Witness History

It’s 50 years since Kim Phuc's village in Vietnam was bombed with napalm. The photograph of her, running burned and crying away from the attack, became one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War. Christopher Wain was one of the journalists who witnessed the attack, and who helped save her. This programme brings Kim Phuc and Christopher Wain together in conversation. It is a Made in Manchester pro...

A violent sectarian dispute took place outside Holy Cross primary school in Belfast in 2001. Loyalist protesters tried to block Catholic pupils and their parents going to school for months. Rachel Naylor spoke to one of the parents, Elaine Burns. (Photo: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Image)

In the early 2000s, Sampat Pal Devi, a villager from a remote part of India's Uttar Pradesh state, started a women's rights group which now has thousands of followers across the country. The Gulabi Gang were originally vigilantes who fought back with sticks against wife-beaters, rapists and corrupt police officers. Now a more mainstream organisation, the Gulabi Gang are known for wearing pink sari...

In 2006, Sri Lanka’s current president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, came within metres of death when he was targeted in a suicide bomb attack in Colombo. The attack was orchestrated by the Tamil Tigers during what was supposed to be a ceasefire in Sri Lanka’s long-standing civil war. Matt Pintus has been speaking to former Sri Lankan foreign minister, Pali Palihakkara, who was injured in the blast. Photo:...

In 2002 Omar Bongo, the president of Gabon, set up a network of national parks to protect the country's forests from logging and help save its population of forest elephants. He was responding to pressure from campaigners worried by a surge in logging over the previous decade. Among them was a British biologist called Lee White, who went on to become Gabon's Minister of Forests and the Environment...

In June 1947, one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust - the Diary of Anne Frank - was published for the first time. In her diary, the teenager described her life in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands up until shortly before she was arrested and sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In 2012, Mike Lanchin spoke to Anne Frank's cousin, the late Buddy Elias. PHOTO: Anne Frank (Press Asso...

In June 1968, US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy was assassinated shortly after addressing his supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It was less than five years after his older brother, President John F Kennedy, had also been assassinated. Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of the crime, but many - including Kennedy's friend Paul Schrade - suspect a second gunman was involved. Schrad...

As the Queen celebrates her Platinum Jubilee weekend, Claire Bowes takes us back to her Coronation in London's Westminster Abbey in June 1953. In 2013, she brought together the memories of two of the Maids of Honour, Lady Anne Glenconner and Lady Jane Vane-Tempest-Stewart. (Photo by Bela Zola/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

In 2013, more than a thousand people are thought to have died in a chemical weapons attack on a suburb of the Syrian capital Damascus called Ghouta. It was the single deadliest attack of the Syrian civil war and the UN later confirmed that the nerve agent Sarin had been used. Louise Hidalgo speaks to Angela Kane, the former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs. Her team of chemical weapo...

It's 10 years since Za’atari refugee camp was set up in Jordan to take in the thousands of people fleeing Syria because of the civil war. It's now the biggest camp for Syrian refugees. Mayada Masalmeh and her family arrived in 2013 from their hometown just over the border, thinking it would be a short stay. Laura Jones hears from Mayada and her daughter. With thanks to BBC Arabic's Diala Al-Azzeh...

In March 2022 a law was passed in the United States making lynching a federal crime - nearly 120 years after the first attempts to introduce legislation. The pioneering African-American journalist Ida B Wells first campaigned for the change in the 1890s after realising the horror of lynching taking place across the country. Laura Jones has been speaking to her great-granddaughter Michelle Duster....

In May 1972, Japanese gunmen attacked Lod airport in Tel Aviv, Israel. They were left-wing militants working for a Palestinian organisation. Twenty-six people were killed that day and more than 70 others were injured. In 2011, Simon Watts spoke to Ros Sloboda, one of the survivors of the shooting. PHOTO: Kozo Okamoto, one of the Japanese gunmen, on trial in Israeli in 1972 (Keystone/Hulton Archive...

