The Sacred Crocodiles
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 September 2012
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thomas Fessy flew into The Gambia to ask questions about recent executions. But he was thrown out of the country. It's left him asking: what have the authorities got to hide? Iraqi police and army officers have been accused of taking part in a murderous campaign of persecution against the country's gay community. Natalia Antelava meets one senior official who reckons there are only about ten homosexuals in the whole country and, he tells her "they need to change." John Laurenson's in a vast shanty town on the edge of Madrid hearing stories from people who've lost everything in the economic crisis. The man who looked after the sacred crocodiles in the Ivory Coast is not doing the job any longer. John James tells us about his very last day at work. And Kathy Flower, who lives in a village in the French Pyrenees, finds that the mayor plays a significant part in French community life.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a download from the BBC, this is from our own correspondent. |
| 0:04.6 | You can hear the version of the program we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our |
| 0:08.6 | site at BBC online. |
| 0:10.8 | But here's the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Adi. |
| 0:16.0 | Today expelled from the Gambia, our correspondent wonders what have the authorities got to hide? |
| 0:22.0 | A final day at work for the man who looked after the sacred |
| 0:25.5 | crocodiles of Ivory Coast. There's an extraordinary moment in a church in the middle of Madrid's |
| 0:30.9 | hard drugs market? |
| 0:32.7 | And why does it help a French mayor to be a dab hand |
| 0:35.6 | with a sledgehammer? |
| 0:38.1 | Now you can find a sprawl of makeshift dwellings |
| 0:40.2 | on the edge of many cities. |
| 0:41.6 | From Mumbai to Manila, Rio to Johannesburg places without |
| 0:45.1 | electricity, running water or proper sewers. But there are also shantytowns in Europe, |
| 0:50.7 | the biggest just south of Madrid, is called the Kanyada Real. |
| 0:55.0 | For 700 years this piece of ground has been common land, which nobody's allowed to buy, sell, |
| 1:00.4 | or build on. |
| 1:01.4 | But the poorest people in Spain started putting up illegal |
| 1:04.8 | dwellings for themselves there in the 1940s, and today tens of thousands live |
| 1:10.2 | along the Canyada Real, many in conditions you wouldn't expect inside the European Union. |
| 1:16.3 | And John Lawrence's been finding out that the deeper the Yure crisis bites, the more people |
| 1:21.3 | move in. |
... |
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