Witness History

When Bangladesh fought for independence from Pakistan, thousands of Pakistani troops were sent to fight in what was then called East Pakistan. In 1971, Shujaat Latif was sent to the town of Jassore where he fought, and then surrendered. He spent two and a half years as a prisoner-of-war. Hear his story. Photo: Indian army soldiers fire on Pakistani positions, December 15th 1971. Credit: AFP/Getty...

During the war of independence in Bangladesh in 1971, Pakistani troops and their local collaborators used systematic rape as deliberate tactic. It's estimated that hundreds of thousands of Bengali women were victims of one of the worst instances in the 20th century of rape being used as a weapon of war. Farhana Haider speaks to one of the women, and to the Bengali playwright and filmmaker Leesa Ga...

In December 1970, Pakistan held its first democratic elections since the end of British colonial rule in 1947. The results would lead to war, the break-up of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. Farhana Haider spoke to Rehman Sobhan, an economist and leading figure in the Bengali independence movement. (Image: The flag of Bangladesh is raised at the Awami League headquarters in 1971. Credit: G...

In February 1952 thousands of people marched in Dhaka in defence of the Bengali language. Eight of the protesters were shot dead by police. It became known as Bangladesh's Language Movement Day. We hear from Abdul Gaffar Choudhury, one of the demonstrators, whose song about the protests became the anthem of the movement. (Photo: Student demonstrators gather by Dhaka University, February 1952. Cour...

In 2005 thousands of tonnes of petrol ignited at a fuel depot 40 kilometres North-West of London. The explosion was the largest in the UK since the end of the WWII. The blast, which severely damaged surrounding homes and properties, was reportedly heard in Holland. Despite the enormous amount of damage, nobody was killed. The fire destroyed large parts of the depot, leading to shortages of fuel at...

The abduction of Theo Albrecht, who co-founded the discount supermarket chain ALDI with his brother Karl. The brothers shunned publicity and there were few photos of them. So, when two armed men confronted Theo outside his company headquarters in late 1971, they demanded to see ID. They needed to be sure they were taking the right man. Albrecht later tried to claim tax back on the ransom paid to s...

In November 2001 a group of British aircraft enthusiasts were arrested and put on trial in Greece. Unfamiliar with their hobby, the Greek authorities had assumed they must be spies. The plane-spotters were initially jailed but later released after their case turned into a diplomatic incident. In 2011, Chloe Hadjimatheou talked to Paul Coppin, who was one of the group. PHOTO: The plane-spotters ret...

Using eyewitness accounts from the BBC archives, we hear how the Nazis developed the world's first modern ballistic missile that killed thousands during World War Two. The Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun was the principal architect of this revolutionary secret weapon. After the war he was recruited to work for the United States to develop its own missile programme and famously built the NA...

In the early 2000s, Sri Rumiati, a brigadier-general in the Indonesian police, began campaigning against intrusive examinations of female recruits to her force. Rumiati had experienced a so-called "virginity test" herself when she joined up two decades earlier. She spoke to Petra Zivic. (Photo: Indonesian policewomen in 2007. Credit: Getty Images)

One of the first high-profile artists to speak openly about having Aids was the British experimental film-maker, Derek Jarman. Jarman had made his name in the 1970s by directing Sebastiane, the first openly gay film in British cinema history. Vincent Dowd speaks to Keith Collins who lived with Jarman during his final years, and cared for him up to his death in 1994. (Photo: Derek Jarman. Credit: G...

At the end of the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people in South Africa were still dying from HIV/Aids because effective drug treatments were prohibitively expensive for a developing country. Under pressure from Aids activists, the government of Nelson Mandela took the big international pharmaceutical companies to court over the right to import cheaper versions of Aids drugs. Bob Howard talks to...

