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From Our Own Correspondent

Shunned in Sri Lanka

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.41.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Throughout Sri Lanka's decades long conflict, attention has focused on the confrontation between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils. The country’s Muslims, who are just 10 per cent of the population and see themselves as a separate ethnic group, have often been ignored. But that changed after this year's Easter Sunday attacks, carried out by a small cell of Sri Lankan Islamists, which claimed 250 lives. Since then many Muslims feel they have been demonised and ostracised. Our South Asia editor Jill McGivering has been in the main city, Colombo, to investigate. Over the past few weeks there has been a fierce crackdown by the Iranian authorities on protests across the country. The number of fatalities keeps being revised upwards, but getting precise details is tricky when the Iranian government seems determined to keep outsiders and its own citizens in the dark. As Jiyar Gol explains, even under normal conditions, BBC Persian’s journalists, who broadcast to 20 million around the world and 10 million inside the country, must resort to ingenious tactics to gather and broadcast the news. In the middle of popular unrest and a media blackout, their job is even harder. Celebrations have been taking place in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, after the transitional authorities officially dissolved the former ruling party of the deposed president, Omar al Bashir. Our former Sudan correspondent James Copnall went back to explore the changes and began in a girls' school in Khartoum. He found a new openness in almost every conversation and that newly gained freedoms have also led to a series of unprecedented street protests. Protests are back again in the Georgian capital Tbilisi as thousands demand electoral reform. Recently police used water cannons to disperse protesters picketing the parliament building. Campaigners want a switch to proportional representation which they say would ensure a more democratic multi- party parliament. Since 2012 the country’s legislature has been dominated by the governing Georgian Dream party. Rayhan Demytrie talks to those who fear that Georgia’s fragile democracy may be at risk, thanks to one man -a billionaire with a James Bond style hilltop lair. And how do you cover protests as a journalist when you are also pumping breast milk? Our South America correspondent Katy Watson needs to keep up the supply of milk for her new baby but she doesn't have an office job where she can plug a in pump and sit at a desk.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

0:05.0

Good morning.

0:07.0

Today, scores of deaths in a crackdown on protests in cities across Iran. But there's a government news blackout, so how do you report on

0:16.0

what's happening when the authorities suppress information and threaten journalists, even those

0:21.6

living outside the country.

0:24.1

In Sudan, protests have become a way of life, as many relish the newfound freedoms, but maybe it's

0:30.5

a bit too soon to celebrate and will the generals step aside to allow fair elections.

0:36.0

Thousands have taken to the streets in Georgia too, worried that a billionaire with Kremlin

0:42.0

connections is threatening the country's hard-won reforms?

0:46.2

And what's it like covering demonstrations around South America when you're both a journalist

0:51.5

and a breastfeeding mother.

0:54.0

Earlier this year on Easter Sunday, Sri Lanka was hit by a series of major attacks on churches

1:00.4

and international hotels. More than 250 people died.

1:05.5

The bombings were carried out by a small cell of Sri Lankan Islamists and seven months on the

1:11.2

country is still in shock. There was another consequence too a new wave

1:15.6

of harassment of Muslims who make up 10% of the population by the majority Buddhist

1:21.2

Sinhala community according to Jill McEvering in the capital, Colombo.

1:26.9

She didn't strike me as sad, at first.

1:30.0

Her eyes were mischievous when she smiled.

1:32.3

She talked me through the sepia photograph framed on the wall,

1:35.4

a picture from another age, a formal portrait of family members in a stiff row,

1:40.8

herself a thin girl of about eight, her father a self-made businessman in spectacles and

...

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