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Intrigue

Mayday - Bonus: The Evidence Gatherers

Intrigue

BBC

True Crime, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.64.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2021

⏱️ 54 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In a secret location in a European city is an archive that contains over a million documents. It’s run by a tough-talking Canadian, Bill Wiley, who set up an evidence-gathering organisation funded by Western governments. Using undercover criminal investigators operating inside a war zone, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) has spent the last eight years extracting official documents from Syria. Wiley says that evidence will prove that the Assad regime has been responsible for a campaign of torture and murder against its own people. CIJA's documents are being used right now in a criminal case in the West to prosecute members of the Syrian regime. But there are those who would discredit the evidence and the people who gather it. These include a group of respected academics here in the UK who are accused of spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories about the war, twisting the narrative so that the Syrian regime becomes the victim and the British government bears responsibility for war crimes. It is a new kind of warfare being fought not on the ground but on the internet. Who will win? Writer, producer and presenter Chloe Hadjimatheou Editor Emma Rippon Researchers Orla O’Brien and Lara Al Gibaly Executive producer Maggie Latham Sound design and mix Neil Churchill Mark Fleischman played the role of Prof Paul McKeigue and the role of Ivan Commissioner for Radio 4 Richard Knight Correction: We stated that Feras Fayyad won an Oscar - instead his films were nominated on two occasions for an Oscar but did not win.

Transcript

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0:00.0

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

0:07.0

The 6 o'clock news from the BBC with John Humphreys and Andrew Hardy.

0:23.0

Good evening, the headlines at 6 o'clock.

0:24.6

One night when Nerma Yalachic was 15 years old, she and her family were sitting at home

0:29.9

watching the evening news when she saw something about stayed with her ever since.

0:35.9

These were images of men held in a couple of detention camps.

0:42.9

It was a hot summer day.

0:45.9

They were half-naked standing behind barbed wire in various stages of starvation.

0:55.9

It was 1992 and journalists from the Observer and ITN were reporting from Serb-run detention camps in Bosnia.

1:04.9

Behind barbed wire were hundreds of Muslim men.

1:08.9

You could see on one of the film reels these men were eating from the tin plates, some kind of a thin soup of nothing that was not possible for the thingies to tell them what they were going through.

1:24.9

What are the conditions like when she was 11?

1:27.9

Conditions are very bad.

1:30.9

And what do they give you here to be?

1:32.9

To be a great job.

1:33.9

Nothing is yet.

1:34.9

The tea, bread and soup.

1:38.9

Soap.

1:39.9

Nerma and her family were from Bosnia.

1:42.9

The war had forced them to flee.

1:44.9

And months earlier, they'd arrived in the UK as refugees.

1:48.9

She remembers the impact of those images from the camp.

...

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