BBC Radio 4
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 25 September 2010
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A corner of old Germany is unearthed in Latin America as Will Grant follows Venezuelans preparing for a crucial vote. Jonathan Head travels to the east of Turkey where there’s been, according to the government, a gesture of reconciliation towards an Armenian minority, subjected to mass killing during the First World War. Fifty years on from independence in Nigeria, Anna Horsbrugh-Porter meets up with two men working there back in 1960. Paul Harper’s in a Yemeni town which comes to a standstill after lunch as its men grow euphoric, chewing the leaves of the qat plant. And why are numbers so sharply down at the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas? Kevin Connolly muses on the attractions of conspicuous consumption in a time of recession and the transience of fame.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, you've downloaded the BBC Radio programme from our own correspondent. We make two versions, |
| 0:05.8 | and if you'd like to hear our World Service programme, you'll find it on the BBC iPlayer. |
| 0:10.4 | This, though, is the edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's presented by Kate Adie. |
| 0:15.7 | Today, a tragedy but not a war crime. That's Turkey's view, as it starts to fill in some of the blank pages of its history. |
| 0:23.2 | We discover a corner of old Germany in Latin America as Venezuelans prepare for a crucial vote tomorrow. |
| 0:30.5 | The hazards of taking an Alfresco shower in Yemen, and why Americans seem to have lost interest in a man who collected Rolls Royces and once sported sparkly hotpants. |
| 0:41.7 | An extraordinary event took place last weekend in the shadow of an ancient castle in eastern Turkey. |
| 0:48.0 | Priests were allowed to conduct a service in an ancient Armenian church for the first time in nearly a century. |
| 0:59.3 | It was, according to the government, a gesture of reconciliation towards the Armenian minority, |
| 1:04.1 | which was subjected to mass killing and deportation during the First World War. |
| 1:09.0 | Many around the world describe those events as the modern era's first genocide. |
| 1:12.4 | But the Turks refused to accept that term and make considerable diplomatic efforts to prevent foreign governments and parliaments from adopting it. |
| 1:17.9 | Jonathan Head was in the province of Vann, watching the church service and reflecting on local |
| 1:22.9 | attitudes towards the past. From the vantage point of the ancient castle perched atop a rocky outcrop, |
| 1:29.6 | you can see the whole city of Vann spread out between the dazzling blue of the Great Lake and the |
| 1:34.6 | jagged mountains to the east. It's a featureless sprawl of ugly apartment blocks that you might find |
| 1:40.4 | in any provincial Turkish city. Nothing suggests that it has any history going back |
| 1:45.6 | more than a few decades. If you then look to the south, directly beneath you, is an area of rough |
| 1:51.5 | grass crisscrossed by a maze of paths with just a few fragments of building still visible. |
| 1:57.6 | This is Old Van, a city that, until its destruction, had been continuously inhabited for more than 3,000 years. |
| 2:05.0 | And a large part of the people who inhabited it were Armenians. |
| 2:08.9 | It had once been at the heart of a great Armenian empire. |
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