Darfur's ethnic war

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2021

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We hear about the start of the war in Darfur, through the eyes of a teenage boy whose life was changed when the Sudanese military allied to a local militia, the Janjaweed, laid waste to villages across the region, killing and raping as they went. We hear from a survivor of Norway's worst day of terror, when a far-right extremist, Anders Breivik, launched a bomb attack on government offices and attacked a summer camp. Plus a story from our archives from a British army officer during World War Two who witnessed the end of Italy's colonial rule in East Africa during a final battle in the Ethiopian town of Gondar. From Brazil, the women's rights activist whose story of abuse inflicted by her husband inspired the country's first legislation recognising different forms of domestic violence in 2006. Lastly, the story of how the family of the artist Vincent Van Gogh worked to get him recognised as a great painter after he died penniless in 1890. Photo: A young Darfurian refugee walks past a Sudan Liberation Army Land Rover filled with teenage rebel fighters on October 14 2004 in the violent North Darfur region of Sudan. (Photo by Benjamin Lowy/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson and the team who bring you eyewitness accounts of key events from the past this week the woman who helped change the law on domestic violence in Brazil.
0:13.4	When I was almost killed by my husband,
0:16.7	there wasn't a single police station I could go to in Brazil,
0:20.1	specializing in violence against women. Also, 10 years on, a survivor of Norway's worst day of terror.
0:27.0	I just saw this huge wall of people coming running towards me from down by the docks and you could see in their eyes that they had seen something terrible.
0:38.0	Plus how the relatives of Van Gogh nurtured his reputation and his art.
0:42.8	We took a hotel and in that bedroom
0:46.3	we saw a reproduction of the sunflowers.
0:49.4	So that was the moment that I realized
0:51.5	that I was a family member of a famous person.
0:54.3	And a graphic account of the Battle for Gondar, Italy's last stronghold in East Africa during the Second World
1:01.1	War. The fighting in the city was one long bloody fury, like a football crowd-bong man.
1:08.0	No one, it seemed, was in control of anybody.
1:11.0	That's all coming up later in the podcast. First up though we're looking back at the origins of a conflict which has blighted a vast region of Western Sudan for the past 18 years.
1:21.0	Alex last is here and Alex this is the war in Darfur. Yes Max it's yeah it's a war in which
1:27.1	hundreds of thousands have been killed more than 2 million people have been forced to flee
1:32.0	their homes.
1:33.2	Yet as so often is the case around the world,
1:35.6	attention seems to have moved on over the years.
1:38.9	You might be aware that last year,
1:40.6	while the world was all focused on COVID,
1:42.4	a new Darfur peace deal was
	...

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