Libya and Croatia

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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 BBC 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.