Unreported World

Word has arrived of a major development in the case of Sahar Gul, the 15-year-old girl rescued from terrible abuse by her in-laws and featured in a recent Unreported World documentary.

The mere thought of my little girl getting hurt makes me wince. So listening to a young Kabul woman in Kabul describe how her father stabbed her 16 times because she refused to marry the man he’d chosen is an unsettling experience

This article was first written for The Independent in relation to Unreported World on Channel 4 at 7.30pm Friday May 24th or on 4OD

The new series of Channel 4’s Unreported World kicks off with a journey around America ahead of the election looking at the truly extraordinary world of talk radio.

There was quite a response to our Unreported World film last friday with the Baghdad Bomb Squad.

The words were simply stunning. Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s tirade against the ANC government rocks so much that we have assumed about post-apartheid South Africa. Comparing the ANC to Libya’s Gaddafi and Egypt’s Mubarak he slammed the party that delivered freedom to South Africa as worse than the old regime. At least you expected them to behave badly, he raged, adding “You, President Zuma and your government, do not represent me. I am warning you, as I warned the nationalists, one day we will pray for the defeat of the ANC government.” It is a sense of anger and betrayal that chimes with much of what I found while filming for the new series of Unreported World (Friday, Channel 4 at 1930 and on 4OD).

Hope comes from unexpected quarters. For the global diamond industry it comes from Zimbabwe, where massive diamond deposits have been identified in the last few years.