BBC Radio 4
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2011
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Aleem Maqbool reports on Karachi, where inter-ethnic violence between Urdu speakers and Pashtuns has killed hundreds in the last few months; as Sonia Gandhi receives medical treatment in the US, Mark Tully explores her enduring political power in India, despite the fact that she holds no government office; Orla Guerin is in Misrata, in Libya, where rockets still threaten civilians and little appears to have changed for the better; Sudan is now officially divided into two and Sudanese pride, especially in the north, has taken a battering - James Copnall describes how national hopes lay with a horse called Diktator at the Sudanese Derby; and despite their economic woes, Jake Wallis Simons sees how the Portuguese still found a way to celebrate, with trays full of bread.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is from our own correspondent. We make an edition for the BBC World Service as well, |
| 0:05.3 | but this is a download of the latest Radio 4 programme, and here to introduce it, as ever, Kate Adie. |
| 0:11.2 | Today, the young victims caught up in the violence in Karachi. |
| 0:15.5 | Sonia Gandhi is in the US for medical treatment. How did she become India's most powerful woman, |
| 0:21.5 | despite not holding a position in government? We hear how a four-legged dictator strains for the finishing |
| 0:27.4 | line in the Sudan Derby, and in spite of the country's economic troubles, the Portuguese |
| 0:33.1 | are busy celebrating. Karachi is one of the largest cities in the world. |
| 0:39.4 | It was the capital of Pakistan after independence until Islamabad was built. |
| 0:44.2 | Now it's the country's main seaport and financial hub. |
| 0:47.6 | But in the last few months it's also been beset by escalating violence |
| 0:51.7 | between the Urdu speaking majority and the growing minority of Pashtuns. |
| 0:57.2 | Ali Mok-Bul says it's become a city in which people are terrified in their homes, |
| 1:02.5 | listening to gunfire and news of abductions and killings. |
| 1:05.8 | And few of the 18 million inhabitants understand what triggered this bloodshed. |
| 1:11.3 | Earlier this summer in the densely packed Casper colony in the west of Karachi, |
| 1:16.6 | the violence came suddenly and it has persisted. |
| 1:20.5 | We're here to see two families who live just a few hundred metres apart, |
| 1:24.2 | but they're now on opposite sides of a brutal urban conflict. The family of one girl, Yomna, who's 13, lives at the bottom of the steep hill that dominates Kasper. The family of another 6-year-old Laiba lives at the very top. You can clearly see one home from the other, but really these two families now live in different worlds. |
| 1:46.1 | No longer can you walk directly from one house to the other. The deserted main road that runs between them has become a front line. |
| 1:54.3 | Scores of bullet holes all over the buildings close by are a warning not to cross what is a very tangible ethnic divide. |
| 2:03.0 | Yuma's family, like most of those living in the sprawling expanse at the bottom of the hill, |
| 2:07.7 | is Urdu speaking, a term given to those Muslims who chose to come over to Pakistan from India |
... |
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