Versions Of Reality
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is this the end of the Mugabe era? Kate Adie introduces correspondents' stories from around the world.
“Which version of reality would you like to read today?” Andrew Harding is asked as he’s offered a selection of newspapers in Zimbabwe.
Gabriel Gatehouse has been reporting on conflict for more than a decade but the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar has affected him like no other.
Caroline Bayley finds a surprising splash of red in a grey Moscow suburb – a strawberry firm turning a profit, not from harvesting fruit but producing houses.
Bethany Bell hears memories of the largest forced migration in European history – of the ethnic Germans made to leave their homes following the Second World War. Their stories have often received little international attention - overshadowed by the crimes of the Nazis.
And Clive Myrie has fulfilled a childhood dream – that of visiting Yemen. But the architectural wonders he longed to see have been disfigured by bullets and bombs.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:03.2 | Hello. Today among the huge number of Rohingya, more than 600,000 of them fleeing violence in Myanmar, |
| 0:10.8 | we hear about one woman's escape. Down on the farm in Russia where the |
| 0:15.5 | strawberries and blueberries grow but where the profit actually comes from |
| 0:19.3 | housing. In Germany memories of the forced migration which followed World War II were stirred by the arrival of today's refugees, |
| 0:28.0 | and the terrible state that Yemen is in as the war drags on. |
| 0:34.1 | Analysts, journalists and Zimbabweans themselves have spent the past few days trying to figure |
| 0:39.6 | out what's going on inside the country. |
| 0:42.2 | The military has announced it's taking action |
| 0:44.5 | against criminal elements within the ruling party. It puts soldiers on the |
| 0:48.6 | streets of the capital Harare and briefly took over the state broadcaster. But is this the end of |
| 0:54.9 | President Robert McGobby's long rule or merely a brief interruption? Andrew |
| 0:59.8 | Harding's been trying to find out. |
| 1:01.8 | It was a grey drizzly afternoon and the taxi driver who picked me up at Harare's Robert Gabriel Magabe International Airport |
| 1:10.0 | was in a feisty mood. |
| 1:12.0 | They should, he said, crush his testicles with a hammer. |
| 1:16.0 | He paused to savour the thought, then began explaining in some detail quite how drunk he planned to get |
| 1:22.0 | when the military finally forced President Mugabe to step down. |
| 1:26.0 | These are the strangest times in Zimbabwe, strange like an earthquake or a revolution or a dream. |
| 1:34.4 | As the waitress at my hotel put it this morning at breakfast, |
| 1:37.4 | as she Riley offered me a selection of local newspapers, |
| 1:41.5 | which version of reality would you like to read today? |
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