In 1987 the first successful drug treatment was developed for Aids. AZT went from initial test to approval in just over two years - at the time it was the fastest approval in US history. Claire Bowes talks to Dr Samuel Broder, the co-developer of AZT. Picture: Dr Samuel Broder and President Ronald Reagan. Credit: Ronald Reagan Library

The HIV virus was first identified by medical experts in a journal article in 1981. In the early days of the epidemic, carriers of the virus were stigmatised and treatment was in its infancy. Alan Johnston talks to Ugandan-born Winnie Ssanyu Sseruma about her experiences of having HIV back in the 1980s. PHOTO: Winnie Ssanyu Sseruma

In the early days of Aids, a misunderstanding made one man the face of the epidemic. Canadian air steward Gaetan Dugas developed the symptoms of HIV/Aids in the early 1980s, but a misreading of scientific data led to him being identified as 'patient zero', giving the mistaken impression he was responsible for the spread of the disease. Lucy Burns speaks to researcher William Darrow, who worked on...

The three Mirabal sisters were leading figures in the Dominican Republic's opposition movement against the dictator, General Rafael Trujillo. Patria, Maria Teresa and the most prominent of the three, Minerva, were all killed on the 25th of November 1960. They were dragged from their car and beaten to death on the orders of General Trujillo. Their murders sparked outrage in the Caribbean country, a...

Estonia started connecting all its schools to the internet very early. In 1996 less than two percent of the world’s population had access to the web but Estonia’s initiative, known as ‘Tiger Leap’ captured the imagination and the hopes of the whole country. Estonians became early adopters of all sorts of digital services, from online banking to digital ID cards. However, a decade later Estonia was...

In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalise voluntary euthanasia: although the new law was ground-breaking, it was based in part on the result of a dramatic criminal trial that happened nearly three decades earlier, in 1973. The case concerned a doctor who helped her elderly and terminally ill mother to die after her mother had repeatedly begged her to do so. Dr Truu...

Eighteen million people were vaccinated against smallpox in the former communist Yugoslavia in only a month and a half in 1972. The mass vaccination campaign succeeded in containing the last smallpox epidemic in Europe. Dr Ana Gligic was a virologist who detected the first cases of the disease and helped tackle the outbreak. PHOTO: A smallpox patient in Yugoslavia in 1972 (Smith Collection/Gado/Ge...

'The Woman in Gold' was one of Gustav Klimt's most famous paintings. It was a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, but it was taken from her family by the Nazis and only returned to them after a long legal battle. Louise Hidalgo has been speaking to Randol Schoenberg the young lawyer who took on the case. Picture: Adele Bloch-Bauer I, or 'The Woman in Gold', painted in 1907 by Gustav Klimt, from the col...

A first-hand account of how Sudanese civilian protesters first brought down a military regime in 1964. The protests began after a student was shot and killed by police during a confrontation at the prestigious University of Khartoum. Demonstrations and a nationwide general strike followed which forced the military to hand over power. Alex Last hears from historian Professor Abdullahi Ibrahim who w...

How a particular form of psychotherapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, became a common treatment for anxiety and depression. CBT was first developed by Professor Aaron T Beck in the USA. It has been rolled out as an option for people with mental health problems in the UK. Professor David Clark has been speaking to Kirsty Reid about why, and how, it works. Photo credit: Getty Images.

In 2008, one of Europe’s most wanted fugitives, the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, was arrested in Belgrade for war crimes. Karadzic had been in hiding for more than a decade, pretending to be an alternative medicine healer called "Dr Dabic". Serbia’s former war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vuckevic remembers the tense days that led to Karadzic’s capture. PHOTO: Radovan Karadzic in 199...

After the end of the Gulf War in 1991, retreating Iraqi forces set light to oil wells in the desert. Specialist firefighters were drafted in by the Kuwaiti government to help put them out. Simon Watts spoke to one of those firefighters, Richard Hatteberg, in 2010. This is a rebroadcast. Photo: an oil fire in Kuwait. March 1991. Credit:Getty Images.

In November 1971 a young American artist decided to get a friend to take a shot at him - in the name of art. His name was Chris Burden and the shooting would go down in the history of performance art. He spoke to Lucy Burns in 2012 about the ideas behind the event. This programme is a rebroadcast. (Photo: Chris Burden just after being shot. Courtesy of Chris Burden)

Eudy Simelane was a star of the South African women's national football team and a gay rights activist. In 2008, she was pursued by a group of men after leaving a pub close to her home in the township of Kwa-Thema. She was gang raped and stabbed to death. She was 31 years old. Her family, friends and campaigners say that her sexuality made her a target for this brutal hate crime. Viv Jones speaks...