Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

history as told by the people who were there.

This week fleeing the Hungarian uprising in 1956 to seek refuge in the West.

People would look at us with our bags and with our winter coats which were not very fashionable

and they would collect money.

Also, the doctor who developed the modern treatment for Clubfoot, a firsthand account of the Nuremberg trials, and...

You have been tried and condemned of crimes almost without number.

Death to Fouman Chou.

The story behind Fouman Chou, the pantomime Chinese villain of the early 20th century.

That's all coming up later in the podcast.

But first we're going back to 2001 and a turning point in the modern story of Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. A troubled 20th century

saw Eritrea colonised by Italy, taken over by Britain, annexed by Ethiopia, and then finally

in 1991 an independent state.

But that turning point in 2001 was a particular rupture.

Alex last has been looking into this and is with us now, Alex.

Yes, Max, for the uninitiated Eritrears the small but this a long struggle for independence. It won its independence from Ethiopia in the early 1990s and initially

it was praised as this new uncorrupt self-reliant model for Africa, a country full of promise, but that all changed. And one of the key

moments in that change came 20 years ago in 2001 when in the space of just a few days the Eritrean president

Azaius Afeworky a man who's still in power by the way arrested top political

critics and journalists and banned the private press the the independent press, and none of those who were detained

have been seen since.

Now I've been hearing the story of one Eritrean journalist who tried to get away.

...