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[Eco Porn: Exploring the Limits of Carnal Idealism]

 SPIEGEL ONLINE
06/14/2013 03:22 PM

Eco Porn: Exploring the Limits of Carnal Idealism

By Georg Diez and Wolfgang Höbel

A new documentary explores the lives of "Fuck for Forest," a group of Berlin-based neo-hippies determined to save the rainforests with a for-pay eco-porn site. It paints a sad picture of failed idealism -- but the group isn't taking the criticism lying down.

The activists have been living in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain for the past seven years. First, there were three of them: Tommy from Norway, Leona from Sweden and a German woman named Natty. Later, they were joined by Dan, from Norway, and Kaajal, a woman from India. They collect their clothing and food from dumpsters and think that drugs are a waste of time. "We're looking for people who enjoy sex and nakedness," they say. Their lives are disjointed, their apartment is a mess, their sex is a free-for-all -- and they call it freedom.

These are neo-hippies, and they resemble rare plants. They can't sing, but they do it anyway. They can't juggle numbers, but they are collecting money to help save the rainforests. They claim to have already raised over €400,000 ($530,000). Tommy, Leona and the others run a website for eco-porn where, for a fee, members can watch people having sex in the woods.

The group calls itself "Fuck For Forest" (FFF), and Polish director Michal Marczak naturally chose the same name for his recently released documentary, for which he accompanied them for a couple months with camera in hand. Marczak's film, which is showing at cinemas in Germany, is an usual portrayal of Berlin -- and an absurd and comical masterpiece that goes beyond the fringe existence of a handful of nutcases, and the bleak world of pornography, to paint a portrait of a city whose threadbare, prudish Prussian atmosphere is only made bearable by the desires and confusion of the foreigners who end up here for one reason or another.

The perpetually bare-breasted Leona and the perpetually guitar-plucking Dan and their friends have a mission: They are fucking to save the world. For €12 a month, payable by credit card or bank transfer, users can feel like they are saving the rainforests and buying porn in good conscience. They have access to dozens of videos in which the members of FFF have sex with each other and with others.

The clips show sex between men and women, men and men, women and women, plus a good deal of group and public sex -- everything that millions of people gape at on Internet porn sites every day, much of it for free. But FFF's pay pornography differs from the standard fare on sites like YouPorn thanks to the group's signature shaky camera work, absurdly poor lighting and blatant poetic ambition. For instance, in the video "Jungle," which was shot in Mexico, Dan stands at the edge of a stream and plays a wooden flute while Natty kneels before him and fellates him. "We try our best to put our human errors to the test", says the narrator's voice in a clumsy attempt at rhyming.

Idealism Gone Wild

Polish director Marczak says he was immediately fascinated by the lifestyle of these young people when he first met them in late 2009. The filmmaker is 35 years old, making him just a few years older than Leona, Dan and Tommy. Marczak spoke with sexologists and sociologists and read reams of hippie literature before he started shooting. Then he waited for over a year. It wasn't until the group became larger and more unstable that he began filming. The director says two questions primarily interested him: "What price does one have to pay to live in a world without rules?" And: "Are these people freer than the rest of society?"

The film "Fuck For Forest" shows the eco-porn hippies as they cruise the streets in a bid to convince total strangers to engage in spontaneous sex in front of the camera; how they use small camcorders to zoom in on their unshaven genitalia and bushy pubic hair; how two of them penetrate each other in front of an audience in a Berlin basement while the others make appallingly bad music and spur them on with songs of encouragement. Theatergoers hear Leona and Tommy talk about how the world needs to be healed and how the spirit and soul of humanity must be liberated. And they see how other people in Berlin shake their heads or turn away in disgust when the FFF followers proffer their naked breasts, tattoos, slogans and music. During the "slut walk," which aims to raise awareness of sexual violence, the eco-porn activists are gently escorted away by Berlin police.

Marczak shows all of this with a great sensitivity for the epic dimension of what is transpiring before his eyes. He doesn't judge or interfere with FFF. His comments are of a purely informational nature. The director doesn't expose the stars of his film, he doesn't ridicule them -- but he doesn't take their side, either. He is fascinated by the contradiction that they represent. Marczak calls them "activists opposing reality." Their desire to change the world stems from radical beliefs, he says, but it also reflects the paranoia of people driven by irrational fears and convinced that the end of the world is imminent.

Unwelcome Messages

The film has many sad moments. Right at the beginning, for example, Dan sits on the kitchen counter like a lost bird and talks on the phone with his mother, who doesn't want to see him, although she probably doesn't even know what her son is up to in Berlin. There is also the scene in which Dan is lying in bed with a good-looking German guy, who has an expression on his face as if he were on some mad LSD trip -- and has every good reason to feel confused since he is surrounded by this do-gooder commune of befuddled individuals who can't seem to do anything right, let alone save the world.

But the saddest moment is when the inconsistencies in the sex commune's worldview -- its euphoria and its failures --- become apparent on their trip to South America. Marczak accompanies Dan and his friends to the Amazon basin, where they want to bring the indigenous peoples their money and their message of sex and ideals. But the locals don't want any money or messages from these white freaks, who look like gophers in a compost heap. They're only interested in the chainsaw that another German wants to sell them. You could say that German technology has won out over German idealism.

Somewhere in the border region between Peru and Brazil, Dan and Tommy bitterly complain about the huge TVs that the natives have in their huts. They are so enthralled by the beauty of a young girl that they are half-tempted to take her along with them. They give long-winded lectures to the inhabitants of a jungle village, explaining how they have collected money and why they want to purchase land for the indigenous people.

The reaction is devastating. "I don't need your money," snaps an Indio woman. The hippies are called liars and pedophiles, and for a few moments it looks as if the locals are going to chase them out of the village. Leona, Dan and Tommy briefly fight back their tears and trudge away from the crowd. "If you don't want our money," they say, "then we'll go."

An Examination of Failure

The way Marczak captures all of this -- so intimate, raw and direct -- is emblematic of a documentary filmmaker who masterfully blurs the borders between reality and fiction. The images have the beauty of a bad trip. They are reminiscent of the tenderness and intimacy of the photos that Nan Goldin took in the 1980s and 1990s of dropouts, drug addicts and hipsters on her journey into the heart of darkness, desire and sex. Making the world a better place was totally out at that time, while narcissism was very in.

The images also evoke the lighter photos of Ryan McGinley, with dancing naked young people in the great outdoors, which becomes a vast playground, not for their sexuality, but simply in its own right. It was the youth of the 2000s who danced here, strangely enough, without a care in the world, although the foundation was already cracking and wavering beneath their feet. Yet, in their hedonism, they failed to notice this.

Now, we have these nomads pursuing their yearnings. Once again, there is a new age and a new youth: children who have set out to tackle the greatest challenge of all, saving the world, with neither a movement to back them nor an ideology to help them. They are entirely alone -- and that is part of what constitutes their sadness. It is the truest thing they have to offer.

At the end of the film, when Dan is back home in Norway, he engages in his favorite activity with a couple of Palestinians: He preaches about the blessings of sexuality, saying that we should all be naked, and then we and the world would be better off. Afterwards, one of the Palestinians says very calmly and earnestly that he doesn't understand how, given all of today's problems, Dan can continuously talk about naked bodies.

The film ultimately becomes an examination of failure: the failure of idealism (which doesn't call into question our dreams or the world); the failure of just about every idea of communalism (which doesn't cast doubt on the attempt to choose a path that diverges from the rat race mentality); and the failure of Dan (which is not to be interpreted as a criticism of Dan -- after all, he can do with his life as he pleases).

But Dan isn't happy with the film. Granted, the FFF eco-porn website is promoting Marczak's film because it could boost the popularity of the good cause. But they still have a few ugly scores to settle with the director. Marczak is no idealist, they say, but rather someone who is "quite manipulative" and "a money and fame loving movie maker," as it says on the site.

The activists write that they granted the filmmaker total artistic freedom, but the longer the film project lasted, they insist, the more it became clear to them that "Michal Marczak (…) and FuckForForest had very different motives behind participating in the movie." And then, twice, they use the word "sadly."

Translated from the German by Paul Cohen

Google reveals top-secret plan to beam Internet to developing world from balloons at the edge of space
By Agence France-Presse
Saturday, June 15, 2013 8:56 EDT
Young Asian woman in Yellow Ao Dai with a laptop in the dunes via Shutterstock
Topics: google
 
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Google revealed top-secret plans Saturday to send balloons to the edge of space with the lofty aim of bringing Internet to the two-thirds of the global population currently without web access.

Scientists from the technology giant released up to 30 helium-filled test balloons flying 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) above Christchurch in New Zealand Saturday, carrying antennae linked to ground base stations.

While still in the early stages, Project Loon hopes eventually to launch thousands of balloons to provide Internet to remote parts of the world, allowing the more than four billion people with no access to get online.

It could also be used to help after natural disasters, when existing communication infrastructure is affected.

“Project Loon is an experimental technology for balloon-powered Internet access,” the company said on its latest project from its clandestine Google (x), “where we work on radical, sci-fi-sounding technology solutions to solve really big world problems”.

“Balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, can beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster,” it added.

“It is very early days, but we think a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, might be a way to provide affordable Internet access to rural, remote, and underserved areas down on earth below, or help after disasters, when existing communication infrastructure is affected.”

It works by ground stations connecting to the local Internet infrastructure and beaming signals to the balloons, which are self-powered by solar panels.

The balloons, which once in the stratosphere will be twice as high as commercial airliners and barely visible to the naked eye, are then able to communicate with each other, forming a mesh network in the sky.

Users below have an Internet antennae they attach the side of their house which can send and receive data signals from the balloons passing overhead.

Some 50 people were chosen to take part in the trial and were able to link to the Internet.

The first person to get Google Balloon Internet access was Charles Nimmo, a farmer and entrepreneur in the small town of Leeston who signed up for the experiment.

He told the New Zealand Herald he received Internet access for about 15 minutes before the transmitting balloon he was relying on floated out of range.

“It’s been weird,” he told the newspaper. “But it’s been exciting to be part of something new.”

Google’s ultimate goal is to have a ring of balloons — each the length of a small light aircraft when fully inflated — circling the Earth, ensuring there is no part of the globe that cannot access the web.

But Richard DeVaul, chief technical architect at Google (x), cautioned that “it’s awfully too early to think about covering the entire planet”.

The next step might be to make a ring of balloons around the same latitude as New Zealand, he added, to extend coverage to countries such as Australia, South Africa and Argentina.

