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Libya and Croatia

Owen Bennett Jones with personal insights from Tarik Kafala, who explores what's changed in Tripoli since his childhood, and Mary Novakovich, delving into family memories of a massacre during WWII.

Owen Bennett Jones introduces personal insights and reflections from around the world. In this edition, Tarik Kafala revisits the sites of his childhood in Tripoli and describes what's changed since the fall of the Gaddafi regime; Mary Novakovich delves into her family's history, and discovers memories of a horrific massacre of Serbs during World War II.

Names, landmarks - even language - change in Libya

Tarik Kafala usually works for 成人快手 News Online. He was brought up in Tripoli, but came to live in the UK and watched the recent conflict from the sidelines in London. He has just returned the land of his birth, and described his impressions of change and uncertainty to us.

Silence and survival

People who've lived through terrible experiences often choose not to talk about these traumas. It can be a way of avoiding confrontation, of simple survival, or even of trying to make a fresh start. Yet as years pass by, sometimes, the elderly decide the time has come to tell the generations that follow what really happened.

That's what happened in Mary Novakovich's family - when her aunt finally agreed, at the age of nearly 90, to tell the full story of what she lived through back in 1941, near the border between present-day Croatia and Bosnia.

Available now

10 minutes

Last on

Tue 20 Dec 2011 04:50GMT

Broadcasts

  • Mon 19 Dec 2011 08:50GMT
  • Mon 19 Dec 2011 12:50GMT
  • Mon 19 Dec 2011 16:50GMT
  • Tue 20 Dec 2011 01:50GMT
  • Tue 20 Dec 2011 04:50GMT