BBC OS Conversations: Colourism

Football in Turkey's biggest city always means colour, passion and noise, but this season has an added edge. The big three Istanbul clubs, which have generally had a vice-like grip on the Super Lig crown are this year facing a new challenger, another city club, Basaksehir. This club has been assembled with international stars thanks to the money of close business associates of the President Erdogan himself. The political symbolism of the title race has not been lost on many football fans in Istanbul, especially as the city prepares for a controversial re-run of Istanbul's Mayoral election in late June. Judges have just overturned the declared victory of an opposition candidate, thanks to ill-specified irregularities. There have been public protests over that decision. But then as President Erdogan often says: "He who wins Istanbul, wins Turkey". How has the rivalry on the football field reflected the political division of the city and the country? Reporter/producer: Ed Butler(Image: Fans at a Galatasaray home match, May 2019. Credit: Reuters/Murad Sezer)

6 Juni 201927min

The Tanzanian mothers forced to hide their children with Down syndrome due to social stigma and their defiant determination to change this.

4 Juni 201927min

Sudan’s doctors on the frontline. When ongoing street protests finally pushed Sudan’s repressive president from power last month, it was the country’s doctors many thanked. Ever since Omar al-Bashir’s successful coup in 1989 they had defied him. Staging strikes, organising demonstrations, and campaigning for human rights, the country’s white-coated men and women opposed all he stood for. In the last few months alone scores of them were jailed, beaten, tortured and some deliberately gunned down. Through the eyes of a murdered medic’s family, Mike Thomson looks at the extraordinary role these unlikely revolutionaries have played in Sudan’s uprising.Produced by Bob Howard(Image:Sudanese doctors protesting in Khartoum. Credit: Mike Thomson/BBC)

30 Maj 201926min

During the migrant crisis, thousands of Nigerian women were trafficked into Italy for sexual exploitation. In 2016 alone, 11,000 made the perilous journey through lawless Libya and then in flimsy boats across the Mediterranean. Naomi Grimley asks what became of them when they got to Europe.

29 Maj 201927min

For over five years, British-Lebanese journalist Zahra Mackaoui has been following the stories of a group of Syrians, who have scattered across the world in search of safety. She originally met and interviewed them in the early years of the long-running civil war in Syria.Zahra travels to rural Sweden to meet Doaa Al-Zamel, who survived the sinking of a boat in the Mediterranean by floating on an inflatable ring. Her story has now been optioned for a film by Steven Spielberg. Also in Europe, Fewaz and his family have found refuge near Bremen – and though he is grateful for Germany’s hospitality, he is finding it difficult to integrate. She ends the series with Faysal, who escaped to Turkey before returning to his home city of Kobani in Syria. The war there has finished but danger remains – and he himself was critically wounded.(Photo: Doaa al-Zamel. Credit: Elena Dorfman, Archive: UNHCR)

26 Maj 201951min

He was known as “the little boy who lost everything”. In 1991, Amar Kanim’s disfigured face was shown on newspaper front pages around the world, an innocent young victim of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. His entire family, it was reported, had died in a napalm attack. The British politician Emma Nicholson found him “alone in the world” during a visit to an aid camp. She took him to the UK. He was, the world assumed, an orphan. So who was the woman claiming he is her son?

25 Maj 201949min

The extraordinary story of an undercover migrant and his ‘secret spectacles’.When Azeteng, a young man from rural Ghana, heard stories on the radio of West African migrants dying on their way to Europe, he felt compelled to act. He took what little savings he had and bought glasses with a hidden camera – his ‘secret spectacles.’Then he put himself in the hands of people smugglers and travelled 3,000 miles on the desert migrant trail north, aiming to document the crimes of the traffickers. Along the way he saw extortion, slavery, and death in the vast stretches of the Sahara.For Assignment, reporter Joel Gunter tells the story of his journey – a journey that thousands of young Africans like him attempt each year.Producer, Josephine Casserly(Image: Azeteng's secret spectacles. Credit: BBC, taken by Joel Gunter)

23 Maj 201926min

The world’s biggest car makers and technology companies are investing billions of dollars in autonomous vehicles. They believe it is just a few years before computers with high-tech sensors do the driving for us, filling our roads with robot cars ferrying human passengers from A to B. But is a driverless future really just around the corner?

21 Maj 201926min