“We think hundreds of balloons, maybe 300 or 400, might be necessary to complete that ring,” DeVaul said.

Google did not say how much it was investing in the project.

“The idea may sound a bit crazy – and that’s part of the reason we’re calling it Project Loon – but there’s solid science behind it,” Google said, but added: “This is still highly experimental technology and we have a long way to go.”

Project leader Mike Cassidy told reporters that if successful, the technology might allow countries to leapfrog the expense of installing fibre-optic cable.

“It’s a huge moonshot, a really big goal to go after,” he said.

“The power of the Internet is probably one of the most transformative technologies of our time.”

[British Girls in the Third Reich: 'We Had the Time of Our Lives']

 SPIEGEL ONLINE
06/13/2013 05:56 PM

British Girls in the Third Reich: 'We Had the Time of Our Lives'

In the 1930s, many English families sent their daughters to finishing school in Nazi Germany. Rachel Johnson, sister of the London mayor, interviewed several for her most recent book. She told SPIEGEL ONLINE about Britain's enthusiasm for Hitler's Reich.

In February 1936, Daphne and Betsy, two girls from Oxford, discover the charms of Munich in Nazi Germany. Rachel Johnson, 47, tells the unique story of young British women in Hitler's Third Reich from the perspective of two fictional characters. The British press has praised the book for being both entertaining and historically accurate. Johnson, who is the sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson, only recently discovered that her own family had close ties to Nazi Germany.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Ms. Johnson, how did you find out that some members of your family were in Bavaria in the 1930s?

Johnson: A couple of years ago, the BBC did a program on my brother Boris and our family history. We had always been told that my paternal grandmother was French, but it turned out she was German. Her last name was originally von Pfeffel, and we had descendants from Munich. My maternal grandmother went to Bavaria as a schoolgirl in the 1930s. Later, when I married, I discovered that my mother-in-law had been to Munich at roughly the same time.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: A strange coincidence.

Johnson: The strangest thing of all was that my mother-in-law was sent from England to Munich in April 1938, when Hitler was already preparing to invade Czechoslovakia and Poland. She watched as the Annexation of Austria took place. She even ran out to Hitler's car.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How did you decide to address that past in a novel?

Johnson: I did a radio documentary about the English colony in Germany before the war, but didn't have enough for a non-fiction book. The English girls in Bavaria were fascinating nonetheless, so I decided to write a novel from their perspective. These girls were there just before the outbreak of war, and in some cases they were even close to the government, hanging out with Hitler and Hess. Sending your daughters to finishing school in Germany was the thing to do.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why?

Johnson: Germany was probably our closest European partner at that time. And don't forget that George V. changed the name of his family from "Saxe-Coburg and Gotha" to "Windsor" only in 1917, during the First World War. There were still aristocratic connections and friendships to Germany between the wars. Two newspapers dealt with Anglo-German relations and printed articles about how wonderful Germany was, how amazing the scenery and how great Hitler was. The British liked that Germany was very clean.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Where did the British girls in Germany typically go?

Johnson: Some moved to Berlin or Dresden, but Bavaria with its mountains, castles, museums and beer cellars was more attractive. Oberammergau was well known in England. My maternal grandmother was in Bavaria in the 1930s, she was Jewish. She enjoyed the opera in Munich, skiing in the mountains and later fell in love with a ski instructor from Freiburg, a member of the National Socialist party. His family called her "die Jüdin," the Jewess. Their relationship went disastrously wrong and she came back to England. I met a dozen English women while researching my book who were in Germany between 1935 and 1938, most of them over 90 by the time I interviewed them.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What did they tell you?

Johnson: They said: "We had the best time of our lives." They felt fantastic being in Germany during the Third Reich. "It was the highlight of my life," one told me. To them, it was a rich experience, because England was very stuffy at that time -- lots of unemployment, terrible food and nasty weather. In Bavaria they had the crisp mountain air, a healthy life, the opera, the mountains and handsome Germans in uniform. They couldn't believe their luck! No chaperons, no parents. They had everything, including sex.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What did they think about the Germans?

Johnson: They loved them! I asked the women: "Were you in love at that time?" And they said: "All the time, with everybody." They typically spent six months there, went to parties and were celebrated. Of course, they were not poor. The exchange rate was favorable for them.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Were they aware of the dangers posed by the Nazis?

Johnson: They weren't aware of anything at all. They would see a sign at a swimming pool saying "No Jews," and they'd think: "What is a Jew?" They didn't know any Jews. Also, they were upper-middle class English girls, so almost by definition their fathers were probably quite anti-Semitic. It was an anti-Semitic time, not only in Germany. We had the rise of the far right, the brown shirts, and Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. My mother-in-law's family was typical of aristocratic attitudes of this period. They were very pro-German. My mother-in-law's father was chairman of the Anglo-German Alliance, which was set up to bring the two countries closer together. He would make speeches in the House of Lords saying Hitler is a sound chap.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What did the women say about Hitler in the interviews with you?

Johnson: They're not saying anything good about him, but they won't change their opinion of what they felt before the war. To them, it was the perfect time. Maybe they saw the SS marching on the street, but basically they enjoyed themselves. "Hitler was marvellous, the problem was, he went a little bit too far," one of the women told me. Others said they couldn't believe that these wonderful people they spent such a happy time with could be capable of things like these. You have to remember England in the 1930s suffered from a widespread depression. And then these girls go to Germany, and on the surface everything looks good. They didn't know what the regime was doing, they didn't know about the Nuremburg laws. One of them told me about her music professor, who suddenly disappeared. He was Jewish and had to flee. Nobody became suspicious. It was wilful blindness.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: When did this change?

Johnson: The English turned against Germany in September 1939, after the invasion of Poland. Most Britons had to leave Germany that summer. The only one left in Munich was Unity Mitford, a prominent British Nazi, big Hitler fan and part of his inner circle. In some way, Unity was an extreme example of the English fascination and admiration for Hitler. Her parents went to Germany and tried to get her to return to England, but she refused. They had to leave without her.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Despite its subject, "Winter Games" is not an unhappy or even tragic novel. What has the response been like?

Johnson: It's been a quite difficult book to promote. People still think it's a dangerous topic. I talked about it during the Jewish Book week in London. The audience was almost entirely Jewish. The first question was: "What was the appeal of the Nazis for you, Rachel?"

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You went to Berchtesgaden, where many of the top Nazis had vacation homes, on a research trip. What was your impression?

Johnson: I found it really dark. By accident, I went there on Hitler's birthday. People lit candles on the site of the Berghof, his former residence. That was quite weird. The mountains and the scenery around the Königsee lake are beautiful, but it's very hard to avoid the history -- or, as the tourism people call it, "the challenging past."

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why are the British still so obsessed with Nazis, Hitler and World War II?

Johnson: It's bizarre, isn't it? I think there are more English books published on Nazism than on any other subject. It remains a period of great fascination, a time of great danger, but also of great English bravery. I thought it was important to try to tell this part of our past from the perspective of some young and slightly naive women.

Interview conducted by Christoph Scheuermann

[Vienna embraces the romance and culture of the bicycle]

Vienna embraces the romance and culture of the bicycle

Faced with increasingly congested streets, the Austrian capital is embracing cycling with a rental system, bike zones and special housing

Tracy McVeigh   
The Observer, Sunday 16 June 2013   

On the Praterstern, where cars, buses and trams converge from several busy streets on a road that loops around Vienna's central train station, a new digital counter stands under the eye of the Riesenrad Ferris wheel.

It's about the size of a bus stop advertising hoarding and picks out passing bicycle wheels from a sensor in the pavement.

With a rumpled grey overcoat over his suit and a cycling helmet covering his grey hair, Wolfgang Dvorak excitedly explains that the 2,072 figure on display marks the number of bicycles that have passed this point so far today. "This is great, great! Measuring cyclists is making cycling visible, making people notice," says Dvorak. "It's very important, especially at city crossings like this. Just 14 days ago it was done, and the marking of the cycle lane here and the cycle signing. This is showing people that Vienna is cycling."

Dvorak, the director of last week's Velo-city, an annual conference that has brought more than 1,000 cycling experts and 330 speakers from around the world to Austria's capital, is giving an impromptu tour of the city's new bike-friendly spots, travelling by "Citybike" – a public bike rental system available at some 100 automatic stations around the streets.

There are dozens of new private rental bike companies springing up too, including many specialising in e-bikes, electric-powered cycles for those more cautious about their fitness or ability levels, which can be charged for free at charging points across the capital.

Vienna is in the middle not only of its own "Year of Cycling", but also of an ambitious five-year plan to tempt its citizens out of cars and on to saddles. Faced with ever-growing traffic, as well as unenviable pollution levels and the rising costs of fuel, the city has determined to learn from progressive cycling capitals such as Munich, Malmo, Copenhagen and Amsterdam, which have embraced biking culture.

Vienna is one of 60 cities to have signed up to the Charter of Brussels, which commits them to promoting cycling and setting clear targets in road safety and in achieving a 15% "modal share" – the percentage of trips made by bicycle out of the total number of trips made by city-dwellers. In the UK only Bristol and Edinburgh, which holds its first festival of cycling this weekend, have signed up, but the interest from mainland Europe, including many in the east, is phenomenal.

"We have now in Vienna about 5% to 6% modal share," says Dvorak. "We aim to double that by 2015. We are working on many infrastructure changes to facilitate urban cycling. The situation in general is that we are a growing population and we have no room any more. We need to create space and stop congestion, air pollution. Look at these terrible floods we are seeing at the moment; it is no longer an option to ignore climate change."

The television news in Austria and neighbouring Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Germany is full of images of flooded homes and businesses, and the Danube and Elbe have swollen with record levels of rainfall. Whatever the meteorologists and scientists say is the cause of the unseasonal weather, people here are talking and worrying about climate change.

It is being reflected in the housing being built. Sustainability is a key factor and new developments are being planned around not just energy use but also the times of journeys to work and access to cycle networks.

For people living in cities, space to park a bike securely can be a major obstacle, which is why Vienna has just completed a pilot project called Bike City – a block of 100 flats for middle-income people, with wide communal hallways and lifts with bike racks outside each front door and bike stores on every floor.

Michael Szeiler, an Austrian traffic planning expert, is one of the first residents to have moved in. "The rents here are affordable because the builders have saved money by not having car parking – they have built only 50 spaces, rather than one per flat, as is usual. People still have cars," he says, "but people who live here make 25% of all trips by bicycle, as opposed to 6% of other Viennese."