Georgia O'Keeffe was one of the world's most influential female artists - in 2014, her painting "Jimson Weed" sold for the highest price ever paid for a work by a woman. Famous for her vivid oil paintings of flowers, landscapes and animal skulls, she lived and worked in the wild dry canyons and deserts of New Mexico in the southern United States. Lucy Burns speaks to her former assistant Agapita J...

in April 1966 thousands of artists and performers from all over Africa descended on the Senegalese capital, Dakar, for the first World Festival of Black Arts. Ibrahim el-Salahi and Elimo Njau are two leading African artists who took part in that first festival. The spoke to Ashley Byrne in 2016 Photo: Poster from the first World Festival of Black Arts.

In 1966, a Russian painter and archaeologist, Igor Savitsky, created a museum in the remote desert of Uzbekistan, where he stored tens of thousands of works of art that he had saved from Stalin's censors. The Savitsky museum, in Nukus, is now recognised as one of the greatest collections of Russian avant-garde art in the world. In 2016, Louise Hidalgo spoke to the son and grandson of one of the ar...

The great Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, died in 1954, at the age of 47. The art critic, Raquel Tibol, lived in Frida's house during the last year of the artist's life. In 2014 she spoke to Mike Lanchin about the pain and torment of Kahlo's final days. PHOTO: Frida Kahlo at her home in Mexico City in 1952 (Getty Images)

In the summer of 1951 a young art historian called John Richardson met one of the greatest painters of the modern era. Richardson was part of Picasso's circle in the South of France for the rest of the 1950s and then spent the rest of his life writing the definitive biography of the Spanish artist. John Richardson spoke to Laura Sheeter in 2011. He died in 2019. PHOTO: Pablo Picasso in Cannes in 1...

In May 1959, Kelso Cochrane, a carpenter who'd emigrated to Britain from Antigua, was knifed to death by a gang of white youths in West London. The unsolved murder came at a time of racial tension in the area and led to the first official inquiry into race relations in British history. For its part, the large Caribbean community in West London responded by creating the cultural festival that becam...

The former president of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos Senior is thought to have plundered a huge amount of public money during military rule in the 1970s and '80s. He spent the fortune on foreign properties and the luxury lifestyle enjoyed by his wife, Imelda Marcos. American lawyer Robert Swift has spent decades trying to recover that money so it can paid out as compensation to the thousands o...

In 1937, Japanese forces entered Shanghai - spelling the end of a period when the Chinese city had been a thriving commercial centre governed by international powers and known as the "Paris of the East". During the eight-year Japanese occupation, local people in Shanghai endured starvation and brutal treatment; while foreigners scrambled to escape as their lifestyle of servants and glamourous part...

Following the closure of McDonald’s in Russia, we’re going back to January 1990 when the global fast food giant opened its first restaurant in Moscow. In 2015, Mike Lanchin spoke to George Cohon, the man who brought the Big Mac to what was then the communist USSR, and to Sveta Polyakova, one of the first locals to work there. PHOTO: A Soviet police officer outside the first McDonald's (Getty Image...

In 1986, four days of huge public protests brought down President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. Kate McGowan, in Manila, talks to the leading Filipino novelist, Jose Dalisay, about the demonstrations. This edition of Witness History was first broadcast in 2011. PHOTO: Filipino troops celebrating the fall of President Marcos (Getty Images)

With speculation mounting that President Putin might mount an attack on Moldova, we're going back to the early 1990s and a war between the Moldovans and Russian-backed separatists in the disputed region of Transnistria. Several hundred people died in a conflict which ended in a stalemate in 1992. Matt Pintus speaks to former journalist and Moldovan defence minister, Viorel Cibotaru. PHOTO: Russian...

In 2010, a previously little-known Icelandic volcano erupted twice, sending a huge plume of volcanic ash all over Europe. The ash cloud grounded flights for days, causing inconvenience for millions of passengers. Reena Stanton-Sharma talks to Icelandic geophysicist and Eyjafjallajökull-watcher, Sigrun Hreinsdottir. (Photo: The awesome power of Eyjafjallajökull. Credit: Getty Images)

In May 1980 China allowed capitalist activity for the first time since the Communist Revolution, in four designated cities known as the Special Economic Zones. The most successful was Shenzhen, which grew from a mainly rural area specialising in pigs and lychees to one of China's biggest cities. In 2017 Lucy Burns spoke to Yong Ya, a musician who has lived in Shenzhen since the 1980s, and to ethno...