Albania's Iranian Guests
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2019
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From their base in Albania, some 3,000 Iranian exiles are committed to overthrowing the government of Iran. Linda Pressly finds out how some members of the M.E.K - the Mujahedin-e Khalq – are adapting to life in Europe.
Kate Adie introduces this and other stories:
It's thirty years since the fall of Czechoslovakia's communist regime, but Chris Bowlby finds the ghostly remains of its past still looming large in one former steel town.
Long-sleeved shirt, trousers tucked into her socks and copious amounts of insect repellent – Sian Griffiths reports from Canada where tiny black legged ticks are migrating north and spreading disease.
“We Kenyan journalists joke that reporting on famine is easy: you just find your old script from a previous one - and repeat it” says Anna Mawathe as she considers one possible solution to hunger in her homeland.
And what happens when you get locked out of a motorhome in rural Andalucía, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with no wallet and no shoes. Tim Smith reports from Spain.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:05.6 | Good morning. |
| 0:06.8 | Today, unwanted reminders and one of the less beautiful legacies of the communist era, gigantic heaps of rusting heavy industry looming |
| 0:16.3 | over fashionable cafes as in the Czech Republic. |
| 0:20.6 | Here country dog walkers have learned to be vigilant about the tick, but in Canada |
| 0:26.0 | beware the black-legged tick which is on the march an invasion from America. |
| 0:31.9 | Yet another superfood discovered. It's nutritious, drought-resistant, |
| 0:36.5 | and though it looks a bit like gray dust, our correspondent thinks it could be a winner. |
| 0:41.4 | And how getting locked out of your caravan can provide an |
| 0:45.0 | unexpected lesson in Andalusian hospitality and rural depopulation. |
| 0:52.0 | Albania is trying to establish itself as a tourist destination, shaking off the |
| 0:57.7 | grim communist regime which isolated it from Europe. But it's recently been hosting a number of very non-tourist visitors. |
| 1:07.0 | This summer Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani went to an Albanian village just outside of Tirana. At a well-guarded |
| 1:15.9 | encumptment in a glitzy auditorium he gave a rising speech. The occasion |
| 1:21.2 | a free Iran event, the annual conference of the Meek, the Mujah Hadin |
| 1:28.0 | E Kalk. Their aim shared by New York's former mayor is the overthrow of the Iranian government. |
| 1:35.0 | Over two and a half thousand members of the group live in a military-style camp on a hillside about 20 miles from the Albanian capital. |
| 1:44.0 | The MEK's official message is one of political transformation for Iran, gender equality and |
| 1:50.3 | a respect for human rights. Linda Presley went to hear how some of its members are adapting to life in Europe. |
| 1:57.0 | Let's go and see then come back fast. |
| 2:01.0 | And with that, Hassan Hirani is out of the car and striding ahead of us up the |
| 2:05.4 | turfy path. He's nervy. Overhead a flock of birds swoops and dives, darkened dots against the perfectly blue sky. |
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