Szeiler has been working on projects to link residential areas by cycle. At hotspots, traffic lights set with detectors are programmed to tell when cars are coming and to give priority for cyclists, so that they do not have to keep stopping and starting their journeys. The city is investing in infrastructure, the second main shopping street is being made car free, with pedestrian and cycle shared zones, and local politicians point to the fact that at €4.5m (£3.8m) it is only 5% of the annual road budgets.

Maria Vassilakou is the deputy mayor of Vienna with responsibility for urban planning. "Vienna is the fastest-growing city within German-speaking Europe, and if we continue with the policy of one person, one car, then we will become one traffic jam," she says.

"Cycling is about reducing congestion and creating space. We have set ambitious targets, especially in a city where you never know what the weather will be, but it is crucial to our survival to double the number of people cycling by 2015. It is crucial to make a swift change to modern mobility, and all ways lead to the bicycle."

She admits that some moves have been controversial – the city intends ripping out parking spaces to make space for cycle lanes, and they also mix pedestrians and bikes in the same spaces. "This is a hot issue" she says, "but in every city in the world there is conflict between cycling and cars, and you have to work hard at convincing people that their daily lives will improve. We have to be creative. We also have to encourage people to be respectful of each other."

But the arguments in favour of cycling have convinced many younger Austrians, among whom bicycles are becoming trendy, with a burgeoning market for old and especially notable bikes. They are also becoming collectable, and Vienna has an exhibition, Tour du Monde, opening this weekend in the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK).

MAK curator Thomas Geisler has chosen 50 examples from a collection of more than 210 bicycles owned by Michael Embacher, an architect with a pop star's standing in Austria. The selected machines are classics of design and very much of their time, says Geisler. "Each bicycle is a smart product of contemporary times, following all the material developments of the 21st century, the innovation and the techniques. They all have a story to tell. The bicycle is a machine for perception, slowing you down through a city."

Old bikes are turning up in Vienna's growing number of cycling shops, too, says Andrzej Felcak at the Radlager cycling cafe, showing a 20-year-old racer with a €1,200 (£1,020) price tag. Felcak is the chairman of Argus Radlobby – an organisation that campaigns for cycling in Austria, lobbying for better routes and security.

"Its a thing that's really growing, bike collectors. For some it's maybe a nostalgia for the bike they wanted as a kid but they couldn't afford it then, like the old racing bikes or the Chopper.

"For the cycling community in Vienna, it is wonderful to see trends in urban cycling being reflected more widely so that the bike is becoming a mainstream method of transport. We can't solve our problems with cars.

"We want to push now the concept of cargo bikes, as they have in Copenhagen, for shop deliveries and also for making sales in the streets. So people can have stalls and perhaps selling things from bikes. There is a lot that can be done in the way of pedal-powered livelihoods, but people need to see it in action to really get the idea.

"If we look at Beijing, where a city of 5.4 million moved, 58% of them by bike, then we see that a bicycle as the currency of a city is something we could get, too."

He pointed to older people or even disabled people having easier-geared bikes, tricycles and wheelchair attachments. "Your bicycle would fit not only your physical needs but your personality. It's your stage, your catwalk. There are new bicycle shops opening up in Vienna like mushrooms after the rain. Affordability is key, as is infrastructure, but little by little we get there."

However, out on the Praterstern, where the digital counter is moving, slowly, the cars are still dominant as the rain pours on the elegant streets.

[How Sweden's innovative housing programme fell foul of privatisation]

How Sweden's innovative housing programme fell foul of privatisation

Stockholm's riots happened in the outskirts of the city, with the poor having been driven out of the centre by rising prices

Owen Hatherley   
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 16 June 2013 13.09 BST   

Like those in London two years ago, the recent riots that swept across Stockholm recently were sparked when a man was shot by police. Yet the burning cars and battles with the police were in peripheral districts around the centre, while in London, "mixed" inner-city districts from Peckham to Clapham saw much of the unrest. That apparent difference hides a long history of mutual appreciation between the town planners of Britain and Sweden.

Sweden has long been a point of reference in British politics. The Labour right admired its partnership between unions and business, the Labour left preferred the independent foreign policy and a deeper, stronger welfare state. More recently, Conservatives have borrowed free schools from Swedish neoliberals, secure in the knowledge that the word "Swedish" makes a policy sound progressive. For planners, Sweden's towns have long been models of intervention and equality.

Sweden's Social Democrats, in government from 1932 to 1976, did not favour "social" housing directed specifically towards those in need, but universal public housing, via tenant-owned co-operatives, municipal-owned building companies, and rigorous rent control, under a specialised housing department.

Vällingby, to the west of Stockholm, built in the early 1950s, was one result – and a place of pilgrimage for British planners and architects. Tower blocks are interspersed with low-rises and terraces, just as in the "mixed developments" of the UK; but rather than vague municipal lawns, the low-rise flats have a forest just behind them, something borrowed in part for Cumbernauld new town. Vällingby's pedestrian precinct, conversely, was inspired by the centres of Coventry and Stevenage – but unlike them it still looks affluent and elegant.

The riots were largely confined to the estates built under the "million programme" of the 60s and 70s, when the Social Democrats tried to solve the housing question at one prefabricated stroke. Casually, these places could be compared with our stacked-up Ronan Points of the same era, but the similarities are deceptive. A typical million programme area on the outskirts of Stockholm is Flemingsberg, site of some of May's unrest. From the adjacent motorway it really does look monolithic, but on foot, it's verdant, pretty and bustling. A London comparison would be the Heygate estate – imposing from a distance, green inside. The striking difference with Vällingby and even more with the centre is that it's not racially homogeneous, with a high non-white population. It suggests Stockholm is a deeply segregated city. How did this happen?

Under conservative governments in the 1990s and 2000s, housing began to be privatised, with predictable results, especially given the British experience. Flats in the most desirable areas – here, the city centre – rocketed in price. Yet Stockholm has kept building, and British architects and planners have kept visiting. The "success story" is Hammarby Sjöstad, a waterside scheme which shames the likes of Salford Quays. As much as Vällingby, it shows the virtues of long-term planning over speculation.

But although some of Hammarby was built by the municipality, it's a wealthy and overwhelmingly white area, and rents are high. It offers little to those exiled to the peripheral million programmes. Hammarby implies that in Sweden, social democracy was only abandoned for the poor. Its innovations were retained for a bourgeoisie whose new areas are far more humane than those provided for them by British developers.

In Stockholm, the centre was cleared of the poor – the likely consequences in London of coalition's housing policies. The stark segregation visible there means that for the first time, it should stand as an example to London's planners of what not to do.

[Graft scandal threatens to implode Czech government]

Graft scandal threatens to implode Czech government

By Agence France-Presse
Saturday, June 15, 2013 19:30 EDT

Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas risked the collapse of his shaky centre-right minority coalition Saturday over a massive corruption scandal in which his top aide was indicted for bribery.

Leftist rival President Milos Zeman said Saturday it was “rather clear” that Necas must step down, while some politicians in the premier’s three-party minority government questioned his integrity.

A defiant Necas, however, said Saturday he saw “no reason to resign… early elections are no solution.”

His minority coalition in power since July 2010 has so far survived eight confidence votes, and will face another test next week as the Zeman-allied leftist opposition Social Democrats have called a fresh no-confidence motion, likely on Tuesday.

It remains to be seen if the opposition will be able to scramble the 101 votes it needs to topple Necas in the 200-seat lower house of parliament.

In the wake of this week’s unprecedented corruption scandal, analysts in Prague have pointed to the possibility of a snap election.

Fresh polls show it would usher the left wing into power. The next regularly scheduled election is due in May 2014.

“The scandal is so serious that Prime Minister Necas can’t simply sit it out,” Social Democrat party leader Bohuslav Sobotka insisted on Saturday.

But another junior coalition partner on Saturday suggested it would not abandon Necas.

The TOP 09 vice-chairman and finance minister Miroslav Kalousek said the country needed continuity to “help regions and people affected by the floods”, which left 12 dead and forced about 19,000 out of their homes a week ago.

The graft scandal rocking Prague erupted when police earlier this week raided the cabinet office, defence ministry, villas and a bank.

Necas’s chief of staff Jana Nagyova was on Friday charged with complicity in the “abuse of power and with bribery”. She will remain in police custody pending trial.

Seven other people — including military intelligence heads and former lawmakers — have also been indicted for corruption among other alleged crimes.

The 48-year-old Nagyova was charged with bribery after allegedly promising three former lawmakers from Necas’s party lucrative jobs in state-run companies on condition they quit the parliament.

But police also uncovered instances in which they say Nagyova had abused her power, by asking the head of Czech military intelligence to tail the prime minister’s wife Radka, 47, and two other people.

Necas announced this week he was getting divorced from his wife after more than 25 years, amid media speculation that Nagyova was his lover.

Military intelligence chief Milan Kovanda was the only one of the eight charged to avoid custody on Saturday as he confessed to his acts.

Ironically, the premier made a high-profile anti-corruption drive a centrepiece of his coalition.

Necas, a 48-year-old physicist, who on Thursday declared he was confident Nagyova was innocent, on Saturday apologised and said she would be sacked.

“Although I didn’t know about these acts, I deeply regret them and apologise to all concerned. I would never accept the abuse of intelligence services for personal and political purposes,” Necas said in a statement.

An EU member since 2004, the ex-communist Czech Republic has been plagued by corruption since it emerged as an independent state after its 1993 split with Slovakia.

Corruption watchdog Transparency International in 2012 ranked the Czech Republic as worse than Costa Rica and Rwanda in terms of the prevalence of graft in its “Corruption Perceptions Index”.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

[Anne Hidalgo: How heir to Spanish socialist tradition has chance to be first female mayor of Paris]

Anne Hidalgo: How heir to Spanish socialist tradition has chance to be first female mayor of Paris

Working mother takes on France's elite in battle for job to run capital city – a position which is seen as a stepping stone to the presidency

Kim Willsher, Paris   
The Observer, Saturday 15 June 2013 17.50 BST   

Anne Hidalgo rushes into her enormous city hall office apologising profusely for being all of five minutes late. "I'm sorry, I hate being late," she says.

This is a surprise; attention to time-keeping is hardly de rigueur in Paris, where punctuality is widely dismissed as a small-minded Anglo-Saxon detail.

"Perhaps I'm a little English then," the Spanish-born, French-adopted Hidalgo adds, clearly amused at the thought. In fact, Hidalgo's influences are even wider spread: her retired parents live in southern Spain and her older sister lives in California and is married to "an Englishman" – who it turns out is from Wales.

