Memento Mori
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a week of remembrance and recollection, Jannat Jalil explains how the French authorities - who are preparing to remember those killed in last November’s Paris attacks - find other deaths on the capital’s streets more than fifty years ago far more difficult to commemorate. Adam Easton in Warsaw reflects on how Poles saw their country’s recent history in the life and work of one of their leading film directors, Andrzej Wajda, who died this week. Carrie Gracie in Beijing joins one of the Chinese Communist Party’s new pilgrimage tours to revolutionary martyr sites from the civil war era of the twentieth century which President Xi Jinping wants party members to attend in order to rekindle ideological fervour. Robin Denselow reports on how Turkey’s volatile political situation is having an effect on Islamic cooperation even at Sufi festivals, like the famous one he visited at Konya. And we remember Chris Simpson, a long-standing and distinguished contributor to "From Our Own Correspondent", who died suddenly this week. We hear again a characteristically witty and perceptive dispatch he recorded in the Central African Republic in 2010.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading from our own correspondent. |
| 0:03.0 | This edition was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday the 22nd of October 2016. |
| 0:09.0 | It's introduced by Kate 80. |
| 0:12.0 | Hello, how the political crackdown affects everyday life in Turkey, even at a Sufi music festival. |
| 0:20.0 | In China, our correspondent joins a communist pilgrimage to learn all about the correct |
| 0:25.3 | behavior for a good party member. |
| 0:28.2 | In Poland, the life of a film director is fondly remembered, while in France there are mixed emotions about remembering |
| 0:35.2 | a massacre over half a century ago. |
| 0:39.5 | First to China. |
| 0:40.8 | How to keep the party going? Not an invitation to jollity and fun, but the renewed effort by the ruling |
| 0:46.8 | Communist Party to keep the faithful in line in the face of mounting corruption and sleazy |
| 0:52.4 | misdoings. |
| 0:54.3 | President Xi Jin Ping is emphasizing discipline and conduct |
| 0:58.8 | at next week's meeting of the party elite. |
| 1:01.7 | As well as suppressing dissent and protest in the general public, he's |
| 1:05.6 | sending party members on pilgrimages to remember revolutionary martyrs. Carrie Gracie |
| 1:11.8 | went along with one group visiting sites from the Civil War in the 1940s. |
| 1:17.0 | The prison cell is lit by three holes cut in the coarse clay roof tiles, a grey autumn light dappling the bowed heads of 50 middle-aged |
| 1:28.3 | men reciting poetry. |
| 1:31.7 | Behind bars is where you'll find a lot of Communist Party officials these days, corrupted |
| 1:36.4 | by access to wealth and power. |
| 1:39.6 | But this prison is a museum, and these prisoners are here only for the day. Their visit |
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