Banished: Crimean Tartars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WdOqpgj1xc

To watch part two click here

The war between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia this summer threw the spotlight on a region of growing international tension, the Black Sea.

Central to this region is the Crimea, now part of Ukraine, but once part of the Soviet Union.

Over 60 years ago, at the close of World War II many of the Crimea’s oldest inhabitants, the Crimean Tartars, were forced by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to abandon their homes and go into exile in Central Asia.

Now, many survivors of this ethnic cleansing have returned, but they have found a land much changed and a conflict over ownership of that land that threatens to ignite simmering tensions between Ukraine and its giant neighbour, Russia.

People and Power travels to the Crimea and tells the story of a banished people. This is an exclusive look at the plight of the Tartars. 

Obama’s Carbon plan

President Obama has vowed that his presidency will mark a new chapter in the US’s leadership on climate change.

This new chapter seems to favour carbon trading as a way of reducing green house gasses. This is where large carbon dioxide emitters such as coal based utilities will be able to buy the right to produce CO2.

But this buying needs the market and bankers are happy about this. But it also begs the question, is it right in this time of financial turmoil, and market crash, when many have lost faith in the function of the market to rely on it to save our most precious asset, the planet?

Presenter Samah El-Shahat is joined by Paul Dawson, head of market design and regulatory affairs at RWE; by Patrick Bond, director of the centre for civil society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, and also by Richard Sandor, chairman of the Chicago climate exchange.

This episode of People & Power was first broadcast in February 2009.