"They're all coming to Paris at the end of the month along with my brother-in-law's parents, which should be interesting," she says. (Even more so, I fear, if she keeps referring to said brother-in-law as English).

But if Hidalgo can talk her way out of a furious crowd of nimbys opposed to Socialist plans to build council houses in their posh Paris neighbourhood, the Welsh in-laws will be a pushover.

Hidalgo, 53, insists that she prefers dialogue and debate to confrontation. Today, however, she is gearing up for a political fight and feels "combative".

Next year she will ask Parisians to elect her as the city's mayor. As she and her nearest rival – the ambitious former centre-right government minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet – are both women, it is a pretty good bet that Paris's city hall will have a Madame le Maire in 2014 for the first time.

Hidalgo believes that the French capital is ready for such an egalitarian leap, but not by default or quotas. She subscribes, she says, to the "French feminist tradition of equality between the sexes – not the Anglo-Saxon feminist belief that women are better than men".

"It's about teams working better when they better represent society in terms of gender." It is also about providing creche places, childcare and giving women a chance to work, she says. The launch of her campaign earlier this month at Paris's trendy Bataclan nightclub saw the petite Hidalgo mobbed by supporters to the sounds of the Rolling Stones' Harlem Shuffle. It was a curious choice of music. "You move it to the left … you move it to the right," sings Mick Jagger.

Hidalgo's impeccable socialist and republican credentials leave no room for such sway. Her maternal grandfather, Antonio, fled General Franco's fascist zone in Spain in 1937, crossing the Pyrenees with his family on a donkey. Homesick, he returned two years later, widowed – his wife did not survive the return journey – and with four dependent children. He was promptly thrown into jail and given a double death sentence, later commuted to life imprisonment, and freed after three years.

His children, including Anne's father, also Antonio, then aged 10, were outcast as "children of the reds" in their home town of San Fernando near Cádiz, where Anne was born.

After joining the Spanish merchant navy, where he trained as an electrician, Antonio junior, his wife Marie, and their two daughters aged two and four, settled in Lyon in 1961.

"My father knew France. For him it was the country of Victor Hugo, the country that had given him refuge when his republican parents were forced to flee Franco's massacres," she writes in her recently published book Mon Combat pour Paris (My Fight for Paris). Her name may be hijo de algo "the son of noble descent" in Spanish, but Hidalgo grew up on gritty French housing estates surrounded by other émigrés from Armenia, Portugal, Italy, Russia, the Maghreb, living in "rabbit-cage" homes from which they "just wanted to escape". Not surprisingly, the experience has given her a first-hand perspective on town planning.

She had a tough but happy childhood, she says, with "loving parents and an open house". Her mother, a seamstress, made mostly pretty dresses for her girls, who were always impeccably turned out.

The French language and state schools were the common factors that united the eclectic émigré community, and both Anne and her sister flourished. "In the playground, the political debates were lively. This impassioned me. We celebrated the death of Franco in 1975," she writes.

Graduating with degrees in social work and law, Anne headed for Paris and a job as a works' inspector. Later she worked in a series of ministerial offices under the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin in the 1990s, before joining the newly elected Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, at city hall as his deputy in 2001.

As a working mother – she has a grown-up son and daughter from a first marriage, and an 11-year-old son from her second – she says she understands the conflicting tug of careers and children. One of the many photographs in her office shows her youngest boy as an unexpected guest at an official ceremony at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. "I have been known to bring my children into the office if all else fails," she says.

"It's all about prioritising. If the school calls, and there's an accident, of course I go straight away. If it's a fever, I negotiate or call on friends. It's not easy, but what I don't do is feel guilty.

"The time I spend with my children is important time, but it's also good for them to know I am happy doing what I do, and that is important too."

Friends and colleagues have described her as a fighter and "an iron fist in a velvet glove". Critics of her, as Delanoë's anointed successor, have nicknamed her the "heiress". The waspish former first lady, Bernadette Chirac, who supports Kosciusko-Morizet and whose husband Jacques was mayor of Paris for 18 years, has taken to calling Hidalgo "that woman with the dark hair".

Hidalgo cheerfully accepts the slings and arrows with a laugh and a shrug. "When I first entered politics, my daughter said she was upset when she saw posters of me defaced in the street. She said it made her feel bad. So I found a poster and told her to do her worst with it.

"Afterwards, I said: 'See, I'm still here, nothing bad has happened.'"

She says that she can be authoritarian, but only as a last resort.

She works mostly by instinct, she adds. Of the Bataclan campaign launch, she is annoyed with herself for not following that instinct and addressing the crowd unscripted. "I wish I'd done it without notes. I won't use notes the next time," she says.

Until now, Hidalgo has perhaps most closely been associated with Paris's successful free bicycle scheme Vélib', and with attempts to reduce car use and consequent pollution in the city. Her election programme, to be officially launched later this year, is a mixed bag including the creation of 60,000 new homes; encouraging business startups; reducing speed limits around schools; renovating emblematic city squares; and more culture and free Wi-Fi throughout the city.

The city hall post is often viewed as a springboard to the Élysée Palace. But for Hidalgo, who came to Paris aged 24 so that she could "meet Sartre", it is the "dream job of dream jobs".

"This isn't about what Paris can do for my career. This is about what I can do for Paris and the Parisians," she tells the Observer.

"And the people of Paris are not easily fooled; they can see when someone is using them as opposed to serving them, and it's not what they want.

"Paris is still my city of dreams. I will never leave here. And being mayor of Paris is the best elected job that exists."
MAKEOVER FOR MARIANNE

Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, and his deputy Anne Hidalgo will on Sunday officially "unveil" the newly renovated Place de la République – one of the city's emblematic squares – after an 18-month facelift costing €17.5m (£14.9m)intended to reclaim the area for pedestrians.

The square, at the crossroads of Paris's 3rd, 10th and 11th arrondissements in the north of the city, was constructed under Baron Haussmann's leadership in the 19th century. Its centrepiece, installed in 1883, is a colossal statue of Marianne, the symbol of France, brandishing an olive branch in her right hand and a tablet engraved "Droits de l'homme" in her left, in bronze.

On the base, 12 bronze reliefs depict events marking the republic's history including the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the square has been slowly overrun by traffic, making it little more than a glorified roundabout.

Now, under the refurbishment, 70% of the five-acre area has been pedestrianised, 48 trees have been planted, a shallow pool constructed and a large cafe/ restaurant installed. The two grand fountains east and west of Marianne have been removed.

The square is at the centre of the axis of boulevards running from Place de la Nation and Place de la Bastille to Place de l'Opéra and is a popular route for protests and demonstrations, which congregate around – and often on – the central monument.

[Turkish police storm protest camp using teargas and rubber bullets]

Turkish police storm protest camp using teargas and rubber bullets

Hundreds of security forces move in with bulldozers during a concert for activists, leaving many wounded

Peter Beaumont in Istanbul
The Observer, Sunday 16 June 2013   

Link to video: Taksim square: riot police evict protesters in Istanbul

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/jun/16/taksim-square-police-evict-protesters-video

Thousands of people took to the streets of Istanbul overnight on Sunday, erecting barricades and starting bonfires, after riot police used teargas and water cannons to clear the protest camp at the centre of Turkey's anti-government unrest.

In a night of chaotic violence large areas of the city around the now symbolic area of Gezi Park were engulfed in plumes of tear gas, while protesters opposed to the government of Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan attempted to push back to the city's central Taksim Square.

The continuing protest through the night, and calls for fresh demonstrations at 4pm on Sunday suggested that despite the clearing of the encampment in the park, Turkey's crisis was far from over.

In the immediate aftermath of the police operation trade unionists called for a national strike on Monday.

Underlining how deeply personal the issue has become for Erdogan, a spokesman for his AKP party blamed the protesters for allegedly reneging on a deal with Erdogan thrashed out two nights before.

"A country's prime minister meets you for 10 hours, you reach an agreement then say something else behind his back," Huseyin Çelik said in a TV interview defending the assault. "Wouldn't you feel cheated?" he told the private broadcaster Habertürk.

The lightning evening assault on the park and nearby square followed a warning from Erdogan that protesters should quit Gezi Park or be removed by security forces ahead of a rally of his supporters in Istanbul on Sunday.

Protesters took to the streets in several neighbourhoods across Istanbul following the raid on Gezi Park, ripping up metal fences, paving stones and advertising hoardings to build barricades and lighting bonfires of rubbish in the streets.

During the raid police fired tear gas against the volunteer doctors manning a clinic in the park who have been working anonymously for fear of losing their jobs.

In the early hours of the morning groups of demonstrators blocked a main highway to Ataturk airport on the western edge of the city, while to the east, police fired tear gas to block protesters attempting to cross the main bridge crossing the Bosphorus waterway towards Taksim.

Thousands more rallied in the working-class Gazi neighbourhood, which saw heavy clashes with police in the 1990s, while protesters also gathered in Ankara around the central Kugulu Park, including opposition MPs who sat in the streets in an effort to prevent the police firing teargas.

In the last 18 days Gezi Park, with its tented encampment occupied by an umbrella of groups including football fans, nationalists, environmental campaigners, Kurds and young Turks from many walks of lives, had come to represent a new spirit of social resistance to what many fear is the increasingly authoritarian style of Erdogan and his moderate Islamist AKP.

Erdogan had delivered his warning at a rally of tens of thousands of AKP supporters in Ankara, the national capital, promising that Taksim Square would be cleared by Sunday in time for a second rally there.

"We have our Istanbul rally tomorrow," Erdogan warned. "I say it clearly: Taksim Square must be evacuated, otherwise this country's security forces know how to evacuate it."

Barely two hours later white-helmeted riot police assaulted Gezi Park shortly after a concert attended by protesters and tourists drew to a close. Protesters had vowed earlier to continue with their occupation, although they had promised to remove barricades and reduce the number of tents in the park. Police had given 15 minutes' notice to clear the park and the adjoining Taksim Square before storming the protest camp.

Police warned protesters: "This is an illegal act, this is our last warning to you – evacuate."

The speed of the move to seize the square and park caught protesters by surprise. They were quickly scattered by teargas canisters and rubber bullets. Within 20 minutes a bulldozer had moved in to demolish structures and tents that had been used by the anti-government movement. A little later police and municipal workers could be seen tearing down fences around the park and removing tents.

