meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
From Our Own Correspondent

We Are All Emigrants Now

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.41.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Insight and colour from around the globe. In this edition: Syrian tears for the waste and suffering of a lost generation; the migrants crossing into Europe via the border between Serbia and Hungary -- they say it'll take more than the steel fence, currently being constructed, to stop them. It's Happy Birthday Singapore! The island state's fifty years old and big business hasn't been slow to join the party. We meet a count in Transylvania who dreams that this part of Romania can one day be as famous for its meadows and its hospitality as it is for Count Dracula. And we're out with a postman in the Malian capital, Bamako, who has a very special delivery.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Thank you for downloading the latest edition of BBC radios from our own correspondent,

0:05.0

the best in news and current affairs storytelling.

0:08.2

It's introduced by Kate Adi.

0:10.3

Hello, today a two bedroom flat for a Syrian in Germany, an apple for an Eritrean in Hungary.

0:17.0

Big business comes to the party as Singapore celebrates its 50th birthday.

0:23.0

Dracula is well off the agenda as we drink Plumb Brandy with a Count in Transylvania.

0:29.0

And they may be just letters and numbers to you and me,

0:32.0

but to the mailman in Bamako, the post codes, the beginning of the end.

0:37.0

With more tragedy on the Mediterranean this week, it's easy perhaps to lose sight of the fact that it isn't just Greece

0:43.9

and Italy which are in the forefront of the migrant crisis. The number arriving each

0:48.9

day in Hungary is actually higher. There have been 120,000 so far this year, 38,000 in July alone,

0:58.0

that's around 1500 every day. The country's right-wing Fidez government is building a razor wire fence more than a

1:05.9

hundred miles long to stop the migrants crossing from neighbouring Serbia.

1:10.6

Nick Thorpe's there. To live and die amongst foreigners, wrote the British poet and painter John Berger,

1:17.0

may seem less absurd than to live persecuted and tortured by one's fellow countrymen.

1:23.5

But to emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world and so to move into a lost

1:29.5

disoriented one of fragments.

1:32.2

I carry his words close to my heart as I trudged the sandy labyrinth of tracks

1:36.8

which riddle the Hungarian-Serbian border on the trail of yet another group of asylum seekers

1:42.4

from the zones of war and hunger which are but so closely on our own comfortable world.

1:48.0

Or as I troll the kaleidoscope of Facebook images in search of the young men and women from Congo, Syria and Afghanistan

1:55.8

I've met in the border zone in the past weeks on their way to seek safety in Europe.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.