40 Years Of War

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2018

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amidst the violence, there are signs of a small but growing peace movement in Afghanistan. Kate Adie introduces stories and insight from correspondent around the world: "This has again become, largely, an Afghan war," says Kate Clark in Kabul, " it is now overwhelmingly Afghans killing Afghans," but she has also noticed growing public exasperation at the conflict. Diana Darke joined the British peers and priests recently granted access to Syria by the government, but as an Arabic speaker, who knows the country well, she was able to look beyond the official narrative and what her guides wanted her to see. In a refugee camp in Bangladesh, home to some of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people who have fled violence in Myanmar, Aisha Gani stumbled across an unlikely scene. As they prepare their makeshift homes for the monsoon season, young men still find time to party. Kevin Connolly has been rummaging through his attic and wondering what the changing design of matrioshka, or Russian, dolls reveal about Russia today. And Sophie Raworth explains what it’s like to run 150 miles through sand dunes and over rocky cliffs in the Moroccan desert - carrying everything you need to survive for six days.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:02.0	Hello, today in Syria a glimpse of what's really happening there under slightly awkward circumstances.
0:11.0	We stumble across an unlikely scene in Bangladesh, a midday rave in one of the world's
0:16.8	biggest refugee camps. What do Russian dolls tell us about a changing nation, and running six marathons in six days in the scorching
0:27.0	desert heat, our correspondent catches her breath to tell us about it.
0:32.8	In what's become a macabre annual ritual, the Taliban formally announced the start of
0:37.8	their spring offensive on Wednesday.
0:40.8	So far this month they've already killed the deputy governor of one eastern province in
0:45.1	Afghanistan and dozens of soldiers and policemen and ISIS is expanding there.
0:51.4	The government is fighting back, but inevitably civilians find themselves
0:56.4	caught up in seemingly never-ending violence. In Kabul, Kate Clark has noticed a new level of public exasperation at the conflict.
1:06.4	Too many people talk about the Afghan war being 17 years old.
1:11.0	They're rarely Afghan. Here the events of 2001 seem quite recent. Instead the
1:17.0	country is remembering the real start of the conflict when leftist military
1:21.3	officers seized power in a coup d'etat 40 years ago in April 1978.
1:27.0	The party which came to power had no popular basis and ruled with such clumsy and brutish force it incited rebellion and so the war began.
1:37.6	I could detail all the sorry years between then and now, the war crimes and the suffering, but it would take all the time of this
1:44.4	broadcast and much more. So I'll look just at a little of what's happening now. Today,
1:50.8	many Afghans will be remembering their beloved family members who disappeared after the 1978 coup,
1:57.1	arrested and never seen again. One scholar put their number at between 50 and 100,000. They were members of the old elite,
2:06.4	mullahs, tribal leaders, school children and teachers, Islamists and the wrong sort of leftists, farmers, nomads, tradesmen, scholars.
2:17.0	The fortunate few who were released told tales of torture, death from disease in the overcrowded jails and secret executions.
	...

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