Children and tourists were among those caught up in the assault, amid reports of many injuries. But despite quickly taking control of the park, running battles between police and thousands of protesters, driven back into the warren of side streets beside the square, carried on for hours afterwards.

At one stage a bearded middle-aged man draped himself over the plough of one of the water cannons to try to prevent it moving forwards before he was beaten back by batons and gas. Protesters sought refuge in hotels and cafes, including hundreds in the Divan hotel, which was stormed by police.

Later police stormed the hotel beating protesters, while a later assault left the lobby of the luxury hotel thick with gas. The Guardian saw two elderly women who had passed out being carried out on stretchers to an ambulance.

Earlier riot police had stormed into the lobby, beating those inside.

Many had been expecting a final move to clear the park after Erdogan's speech. But none had anticipated the action would begin so quickly. Tayfun Kahraman, a member of Taksim Solidarity, an umbrella group of protest movements, said an unknown number of people in the park had been injured, some by rubber bullets.

NUT executive member Martin Powell-Davies was part of a British trade union delegation that had approached the fringes of the square as police moved in. He said: "There was a concert by a well-known musician with hundreds of people and families in a festival atmosphere in the square and then suddenly from all sides the police came with water cannons and teargas."

He struggled to speak as he choked on teargas and protesters regrouped to chant anti-government slogans. He said: "There are hundreds of Istanbul residents who have come out on to the streets to show their opposition. They are banging the shutters in protest at the sides of the streets."

The assault followed Erdogan's defiant message delivered in a suburb of Ankara, depicting those on the streets as "traitors playing a game", "looters" or part of a conspiracy against the government.

"Anyone who wants to hear the national will, should come and listen to [Ankara]," Erdogan said. "We are not like those who took molotov cocktails, or honked their car horns. I tell you it's a crime to violate order." He insisted, once again, that he and the AKP had a clear mandate to govern.

Oguz Kaan Salici, Istanbul president of the main opposition People's Republican Party, said: "The police brutality aims at clearing the streets of Istanbul to make way for Erdogan's meeting tomorrow. Yet it will backfire. People feel betrayed."

*************

Recep Tayyip Erdogan struggles to make sense of Turkey's trauma

After a fortnight of missteps, the prime minister grasps that the protests are harming his regime. But he has not recognised they are unlikely to end if he removes the freedom his people expect

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
The Observer, Saturday 15 June 2013 21.46 BST   

Sitting by her tent in Istanbul's Gezi Park, child psychiatrist Tugba Camcioglu, 36, ponders what brought her here. She is not, she admits, very political. The handmade poster on her tent is about child abuse, not the fate of the park or even the vexed subject of Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "I came because the park should be kept for children. I came to stand up for the weak," she says.

I meet Camcioglu the day after last week's assault on nearby Taksim Square with teargas, water cannon and rubber bullets that cleared it of protesters. It's her first evening in the park, which days later would again be stormed by riot police.

"Turkey is like a traumatised adolescent," she explains. "We have had so many traumas, such as what happened with the Kurds, that we are finding it difficult to mature as a country. I'm not angry. And I'm not afraid. When I told my nine-year-old that I was planning to come here, he said: 'Don't go. Erdogan won't understand'."

Camcioglu is one of those whom Erdogan has branded as capulcu – literally, "riffraff" – a word that has been appropriated by the protesters as a badge of pride. It is posted on tents, homes, banners, even on biscuits.

After a fortnight of missteps by Erdogan and his moderate Islamist AKP, during which five have died and 5,000 have been injured in protests in dozens of cities, the prime minister's most recent moves suggest that, while he may not comprehend the reasons for the protests, at last he understands the damage they are doing to him.

Recent days have seen a series of dizzying flip-flops. On Thursday night, Erdogan appeared abruptly to change tactics. Meeting in Ankara for the first time with representatives of the protesters, he offered if not an olive branch then the hint of one, backing down on his insistence that Gezi Park must be redeveloped to rebuild an Ottoman-era barracks.

By Saturday evening, with protesters still refusing to leave, Erdogan was once again in full fire and brimstone mode as he addressed tens of thousands of supporters in a suburb of the capital, Ankara, railing about plots and criminals, and telling those in the park to leave or face again Turkey's security forces. Riot police were deployed hours later.

If there is a problem for Erdogan, it is that the protests that began on 31 May with a police assault on an environmental camp to save the park's green space have long since moved on from being about Gezi's lovely old trees. A poll of 498 protesters in the park, published last week, found that 58% were there to protest against Erdogan and a style of government that his critics say is increasingly high-handed; just 3% were there for the trees.

Erdogan's gamble in agreeing to talk to the protesters – like all his moves in this crisis, including ordering the riot police to clear Taksim Square last week and again last night – has been high risk. Coming just a few hours before police released 43 arrested protesters, in accordance with their demands, his new tactic was clear. Seeking to confine the terms of the protests to their original cause – the park – he had hoped to defuse the wider issue of how two weeks of protests have created a permissive space for a new opposition to a decade of AKP rule.

As that backfired, Erdogan has been pushed back to his default position of the last two weeks: demonising those who stand against him, issuing threats and offering ill-shaped conspiracy theories designed to mobilise his base.

At the heart of this crisis has been a failure on Erdogan's part to fully grasp the nature of the protests. Writing in the Turkish daily Hürriyet last week, Taha Ozan, director of the Seta thinktank, which is close to the AKP, reflected some of the difficulties Erdogan has encountered.

Ozan writes: "Erdogan faced the accusations of totalitarianism with only one response: 'Do not come to me with abstract accusations that are outside the realm of politics. Can you give me specific and tangible examples?' This simple question does not have a tangible response other than: 'We are afraid and we feel repressed'."

If anything has changed in the last few days, it is that Erdogan and other senior officials appear to have recognised, at least, that such fears can be contagious. What is clear is that there are growing political dangers in the crisis for Erdogan and his style of government that predate the protests. According to a Gallup poll taken before the protests, the government's approval rating has been declining. That trend is most marked in Istanbul, where it has dropped from 59% in 2011 to 30% in 2012, while in the rest of Turkey it has fallen from 57% to 48%.

On the international stage too, the past two weeks have damaged Turkey's reputation, crucially in Europe, where a group of countries led by Germany have put further brakes on the glacial EU accession talks because of the violence used against the protesters.

Ziya Meral, a Turkish academic based in the UK, believes that the protests are rooted in a complex clash of ideas and personal values that has arisen during an AKP era of economic policies that created a new, tech-savvy consumer society, especially in cities, whose growing economic and social autonomy is now at odds with how Erdogan and the AKP believe Turkish society should be.

Their expectation has long been institutionalised in Turkish society, where journalists, university professors and even doctors have been required to conform and help shape public attitudes.

"It's not a clash between an Islamist party and secularists … instead, it represents a postmodern crisis for Turkey," Meral said. "Erdogan and the AKP came into power rejecting the old-school style of Islamist politics that had come before. They wanted economic improvement and they wanted to be open to the world.

"The shift came after 2011. By then, the military was no longer a force. Consumption was increasing. The EU was out of the picture with its own troubles. With its large majority, [the AKP] started behaving as previous governments had done – insisting on being the 'gatekeeper' of the Turkish identity, while emphasising majoritarianism over pluralism."

If in the past "gatekeeping" meant enforcing a strict vision of secular nationalism, today it means creeping socially conservative Islamist values, the most recent iteration of which – described by many people as the "last straw" – has been tighter limits on the sale of alcohol.

For many in Gezi Park, this is precisely the issue: the conflict between their growing desire for personal autonomy in the new Turkey and state-prescribed notions of "Turkishness".

But the crisis has been exacerbated by other tensions. There has been deep discontent, not least within the ranks of Erdogan's party, over the historic peace process with the Kurds, and public rumblings over his Syria policy.

Erdogan's attempts to rewrite the military-era constitution, which would create a presidential system of government, have aroused suspicion that the new system would most benefit the prime minister himself.

All of these complaints have been reflected in the protests as the demonstrations have rippled outwards, drawing in an uneasy coalition of often contradictory interests.

Indeed, the worst of the violence last week, during the clearing of Taksim Square, saw Kurds and Kemalists – secular nationalist followers of the founder of the modern Turkish state – standing shoulder to shoulder with anarchists and environmentalists all pursuing their own agendas.

Like Meral, political analyst Ihsan Dagi – who has written extensively on the AKP's time in power – believes that the friction in Turkish society is a direct result of the party's own policies. The protesters in Gezi Park are by and large those who have grown up under and often benefited from the decade of AKP rule.

"Erdogan looks at how incomes have increased over the past decade and asks, why are people complaining? What he is missing is that in the new consumer society, people believe they have the right to make their own choices about what they buy, how they live and what they choose to drink," said Dagi.

Despite believing that Erdogan is fundamentally a pragmatic politician, Dagi suspects that some of the prime minister's mistakes in the last fortnight stem from both his own sense of being under attack and his need to appeal to his core voters by sounding defiant in the midst of a crisis.

His sense of affront is not entirely surprising. Chants in Gezi Park have ranged from straightforward calls for him to step down to the outright vulgar, including from football "ultras", on Friday night, who shouted: "Tayyip, Tayyip, suck my dick."

"Erdogan took it very personally at first," says Dagi. "The reports of people close to him say he saw it as an attempt to force him to resign or harm him so he couldn't stand again."

One story tells of a furious PM being calmed by his daughter after storming out of the Ankara meeting with protesters. But Dagi believes that many of Erdogan's problems are of his and his party's making by narrowing the terms of Turkey's political conversation.

"The magic formula of the AKP and Erdogan in the last 10 years was that it generally acted in a wider coalition allowing different political ideas and identities. But that started to crumble two years ago and some of the more liberal politicians who felt that they could work with Erdogan turned against him. I think he's realised now that he needs to build bridges again and open dialogue to a wider audience."

However, Dagi is still not convinced that Erdogan has understood the real nature of the protests: "He sees it as deeply political, something that needs to be controlled to keep Turkey manageable. But really this is a social resistance, not a political uprising.

"This isn't about removing him from power. It's people saying to the AKP and Erdogan there are limits to the powers they try to assume."

Turkey's prime minister showed his determination in moving to clear the park with water cannon and teargas. He may have won this battle, but the most serious crisis of Erdogan's 10 years in power is far from over.

ERDOGAN: A LIFE

Born in February 1954, Erdogan attended an Islamic high school before studying business administration at Marmara University, graduating in 1981. He spent 13 years as a semi-professional footballer, but his father reportedly blocked a move to top club Fenerbahçe. Erdogan's passion for politics was greater: time as a student activist was followed by a decision to join the Islamist Welfare Party after the 1980 military coup in Turkey.

