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From Our Own Correspondent

Battle Lines

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.41.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2016

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today, twenty years after the Taliban took control of the Afghan capital, Kabul, Kate Clark, who was the only Western reporter in the country during their final years in power, reflects on what has changed there during the last twenty years. In Ethiopia, the government has this week declared a six-months-long state of emergency after violent protests in one of the nine ethnically-based states. James Jeffrey in Addis Ababa has been looking at the ethnic tensions which beset the country. The US presidential election campaign has been full of melodrama and incident more befitting a reality television show than a political debate. Gabriel Gatehouse passed through Washington en route to the rustbelt to gauge how far reality and the peculiar 2016 campaign are in alignment. Albania wants to be on everyone's tourist destination list after ending its long period of reclusive communist dictatorship. But Rob Stepney has found some national habits are so ingrained that making such a radical change isn't straightforward. The tentacles of corruption have inveigled their way deep into Mexican life, in part thanks to the drug trade. Antonia Quirke has been to the Caribbean coast to discover just how far they now reach and what effect they have on daily life.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Thank you for downloading from our own correspondent.

0:03.0

This edition was broadcast on BBC Radio 4

0:06.0

on Thursday the 13th of October 2016.

0:09.0

It's introduced by Kate Aide.

0:12.0

Hello.

0:13.0

Today, Ethiopia and its circular problems.

0:17.0

The churches are round, the mosques are round,

0:20.0

and its arguments go round and round.

0:23.4

What lies behind the rasmatous and viciousness of the American election campaign?

0:28.8

We head for the rust belt and the down and outs.

0:32.2

Albania, time to put it on your tourist's destination list,

0:35.8

though you'll have to like cheese. And huge pylons mean electricity, don't they?

0:41.0

Maybe not in the Mexican jungle. To Afghanistan first where the last

0:47.0

20 years have seen violence and social repression ebbing and flowing through

0:51.0

society. The Taliban in power for five years,

0:55.0

foreign troops intervening, then leaving, and now an uneasy atmosphere

1:00.2

with the Taliban gaining ground in rural areas and increasing

1:04.0

Borman suicide attacks in the capital Kabul,

1:07.3

where Kate Clark lives and she's been looking back over two decades of

1:12.1

change.

1:14.0

When I first came to Kabul in 1999, a third of the city lane rubble.

1:19.2

Buildings still standing were popmarked by shrapnel and bullets. I didn't meet anyone who hadn't lost a brother, a

...

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