The Dictator Hunter
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The challenge of rebuilding Syria. Kate Adie introduces stories and insight from correspondents around the world: Jeremy Bowen has just returned from Damascus and concludes that though the fighting may have stopped “the virus of war has spread - not just breaking bodies, hearts, and minds, but poisoning the future.” Lucy Ash discovers how seaweed farming in Zanzibar has proved a liberating force for thousands of women on the island. Helen Nianias hears about one Uganda woman’s life-changing encounter after a night out clubbing. Slightly tipsy, on her way home in the early hours of the morning, she came across a baby that had been abandoned in the street and took it home. Ashwin Bhardwaj retraces the steps of Brigadier Edmund “Trotsky” Davies in Albania and reveals his secret mission during the Second World War. And Heidi Fuller-Love discovers how the fallout from the Greek financial crisis is still having an impact - on animals as well as people.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:03.8 | Hello, today we hear how seaweed is transforming lives in Zanzibar, making some people rich and shifting the sexual balance of power. |
| 0:13.9 | From Uganda, the tale of a chance encounter on the roadside after a night out clubbing that changed one woman's life. |
| 0:21.3 | From Albania, the story of Britain's secret mission in the Second World War, |
| 0:25.9 | and eight years on, since the Greek financial crisis, |
| 0:29.3 | we hear how it's still affecting animals as well as people. |
| 0:33.8 | When Syrian rebels refused to discuss a possible truce on Wednesday, pro-government and Russian forces stepped up their bombardment of towns in Dura province, launching intense air and artillery strikes. |
| 0:46.9 | On Thursday, the rebels returned to the negotiating table. |
| 0:51.2 | The Syrian army and its allies have made significant gains in the southwest of the country |
| 0:55.7 | since their focus shifted to the areas close to the border with Jordan and the boundary with the |
| 1:01.2 | Golan Heights. In and around the capital Damascus, the fighting's over, but as Jeremy Bowen has seen, |
| 1:07.9 | years of conflict are taking their toll. A war is not just a huge, noisy engine of destruction and chaos. |
| 1:15.6 | It also seeps into lives like a virus. |
| 1:19.6 | Even Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, back in 2011 as the Arab uprisings were sweeping through the Middle East, |
| 1:26.6 | said Syria faced conspiracies that spread |
| 1:29.8 | like germs. He believed his presidency was the cure. The Syrians who disagreed demonstrated against |
| 1:37.2 | him and later on some took up arms against his regime. People on every side of the argument can see that the war virus infects everything and |
| 1:47.9 | anything. The other day in Damascus, the BBC team stopped for our usual lunch of Shawarma, |
| 1:55.7 | delicious sliced chicken wrapped in a damascene flatbread. While it was being prepared, I gave some first aid to a small |
| 2:03.1 | boy in the street outside who gashed his knee, playing, not because of the war. A pleasant woman in |
| 2:09.1 | her twenties helped and then got talking to my colleague. A few years ago, she said, her husband was |
| 2:15.6 | carrying their ten-month-old as he walked down the street, |
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