A pragmatic approach as mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998 ended with his imprisonment for reciting a poem in public that was regarded as incitement to religious hatred. He established the Justice and Development Party (AKP) after his release and it won a landslide victory at the 2002 general election, taking nearly two-thirds of the seats. In 2011 the AKP was re-elected for a third term.

Erdogan married Emine Gulbaran in 1978 and the couple have two sons and two daughters.

[Fighting the poachers on Africa's thin green line]

Fighting the poachers on Africa's thin green line

Underpaid, ill-equipped and outnumbered, park rangers fight a one-sided war against vicious gangs of poachers. Hundreds have been murdered in the defence of endangered wildlife, and their deaths leave their own families in jeopardy. David Smith reports from Zambia

David Smith   
The Observer, Saturday 15 June 2013 17.00 BST   

Esnart Paundi rarely smiled for the camera. One old photo shows her wearing her ranger's camouflage fatigues and a pensive expression as she crouches beside a mound of bushmeat and three despondent poachers, one handcuffed. In another she is in a black leather jacket at her sister's home, leaning against the TV with a baby under her arm and sad eyes.

Death stalked Esnart. When her mother died young, she stepped in to help raise her siblings and become the family breadwinner. One of her five brothers and two of her three sisters are dead. Twice married and twice widowed, she was a single mother of five children.

When death came to Esnart herself at the age of 38, it was sudden, brutal and senseless. She had caught two more poachers trying to smuggle butchered wildlife to Zambia's copper belt. One was hiding a machete and, though she tried to flee, he hunted her down and smashed her skull with it. Her orphaned children are now scattered among different homes. The state has done nothing to help them.

Esnart was one of the foot soldiers in what has been called the thin green line: park rangers faced with an unprecedented onslaught from vicious, well-armed criminal gangs in Africa and around the world. In the past decade at least 1,000 have paid with their lives for defending wild animals, according to the Thin Green Line Foundation, a charitable organisation which supports rangers in their work, and their families in the case of bereavement.

"Once you are deployed on patrol, you know for certain: I am going to war," says Liywali Akakulubelwa, 47, a senior intelligence and investigations officer at the Zambia Wildlife Authority. "You accept that is the nature of the job."

Respite is unlikely. Rangers are braced for an escalation in the "wildlife wars" – the increasing militarisation of the planet's most precious and fragile game reserves. The struggle is as ferocious as any in nature, but unlikely to be seen in a David Attenborough documentary.

In India, the foundation says, rangers have been buried alive in sawing pits by illegal timber poachers. In Colombia they are killed when dealing with drug cartels, land mines and militias. But Africa is probably the bloodiest battleground. Elephants and rhino are under siege as the black-market prices of ivory and horn rocket. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, tormented by rebel militias, 183 rangers have been killed in just one national park over the past decade. Last year alone Kenya lost six rangers, including a pregnant woman who was ambushed and shot in the face, while in Chad's Zakouma national park five rangers were mown down by automatic weapons during their morning prayers.

And this is no even contest. Some poachers are former army soldiers who do not hesitate to kill animals or humans, and they come with powerful backers. Rangers are often older and underpaid and lack the equipment, resources and training to defend themselves in firefights. When they make the ultimate sacrifice, there is often no government assistance for their families, who face a life of poverty and destitution.

Zambia, a landlocked country generally seen as democratic, inoffensive and rich in wildlife, has suffered much down the years. Its rhino population was annihilated and most of its elephants wiped out in 1970s and 80s. Efforts to reintroduce and conserve the animals now mean the "big five" – buffalo, elephant, leopard, lion and rhino – as they are a tourist drawcard.

In the early 1990s Esnart decided to become a park ranger to defend these crown jewels. Liywali, who trained with her for two years, recalls: "She wanted our animals to be protected so young ones could come and see elephants and buffalos. She wanted young people to see our natural resources in this country. She wanted to stop the trade in wildlife game meat. This is where death found her."

Esnart became a ranger in 1995, bringing a crucial income to an otherwise impoverished family. With her mother dead, Esnart helped her father with parenting. Her brother Mawto Paundi, 33, a taxi driver, recalls: "I remember she insisted that I go to school, but I refused. I now regret passing up the opportunity. She was ready to sponsor me."

Many former colleagues of Esnart claim she was aware of the risks of the job, but never dwelled on them. Mawto, however, says that she confided in him: "There was a time when she wanted to change career, get some money and do something else. She wanted to do something with computers so she could be in the civil service. It was because of the danger of going on patrol in the bush. She was concerned about the risks involved. It was around that time she died. Of course I was concerned as a brother, knowing the dangers of the job and what had happened to others who did it. A lot of other rangers have died. But I appreciated what she did for wildlife conservation."

By 2009 Esnart was working under William Soko, a senior ranger in Rufunsa district, about 80km from the capital, Lusaka, and earning about 1,350 kwacha (£160) per month. "She was very cheerful and obedient," Soko recalls from behind his desk in a modest office. "She was a fine lady, ever-smiling, everybody's darling."

Esnart was the only woman among Soko's 20 wildlife police officers, as rangers are formally called. "She was proud to be a pioneer. I gave her challenges, like patrolling through the escarpment. I thought she would say: 'No, I can't go' – I was shocked she went. It definitely changed my perception of women, because I know some males who are afraid to go there. I wouldn't hesitate to employ another female ranger. I still think about Esnart very much. She died a very sad death. She didn't deserve this type of death."

Esnart died on 14 September 2010 in Kabwe in Zambia's Central Province. She was on a route where poachers were known to transport bushmeat. A small, light truck approached her roadblock, executed a U-turn and sped away. Esnart, who was unarmed, and two other officers with rifles gave pursuit on foot into the bush. They found the vehicle abandoned and followed some tyre marks that led to a pile of bushmeat and two poachers, whom they arrested. One of the rangers then left to look for transport.

"One of the suspects had a panga [machete] hidden," Soko continues. "He moved like lightning. He struck the male officer on the head and knocked him unconscious. That officer has never been the same since – you can see he is not right any more."

Esnart ran but the poacher gave pursuit and rained blows on her head until she was dead. Soko was called to collect her body. "I cried," the 51-year-old admits. "It was a gruesome sight. I left with that grief in me and went to look for the suspects' house at 3am, and if I had found them, they would be have been mincemeat to bury."

But the suspects had gone and, more than two years later, are still on the run. It is thought one was Congolese and may have returned home. Soko adds: "If they are in Zambia, they will be caught. You can run for 10 or 20 years, but if you shed human blood you get caught. I can never forgive them. They have to pay."

Soko took Esnart's body back to her home village, where her father, himself a former park ranger, was "understanding". The funeral brought a big crowd of mourners and there were songs, Bible readings and preaching. As is traditional, Esnart's colleagues fired their guns in salute to a fellow ranger.

But since then Esnart's family have received no financial compensation from the authorities she served. Soko, who is also chairman of the Game Rangers Association of Zambia, complains: "The government should have done a lot more because of the misery the children are subjected to. Their life simply collapses when they lose the breadwinner. She was a single mother and when she died everything went.

"I don't know what the government is thinking. What I do know is that they are silent. The Thin Green Line is the only organisation in the world to come to the aid of the children."

Rangers in Zambia, Africa and the world should not be abandoned by their governments, Soko argues. "It is a very dangerous job. Every year we have a death. It's nonstop. For as long as there are poachers, there are going to be deaths. If my daughters wanted to become rangers, I wouldn't allow them."

A short walk from Soko's office is the rudimentary house where Esnart lived, built of a reddish mudbrick, with a flimsy wooden door and a corrugated roof weighed down by rocks. It is surrounded by bare earth and dust. The faceless, unnamed poacher whose machete struck down Esnart also splintered a family. Her five children now live far apart in three separate towns in the care of various relatives.

The eldest, Anna Phiri, 17, is not so different from many teenagers: she enjoys going out and her favourite TV shows are Hannah Montana and Shake It Up. Her best subject at school is English, and she wants to be a journalist one day. "I wouldn't be a ranger because there is not enough security," she says.

Anna's father, Gawa Phiri, also a game ranger, died from meningitis in 2006. She lives with his sister, Martha Phiri, a primary school teacher, her husband Maxwell, an accountant, and their four children in eastern Lusaka. The approach road is dusty, bumpy, unpaved and fringed with rubbish. Outside the grey concrete-block house is the stench of raw sewage. Anna's bedroom has two double beds shared by four children. Dolls and teddy bears are strewn around the room. A green curtain is strung up by the window and the walls are pockmarked under a corrugated roof and naked lightbulb. A shoebox is perched on top of a wardrobe.

Barefoot and wearing a turquoise dress with white leggings, Anna rummages in a suitcase and produced a homemade photo album. It includes a picture of her mother with short hair, a blue T-shirt, light trousers and an unsmiling, careworn look. "I feel very bad when I look at it." Among her most precious possessions is a red and white dress that belonged to her mother. "It means a lot to me. I will wear it one day."

Recalling the day of her mother's funeral, Anna is tearful yet composed. "I was told by my aunt. It was very disturbing and shocking. My mother was very brave. I'm proud of her. I think about her a lot. It's very difficult now because I don't get to see my brothers and sisters often. I don't know how they are doing."

Across the city Esnart's son, George, 14, lives with his uncle, Mathews Phiri. "Mum didn't tell me much about the job," George mumbles shyly. "But I knew it was dangerous."

The long flat ROAD to Mumbwa, 135km from Lusaka, passes through a broiling marketplace selling farm produce, knock-off furniture and Manchester City football mugs. A sign for a traditional healer from Malawi promises penis enlargements and the magical return of runaway spouses. In Mumbwa is the simple house that Esnart bought but never occupied. It is now home to her siblings and three other children: the boys Annex, 12, and Chimunya, eight, and her adopted seven-year-old daughter Irene. Their father Annex, a polygamist who already had a wife when he met Esnart, died from an illness. Now the trio lives alongside her sister Abigail's two children.

There is electricity here and a digital TV and DVD player, but water must be fetched from an outside pump. Beyond a torn sheet in a doorway is the main bedroom, where foam oozes out of a split mattress, paint is cracked on the walls and a weathered mosquito net hangs limp. The family toilet is a dark pit in the ground in a ramshackle backyard shed.

