Bosnian concentration camp photo and hero clown

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service.

We hear how a shocking photo from a Bosnian concentration camp stunned the world, what it's like to be in a tornado and the heroic clown who helped after an earthquake in Peru.

Plus the 1980 military coup in Suriname and the moment in the 1960s when African de-colonisation might have led to a United States of Africa.

This programme contains descriptions of sexual violence.

(Photo: Fikret Alic in a Bosnian refugee camp. Credit: ITN/Shutterstock)

Transcript

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0:00.0	An original audio drama series from the BBC World Service, Fukushima tells the story of the 2011 disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant.
0:12.0	We lose the Daiichi nuclear power plant. Then we lose Japan as we know it.
0:16.8	Listen to the series now by searching for Fukushima
0:19.8	wherever you get your BBC Podcasts.
0:30.3	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there. This week a military coup in
0:35.3	Surinam just five years after independence from the Netherlands. They spoke so nicely
0:40.8	about what they would do, how good they would organize everything and how
0:47.0	relative to be for poor people. That's what they said. So people believe them.
0:53.0	Plus the moment in the early 1960s when there might have been a United States of Africa.
0:58.0	From just 10 years ago we'll be chasing one of the biggest tornadoes the United States of America has ever witnessed, and a circus
1:04.8	clown who acted heroically to save children after a deadly earthquake in Peru.
1:09.7	My dad was a performance used to making people happy and suddenly he found himself in the middle of this difficult painful tragedy.
1:19.0	That's all coming up later in the podcast but we're going to begin by remembering one of the most shocking images to have emerged from the Balkan conflict in the early 1990s.
1:29.0	It's an image that changed the world's view of the war which broke out following the collapse of
1:33.9	the former Yugoslavia. It spoke of the depravity which swept the region as Serbs, Bosnians
1:39.4	and Croats fought each other. It showed a man, one among many, who'd been treated dreadfully by
1:44.6	his captors. The reporter Ed Vuleyami was there at the time and a warning parts of his story
1:50.4	contains details of sexual violence. Just over 30 years ago, a shocking photograph of a starving emaciated man behind the barbed wire fence of a Bosnian
2:10.0	concentration camp stunned the world. The picture, taken from a television news report, was of
2:17.6	a Bosniac Muslim called Figret Alich. Moments before it was captured, Figres and I met for the very first time.
2:25.2	His face looked almost skeletal with its taut skin, hollow eyes, sharp cheek bones and angular chin.
2:34.0	Whilst I found his gaunt appearance alarming, I also disturbed him.
	...

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