Use BBC.com or the new BBC App to listen to BBC podcasts, Radio 4 and the World Service outside the UK.

Find out how to listen to other BBC stations

Episode details

World Service,08 Apr 2016,49 mins

"I saw their silhouettes with the guns"

The Fifth Floor

Available for over a year

On Sunday 13th March, as people gathered to enjoy the beach at the Grand Bassam resort in Ivory Coast, militants opened fire causing chaos and killing at least 19 people. BBC Ivory Coast reporter Valerie Bony was at the resort that day and she shares her memories of the attack. Nostalgia for a shared identity Tatyana Movshevich grew up in Soviet Russia at a time when a shared culture was encouraged, from Kazakhstan to Latvia. But since the dismantling of the Soviet Union that shared identity has been eroding. And for Tatyana, the contest for Ukraine to choose its entry for this year's Eurovision Song Contest brought that change home. Punjab's centuries-old epic poem The epic poem Heer Ranjha is a love story which goes back centuries in Punjabi folklore. It was popularised in the 18th century by Waris Shah, who took it from town to town and village to village. We hear from BBC Urdu's Asad Ali Chaudhry and Sana Gulzar how the tradition lives on today. How much unity can we expect from Libya's Unity Government? In the past week, Libya has gone from having three governments to two, and then back to three. It's evidence of the challenges the United Nations faces in trying to bring to an end five years of conflict and promote the new Unity Government. We ask Libyan Muhammad Hussein of BBC Monitoring what the prospects for unity are, in a country with three governments and nearly two thousand militias. Stories from the salon How important is it to be well groomed in the Arabic-speaking world? BBC Arabic's Marwa Al-Nagar shares the stories she discovered for the BBC documentary The Salon, including encounters with a Lebanese refusenik who won't straighten her hair - to the despair of her family - and an Iraqi refugee who can no longer afford the salon and relies on her ex-policeman husband to cut her hair. And Fifi's pick of the worldwide web. Image credit: Getty Images

Programme Website
More episodes