak", a kind of Cornish Pasty, and a donut which was called something like "Paris Match".
The head of the congress droned on for what seemed like hours about the history of the Tatar people, their culinary delights, their way of life, which seemed fairly hum drum and normal to be honest, and their relationship with the rest of Russia. I continuously ate pasties to keep myself from nodding off whilst poor Adrian had to take notes. This theme seemed to follow us wherever we went in Kazan, the Tatar officials we met all seemed to be obsessed with their past History. Do they seriously think that Ethnic Russians and the rest of us give a stuff about the " Golden Hordes" of the 15th century anymore, that it really has a bearing on present day governmental policy?
What was interesting was the fact that the share of oil wealth that has to be given to Moscow is at an all time high ,at something like 85 percent, but no matter how galling that may be they all felt that it was better to play the game than push for further independence and end up like Chechnya.
There was one ray of light at the end of the tunnel on our first day in the form of self confessed "football hooligans" Rinat and Murat whom we met in a shitty little bar off Kazan's main pedestrianized street late on our first night.
When we arrived the inhabitants of the bar consisted of a badly dressed male cabaret singer, a Turk, and two fat Babushkas. Halfway through our beers and some awful ravioli type stuff called Manti, Rinat and Murat turned up and instantly homed in on our little table. "We are Russian Football Hooligans Yeahhhhh! " they announced as they collapsed onto the free bench space around our table.
Rinat had the habit of shouting in your ear , and sitting very close, squeezing me up against the wall with hardly enough room to raise my arm to take a drag off my cigarette. "We are Russian football hooligans, we like to fight" ...oh dear, just what we needed. Two hours later, after numerous glasses of Vodka and endless toasts to Anglo-Russian relations, we made our escape from their drunken embrace only to find ourselves being propositioned by the two fat middle aged babushkas who turn out to be off duty policewomen, we take their number and promise to call tomorrow after a good night's sleep when we have more "stamina".
On day two in Kazan, with its omnipresent drizzle, we visited the Kul Sharif mosque for Friday prayers inside the city's Kremlin walls which was rebuilt after the Soviets lost power in the early nineties. Reports have come out recently that the suggest the Muslim population of Russia could overtake that of the Orthodox faith in the next thirty years. Now, whether it is just Daily Mail style racist scare mongering or a real fact I have no idea, but nonetheless having no idea previously that Russia had such a large Muslim population I thought it'd be interesting to meet some and try and illustrate their presence in Russian society in photographs.
We then met a Presidential advisor who has pioneered a movement known as Euro Islam, which appears to be a watered down form of the religion designed to be more palatable to the Kremlin and other Russians. Could this become part of David Cameron's Election manifesto? Seems just the sort of thing that would keep the cohorts of Ultra-Right Norman Tebbit clones behind him happy. We asked one of the senior Mufti's what he thought of Euro Islam and he of course thought the whole idea was ridiculous, but the fact that this version of Islamic ideology is now being firmly promoted inside the walls of Russia's only Islamic University, which lies in Kazan, and in the light of Russia's continuing problems in the Caucasus, it proves that in the future there will undoubtedly be a battle for the hearts and minds of Russia's Muslims.
As we finished our days work and were leaving through the Kremlin gates we passed two young wealthy Russian newlyweds posing for a hired wedding photographer next to a war memorial whilst the rest of the wedding party drunkenly fooled around by the awaiting fleet of shiny new and expensive 4x4's. These were young members of Kazan's elite who were benfitting from it's new wealth but not far down the road, state workers and pensioners were fighting against property developers to hold onto their old wooden homes, and mostly losing.
That evening we met up with some middle class Russians in a Bavarian style pub, complete with traditionally dressed waitresses.
They all worked for a publishing company and were wishing their friend Sergei bon voyage as he was heading off to Germany to manage a sister company there. In between mouthfulls of shelled prawns and German beer we talked politics and joked around with them reminding me of evenings back home in London, and how just like so many of my friends back home they were, giving me hope for the journey ahead.
The women were funny with their opinion of English girls whom they all believed to be fat, dumpy and unsexy, unlike their own, and the sexiest men in the world? "Why Russian men of course" was their reply. We danced half drunkenly to saccharine pop ballads the type that seem so popular in all of Europe these days, and then bid our farewells as we had a long drive ahead of us in the morning to Samara.]]>