Abigail, 31, is in charge of Esnart's estate and has kept her sister's ranger's uniform. "It reminds me of her because she used to wear it often," she says, sitting in a cramped, stuffy lounge with a fridge parked in the corner. "But I rarely look at it because it's painful."

She still feels bitterness towards the poachers whose actions that day continue to ripple through numerous lives. "I can't forgive them, because the impact of what they did is still being felt now. The main problem is that I'm the only sister looking after the kids, and I don't have a job. Sometimes I do piece work, but it might not suffice to look after the needs of the children. They miss their mother. I would like them all to be in one place, but I can't manage to keep all of them. They miss each other very much."

Another of Esnart's brothers, Muyeni Paundi, 22, a taxi driver, chips in: "The authorities should have done more. When the incident happened, she had no firearm and they had no handcuffs. They should also give financial support, especially for the kids. They were supposed to. Esnart's children need to be together for that brother and sister relationship."

A family friend wanders in, wearing the camouflage uniform of a wildlife police officer. Ellison Kanyembo, 47, had known Esnart since they were at training school in the 1990s. "We were tribal cousins," he recalls fondly. "She was good to me. We were like brother and sister, helping each other. She was courageous. She admired the job and was not frightened. She liked going in the field and seeing animals. She liked adventure in the wilderness. She liked cooking and she cooked fritters for me sometimes. I saw her three days before she died. It was as if she knew she was going to die. She said: 'Look after my children – this one, that one – I don't know if I'll come back.' It was like she was saying goodbye."

Kanyembo says that news of her death had a terrible impact on him: "It pained me spiritually, physically. There was that hurt in me."

Esnart's story chimes with those of many park rangers: gratitude for a job of any kind to feed and clothe numerous dependents, but low pay and the constant threat of a violent demise. In the absence of government support, her family was rescued by donations from the Thin Green Line Foundation.

What safety net, then, for other grieving spouses and children left to pick up the pieces? It is a question that corrodes the spirit of the Kalounga family back in Rufunsa where, down a bone-shaking dirt track, is a gate to the Lower Zambezi national park decorated with the skulls of buffalo, elephant and sable. Mathias Kalounga, 49, is among the rangers who patrols and camps there for unbroken stretches of 15 days. He has a wife and nine children aged from three to 22.

"I love keeping God's creation," he says. "I'm not afraid of anything. I have been shot at. We met some poachers and they started shooting and there was an exchange of fire. The poachers ran off and left their cooking equipment. I was not afraid at all."

But the danger weighs heavily upon his wife, Loyce. "It was close to the camp and we even heard the gunshots. I was worried that my husband might be killed and not make it home. He was outnumbered – three rangers against four poachers. I wish he did a different job, because this one is very dangerous. When I worry, I don't feel well."

If the worst happened to Mathias, Loyce, a housewife, would be left alone to fend for her children. "The authorities don't care about other people's lives," she muses. "We see what happens. Esnart was working for the government, but when she died the government did not look after the orphans. It's a big responsibility to feed my children and send them to school. When my husband dies, the government will do nothing to help me and my children. We will be in very big problems."

Even in life, the family endures deep hardship. Mathias and Loyce share the sole bed while their children sleep on the floor. There is no electricity or running water. Mathias earns just 1,700 kwacha (£201) per month. "It's very little, not enough to pay for the children to go to school. Some of them do and some don't."

When Zambia's vice-president, Guy Scott, was informed that Esnart's family had still not received any government support, he said that something had gone wrong and asked for her name so that it could be rectified.

One of the FIERCEST battlegrounds is also one of the world's most popular tourist destinations: South Africa, where on average a rhino is poached every 11 hours. Backed by international crime syndicates feeding a demand for horn in the Far East, poachers have been known to use helicopters, specialised silent tranquillisers, body armour, night-vision equipment and mercenaries experienced in rhino tracking.

Officials have vowed to "fight fire with fire" and deployed troops in the famed Kruger national park, where gun battles are increasingly common. Major-General Johan Jooste, who heads the joint military, police and game ranger operations, recently described the influx of poachers from Mozambique as an "insurgency" requiring a "counter- insurgency".

Wanda Mkutshulwa, managing executive of corporate services for South Africa national parks (SANParks), says: "Except for an accident between a ranger and a soldier who mistook each other for a suspected armed and aggressive poacher, there have been no fatalities of rangers in the Kruger national park related to suspected poaching in the past five years. This is something we live in fear of and, with the escalating incursions into the park and the increasing aggression of the suspects, it is only a matter of time before this happens.

"We are dealing with an enemy that has no rules and respects none, while the rangers are expected to first attempt arrest and can only shoot once they are shot at. The poachers are in control of time and place, because you never know where or when they will surface due to the size of the park – which is about half the size of Switzerland and bigger than Swaziland."

The rangers are the "forgotten victims" of the poaching war, according to Sean Willmore, an Australian-based conservationist, documentary maker and president of the International Ranger Federation. Willmore is the driving force behind the Thin Green Line Foundation, whose champions include Jane Goodall, the celebrated British primatologist. "Rangers are often outgunned, outnumbered and outresourced by illegal commercial poachers," Willmore says. "And, sadly, on a weekly basis, they are shot at, hacked to death and sometimes even tortured if they survive the bullets. I have many graphic and horrifying examples."

The foundation says it has given support to 80 widows and more than 550 orphans of rangers killed in action, but still has more than 900 widows waiting for help. Willmore adds: "With little or no compensation, many rangers' widows and children are often left destitute and below the poverty line. The children are often taken out of school with no source of income for the family. The poverty cycle for these families is set in motion. This is the thanks we give these rangers and their families for risking their lives for the animals we all care about."

[Fighting the poachers on Africa's thin green line]

Fighting the poachers on Africa's thin green line

Underpaid, ill-equipped and outnumbered, park rangers fight a one-sided war against vicious gangs of poachers. Hundreds have been murdered in the defence of endangered wildlife, and their deaths leave their own families in jeopardy. David Smith reports from Zambia

David Smith   
The Observer, Saturday 15 June 2013 17.00 BST   

Esnart Paundi rarely smiled for the camera. One old photo shows her wearing her ranger's camouflage fatigues and a pensive expression as she crouches beside a mound of bushmeat and three despondent poachers, one handcuffed. In another she is in a black leather jacket at her sister's home, leaning against the TV with a baby under her arm and sad eyes.

Death stalked Esnart. When her mother died young, she stepped in to help raise her siblings and become the family breadwinner. One of her five brothers and two of her three sisters are dead. Twice married and twice widowed, she was a single mother of five children.

When death came to Esnart herself at the age of 38, it was sudden, brutal and senseless. She had caught two more poachers trying to smuggle butchered wildlife to Zambia's copper belt. One was hiding a machete and, though she tried to flee, he hunted her down and smashed her skull with it. Her orphaned children are now scattered among different homes. The state has done nothing to help them.

Esnart was one of the foot soldiers in what has been called the thin green line: park rangers faced with an unprecedented onslaught from vicious, well-armed criminal gangs in Africa and around the world. In the past decade at least 1,000 have paid with their lives for defending wild animals, according to the Thin Green Line Foundation, a charitable organisation which supports rangers in their work, and their families in the case of bereavement.

"Once you are deployed on patrol, you know for certain: I am going to war," says Liywali Akakulubelwa, 47, a senior intelligence and investigations officer at the Zambia Wildlife Authority. "You accept that is the nature of the job."

Respite is unlikely. Rangers are braced for an escalation in the "wildlife wars" – the increasing militarisation of the planet's most precious and fragile game reserves. The struggle is as ferocious as any in nature, but unlikely to be seen in a David Attenborough documentary.

In India, the foundation says, rangers have been buried alive in sawing pits by illegal timber poachers. In Colombia they are killed when dealing with drug cartels, land mines and militias. But Africa is probably the bloodiest battleground. Elephants and rhino are under siege as the black-market prices of ivory and horn rocket. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, tormented by rebel militias, 183 rangers have been killed in just one national park over the past decade. Last year alone Kenya lost six rangers, including a pregnant woman who was ambushed and shot in the face, while in Chad's Zakouma national park five rangers were mown down by automatic weapons during their morning prayers.

And this is no even contest. Some poachers are former army soldiers who do not hesitate to kill animals or humans, and they come with powerful backers. Rangers are often older and underpaid and lack the equipment, resources and training to defend themselves in firefights. When they make the ultimate sacrifice, there is often no government assistance for their families, who face a life of poverty and destitution.

Zambia, a landlocked country generally seen as democratic, inoffensive and rich in wildlife, has suffered much down the years. Its rhino population was annihilated and most of its elephants wiped out in 1970s and 80s. Efforts to reintroduce and conserve the animals now mean the "big five" – buffalo, elephant, leopard, lion and rhino – as they are a tourist drawcard.

In the early 1990s Esnart decided to become a park ranger to defend these crown jewels. Liywali, who trained with her for two years, recalls: "She wanted our animals to be protected so young ones could come and see elephants and buffalos. She wanted young people to see our natural resources in this country. She wanted to stop the trade in wildlife game meat. This is where death found her."

Esnart became a ranger in 1995, bringing a crucial income to an otherwise impoverished family. With her mother dead, Esnart helped her father with parenting. Her brother Mawto Paundi, 33, a taxi driver, recalls: "I remember she insisted that I go to school, but I refused. I now regret passing up the opportunity. She was ready to sponsor me."

Many former colleagues of Esnart claim she was aware of the risks of the job, but never dwelled on them. Mawto, however, says that she confided in him: "There was a time when she wanted to change career, get some money and do something else. She wanted to do something with computers so she could be in the civil service. It was because of the danger of going on patrol in the bush. She was concerned about the risks involved. It was around that time she died. Of course I was concerned as a brother, knowing the dangers of the job and what had happened to others who did it. A lot of other rangers have died. But I appreciated what she did for wildlife conservation."

By 2009 Esnart was working under William Soko, a senior ranger in Rufunsa district, about 80km from the capital, Lusaka, and earning about 1,350 kwacha (£160) per month. "She was very cheerful and obedient," Soko recalls from behind his desk in a modest office. "She was a fine lady, ever-smiling, everybody's darling."

Esnart was the only woman among Soko's 20 wildlife police officers, as rangers are formally called. "She was proud to be a pioneer. I gave her challenges, like patrolling through the escarpment. I thought she would say: 'No, I can't go' – I was shocked she went. It definitely changed my perception of women, because I know some males who are afraid to go there. I wouldn't hesitate to employ another female ranger. I still think about Esnart very much. She died a very sad death. She didn't deserve this type of death."

