Sri Lanka After the Bombings
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2020
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sri Lanka's economy was improving and tourism flourishing after three decades of civil war but last Easter, a group of Muslims youths, inspired by Islamic State group, murdered more than 250 people in a series of bomb attacks. Jane Corbin has been gauging the lasting effect on the island, one year on.
In Georgia, the country's powerful Orthodox Church is at loggerheads with the government over Easter celebrations. Despite restrictions on gatherings of more than three people to tackle the Coronavirus pandemic, churches across the country remain defiantly open and offer holy communion with a shared spoon. It is a case of church versus state, faith versus science says Rayhan Demetriye.
Richard Dimbleby's report from the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, liberated by British troops seventy-five years ago, remains one of the most remarkable broadcasts ever. It was a revelation as he carefully detailed the horrific reality of the Nazi’s ‘final solution’. His son Jonathan recently returned to the camp with film maker Simon Broughton and one of the survivors.
In Paris another survivor from the Nazi era tells David Chazan what he thinks about President Emmanuel Macron’s approach to the pandemic - will he succeed in uniting the French behind him as the country fights what he calls "a kinetic war"?
“Patient zero” may be the present day term for the original carrier of a disease but it is not a new concept. Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the bubonic plague and now Covid 19 all had major stories of detection around them and the one which looms largest in folk memory says Kevin Connolly is that of the Irish cook, Typhoid Mary, once dubbed "the most dangerous woman in America".
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:06.6 | Good morning. |
| 0:07.8 | Today, religion versus restrictions. |
| 0:10.6 | It's led to an almighty rift between the Orthodox Church and the state in Georgia. |
| 0:16.0 | 75 years after the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by British troops, |
| 0:22.0 | a survivor and our correspondent encounter bird song and emptiness. |
| 0:27.9 | In Paris, another survivor from the Nazi era tells us what he thinks about the French President's approach to the pandemic. |
| 0:36.2 | And another tale of a traveling disease carried to New York 120 years ago by an Irish woman known to history as typhoid Mary. |
| 0:47.0 | First to Sri Lanka, still scarred by the three decade-long civil war between Buddhist Sinhales and Tamils, which ended just |
| 0:55.2 | over ten years ago. Since when the economy improved and tourism flourished. Then |
| 1:00.9 | last Easter a group of Muslim youths influenced by ISIS murdered 270 people in a series of attacks |
| 1:09.0 | Jane Corbin has been gauging the lasting effect one year on. |
| 1:14.0 | It's like Paradise, White Beaches, palm trees and warm hospitable people. |
| 1:20.0 | No wonder Sri Lanka was a dream holiday destination. |
| 1:24.0 | But all that changed a year ago on Easter Sunday. |
| 1:28.0 | Blood and sirens filled the air. |
| 1:31.0 | Screaming churchgoers, shell-shocked tourists ran through the streets |
| 1:36.4 | as three churches and four luxury hotels were bombed within half an hour. That day changed the lives of hundreds of Sri Lankans, |
| 1:47.0 | but it also changed the lives of two men from thousands of miles away, from London. One caught up in the bombing of the Shangri-Lau Hotel miraculously |
| 1:57.4 | survived. The other lost a brother and a sister in the same hotel. I spent time with both of them when they came back to |
| 2:06.8 | Sri Lanka as they tried to move beyond their own fear and tragedy to help the people of this island who suffered so much that day. |
| 2:17.2 | I've spent years reporting the worst of humankind, the wars, the bombs, the famines and the cruelty but unusually for me this is a story that gives hope |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.