Dancing in Damascus
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There's dancing in a nightclub in Damascus, though some remain seated during the songs played in honour of the leaders of Syria and Hezbollah. And not much dancing in the suburbs. How are locals coping after five years of war? He started out as a caring psychiatrist, and before his capture he lived as an alternative healer. Yes, it's the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. who may be convicted of genocide next week. Playing chess with God - or rather, in a stunning part of Ethiopia called the Chess pieces of God, is it check mate for some very rare animals, or the local mountain people? In Romania, shepherds cloaked in sheep skins are on the war path, and we sail past the remotest island in the world, Bouvetoya. It is only inhabited by penguins, but has its own internet domain.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading this edition of From Our Own Correspondent From the BBC. |
| 0:05.0 | It was first broadcast on the 19th of March 2016 and it's presented by Kate A. |
| 0:11.0 | Hello, today the psychiatrist on trial for genocide. |
| 0:16.1 | Our correspondent takes a hard look at Radavan Karajich facing the verdict of the |
| 0:20.9 | International Tribunal at the Hague. We go dancing in a nightclub in Damascus |
| 0:26.8 | where the sounds of disco are interspersed with patriotic songs. In Ethiopia the people and rare animals in the mountainous north face an |
| 0:36.2 | uncertain future in an area called the chess pieces of God. Shepherds in Romania |
| 0:42.2 | are on the warpath cloaked in sheepskins, and we hear about |
| 0:46.3 | penguins in the far-far south who get loosely connected to the internet. The International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague is |
| 0:55.4 | expected to announce its verdicts next Thursday in the trial of the former |
| 0:59.6 | Bosnian Serb leader Radavan Karich. He faces 11 charges of genocide, crimes against |
| 1:06.2 | humanity and breaches of the Geneva Convention for his role in the Bosnian War, including |
| 1:12.0 | the massacre at Trerebrinitza. |
| 1:14.0 | Mr Carrijich has said he has a clear conscience. |
| 1:18.0 | So what kind of a man goes from psychiatrist to warmonger? |
| 1:22.0 | John Sweeney recalls that time in Sarajevo. |
| 1:25.0 | The red tracer fire would arc across the night sky for hour after hour. |
| 1:31.0 | It was a thing of beauty were it not so murderous. In the early |
| 1:36.1 | 90s we would sit in the holiday in in Sarajevo and watch the bullets dance |
| 1:41.4 | upon the city and sip our whiskeys and talk and talk |
| 1:47.4 | about the madness that had gripped old Yugoslavia. At the dead center of our conversation was the local madman, Radavan Karajich, the one-time |
| 1:58.4 | psychiatrist who became the leader of the Bosnian Serbs. The city turned into a siege. The Serbs on the hills |
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