Esnart died on 14 September 2010 in Kabwe in Zambia's Central Province. She was on a route where poachers were known to transport bushmeat. A small, light truck approached her roadblock, executed a U-turn and sped away. Esnart, who was unarmed, and two other officers with rifles gave pursuit on foot into the bush. They found the vehicle abandoned and followed some tyre marks that led to a pile of bushmeat and two poachers, whom they arrested. One of the rangers then left to look for transport.

"One of the suspects had a panga [machete] hidden," Soko continues. "He moved like lightning. He struck the male officer on the head and knocked him unconscious. That officer has never been the same since – you can see he is not right any more."

Esnart ran but the poacher gave pursuit and rained blows on her head until she was dead. Soko was called to collect her body. "I cried," the 51-year-old admits. "It was a gruesome sight. I left with that grief in me and went to look for the suspects' house at 3am, and if I had found them, they would be have been mincemeat to bury."

But the suspects had gone and, more than two years later, are still on the run. It is thought one was Congolese and may have returned home. Soko adds: "If they are in Zambia, they will be caught. You can run for 10 or 20 years, but if you shed human blood you get caught. I can never forgive them. They have to pay."

Soko took Esnart's body back to her home village, where her father, himself a former park ranger, was "understanding". The funeral brought a big crowd of mourners and there were songs, Bible readings and preaching. As is traditional, Esnart's colleagues fired their guns in salute to a fellow ranger.

But since then Esnart's family have received no financial compensation from the authorities she served. Soko, who is also chairman of the Game Rangers Association of Zambia, complains: "The government should have done a lot more because of the misery the children are subjected to. Their life simply collapses when they lose the breadwinner. She was a single mother and when she died everything went.

"I don't know what the government is thinking. What I do know is that they are silent. The Thin Green Line is the only organisation in the world to come to the aid of the children."

Rangers in Zambia, Africa and the world should not be abandoned by their governments, Soko argues. "It is a very dangerous job. Every year we have a death. It's nonstop. For as long as there are poachers, there are going to be deaths. If my daughters wanted to become rangers, I wouldn't allow them."

A short walk from Soko's office is the rudimentary house where Esnart lived, built of a reddish mudbrick, with a flimsy wooden door and a corrugated roof weighed down by rocks. It is surrounded by bare earth and dust. The faceless, unnamed poacher whose machete struck down Esnart also splintered a family. Her five children now live far apart in three separate towns in the care of various relatives.

The eldest, Anna Phiri, 17, is not so different from many teenagers: she enjoys going out and her favourite TV shows are Hannah Montana and Shake It Up. Her best subject at school is English, and she wants to be a journalist one day. "I wouldn't be a ranger because there is not enough security," she says.

Anna's father, Gawa Phiri, also a game ranger, died from meningitis in 2006. She lives with his sister, Martha Phiri, a primary school teacher, her husband Maxwell, an accountant, and their four children in eastern Lusaka. The approach road is dusty, bumpy, unpaved and fringed with rubbish. Outside the grey concrete-block house is the stench of raw sewage. Anna's bedroom has two double beds shared by four children. Dolls and teddy bears are strewn around the room. A green curtain is strung up by the window and the walls are pockmarked under a corrugated roof and naked lightbulb. A shoebox is perched on top of a wardrobe.

Barefoot and wearing a turquoise dress with white leggings, Anna rummages in a suitcase and produced a homemade photo album. It includes a picture of her mother with short hair, a blue T-shirt, light trousers and an unsmiling, careworn look. "I feel very bad when I look at it." Among her most precious possessions is a red and white dress that belonged to her mother. "It means a lot to me. I will wear it one day."

Recalling the day of her mother's funeral, Anna is tearful yet composed. "I was told by my aunt. It was very disturbing and shocking. My mother was very brave. I'm proud of her. I think about her a lot. It's very difficult now because I don't get to see my brothers and sisters often. I don't know how they are doing."

Across the city Esnart's son, George, 14, lives with his uncle, Mathews Phiri. "Mum didn't tell me much about the job," George mumbles shyly. "But I knew it was dangerous."

The long flat ROAD to Mumbwa, 135km from Lusaka, passes through a broiling marketplace selling farm produce, knock-off furniture and Manchester City football mugs. A sign for a traditional healer from Malawi promises penis enlargements and the magical return of runaway spouses. In Mumbwa is the simple house that Esnart bought but never occupied. It is now home to her siblings and three other children: the boys Annex, 12, and Chimunya, eight, and her adopted seven-year-old daughter Irene. Their father Annex, a polygamist who already had a wife when he met Esnart, died from an illness. Now the trio lives alongside her sister Abigail's two children.

There is electricity here and a digital TV and DVD player, but water must be fetched from an outside pump. Beyond a torn sheet in a doorway is the main bedroom, where foam oozes out of a split mattress, paint is cracked on the walls and a weathered mosquito net hangs limp. The family toilet is a dark pit in the ground in a ramshackle backyard shed.

Abigail, 31, is in charge of Esnart's estate and has kept her sister's ranger's uniform. "It reminds me of her because she used to wear it often," she says, sitting in a cramped, stuffy lounge with a fridge parked in the corner. "But I rarely look at it because it's painful."

She still feels bitterness towards the poachers whose actions that day continue to ripple through numerous lives. "I can't forgive them, because the impact of what they did is still being felt now. The main problem is that I'm the only sister looking after the kids, and I don't have a job. Sometimes I do piece work, but it might not suffice to look after the needs of the children. They miss their mother. I would like them all to be in one place, but I can't manage to keep all of them. They miss each other very much."

Another of Esnart's brothers, Muyeni Paundi, 22, a taxi driver, chips in: "The authorities should have done more. When the incident happened, she had no firearm and they had no handcuffs. They should also give financial support, especially for the kids. They were supposed to. Esnart's children need to be together for that brother and sister relationship."

A family friend wanders in, wearing the camouflage uniform of a wildlife police officer. Ellison Kanyembo, 47, had known Esnart since they were at training school in the 1990s. "We were tribal cousins," he recalls fondly. "She was good to me. We were like brother and sister, helping each other. She was courageous. She admired the job and was not frightened. She liked going in the field and seeing animals. She liked adventure in the wilderness. She liked cooking and she cooked fritters for me sometimes. I saw her three days before she died. It was as if she knew she was going to die. She said: 'Look after my children – this one, that one – I don't know if I'll come back.' It was like she was saying goodbye."

Kanyembo says that news of her death had a terrible impact on him: "It pained me spiritually, physically. There was that hurt in me."

Esnart's story chimes with those of many park rangers: gratitude for a job of any kind to feed and clothe numerous dependents, but low pay and the constant threat of a violent demise. In the absence of government support, her family was rescued by donations from the Thin Green Line Foundation.

What safety net, then, for other grieving spouses and children left to pick up the pieces? It is a question that corrodes the spirit of the Kalounga family back in Rufunsa where, down a bone-shaking dirt track, is a gate to the Lower Zambezi national park decorated with the skulls of buffalo, elephant and sable. Mathias Kalounga, 49, is among the rangers who patrols and camps there for unbroken stretches of 15 days. He has a wife and nine children aged from three to 22.

"I love keeping God's creation," he says. "I'm not afraid of anything. I have been shot at. We met some poachers and they started shooting and there was an exchange of fire. The poachers ran off and left their cooking equipment. I was not afraid at all."

But the danger weighs heavily upon his wife, Loyce. "It was close to the camp and we even heard the gunshots. I was worried that my husband might be killed and not make it home. He was outnumbered – three rangers against four poachers. I wish he did a different job, because this one is very dangerous. When I worry, I don't feel well."

If the worst happened to Mathias, Loyce, a housewife, would be left alone to fend for her children. "The authorities don't care about other people's lives," she muses. "We see what happens. Esnart was working for the government, but when she died the government did not look after the orphans. It's a big responsibility to feed my children and send them to school. When my husband dies, the government will do nothing to help me and my children. We will be in very big problems."

Even in life, the family endures deep hardship. Mathias and Loyce share the sole bed while their children sleep on the floor. There is no electricity or running water. Mathias earns just 1,700 kwacha (£201) per month. "It's very little, not enough to pay for the children to go to school. Some of them do and some don't."

When Zambia's vice-president, Guy Scott, was informed that Esnart's family had still not received any government support, he said that something had gone wrong and asked for her name so that it could be rectified.

One of the FIERCEST battlegrounds is also one of the world's most popular tourist destinations: South Africa, where on average a rhino is poached every 11 hours. Backed by international crime syndicates feeding a demand for horn in the Far East, poachers have been known to use helicopters, specialised silent tranquillisers, body armour, night-vision equipment and mercenaries experienced in rhino tracking.

Officials have vowed to "fight fire with fire" and deployed troops in the famed Kruger national park, where gun battles are increasingly common. Major-General Johan Jooste, who heads the joint military, police and game ranger operations, recently described the influx of poachers from Mozambique as an "insurgency" requiring a "counter- insurgency".

Wanda Mkutshulwa, managing executive of corporate services for South Africa national parks (SANParks), says: "Except for an accident between a ranger and a soldier who mistook each other for a suspected armed and aggressive poacher, there have been no fatalities of rangers in the Kruger national park related to suspected poaching in the past five years. This is something we live in fear of and, with the escalating incursions into the park and the increasing aggression of the suspects, it is only a matter of time before this happens.

"We are dealing with an enemy that has no rules and respects none, while the rangers are expected to first attempt arrest and can only shoot once they are shot at. The poachers are in control of time and place, because you never know where or when they will surface due to the size of the park – which is about half the size of Switzerland and bigger than Swaziland."

The rangers are the "forgotten victims" of the poaching war, according to Sean Willmore, an Australian-based conservationist, documentary maker and president of the International Ranger Federation. Willmore is the driving force behind the Thin Green Line Foundation, whose champions include Jane Goodall, the celebrated British primatologist. "Rangers are often outgunned, outnumbered and outresourced by illegal commercial poachers," Willmore says. "And, sadly, on a weekly basis, they are shot at, hacked to death and sometimes even tortured if they survive the bullets. I have many graphic and horrifying examples."

The foundation says it has given support to 80 widows and more than 550 orphans of rangers killed in action, but still has more than 900 widows waiting for help. Willmore adds: "With little or no compensation, many rangers' widows and children are often left destitute and below the poverty line. The children are often taken out of school with no source of income for the family. The poverty cycle for these families is set in motion. This is the thanks we give these rangers and their families for risking their lives for the animals we all care about."