Several eyewitnesses both protesters as well as volunteer magic who say they last passed near one of the major just here in baghdad near our bridge where Security Forces the board both tear gas as well as live ammunition to discourse to Disperse Protesters around and i also spoke to one of the volunteer medics in one of those makeshift clinics that read me that he had treated several injured protesters have received live ammunition now its important to say that some of the violence also coming from the protesters theyre probing molotov cocktails in the direction of the Security Forces and also spoke to one protester was a key part of a group who had actually tried to capture and beat one of the members of the of the the riot forces you know were also seeing a lot of funeral processions today a lot of caskets being carried through to here where People Company building a final farewell to those who have passed away yesterday in the marshes and of course these funerals for to galvanize the crowd for anger and as the crowd surged here into here square were likely to see more confrontations military parades have given way to protest marches as lebanon marks its 76 the Independence Day demonstrators have gathered in downtown beirut keeping up their calls for political and economic change the protests began last month over new taxes and the failing economy the Prime Minister saad hariri has resigned but thats not satisfied protestors who want a complete overhaul of the sectarian political system. U. S. President donald trump says he wants a trial in the Republican Controlled Senate if he is impeached by the house in an interview with fox news after days of public impeachment hearings he insisted hes done nothing wrong and he defended using his private lawyer Rudy Giuliani to work on ukraine policy because of his reputation quote is a great crime fighter the House Intelligence Committee has been holding hearings. As looking into accusations that trump pressured ukraine to investigate his political rivals there was no due process as you can have lawyers we can have any witnesses we want to call the whistleblower but you know i want is the 1st witness because frankly i want to trial you know i could get could have it you want to try out every one 0 i would look number one they should never ever impeach just not in the i watch i watch 5 people in your network yesterday say there is nothing me here israels Prime Minister says he will not step down after being charged with corruption offenses Benjamin Netanyahu has criticized investigators calling his indictment an attempted coup and launching an attack on Law Enforcement the judicial system and what he sees as hostile left wing media the attorney general charged neta now with bribery fraud and breach of trust in sri cases. At least 8 prodemocracy protesters who had been holding out had a standoff with riot police at hong kongs Polytechnic University have surrendered the campus has been the scene of some of the worst violence and 6 months of protests commissioner point quaintness says he wants a peaceful resolution to the occupation and the peel to others to surrender. Colombias the Fence Ministry says at least 3 people were killed the inservice these protests more than 250000 people marched in the capital book with cash and other cities to show growing discontent with president even dukas government the defense minister says the circumstances surrounding the deaths are under investigation while the conduct of the Security Forces is also being examined those are the headlines are going to have more news for you in half an hour coming up next studio b. Unscripted. Sometimes were right as i think were really close that most of this. Entire relationship with the past is full of. What are my guide in my interest is the lets make friends die you my me to mr bike. I once through trial for allegedly holding all a Radio Station at gunpoint in defense of democracy i believe was a human problem and human being and youre quite right to say i got myself involved my name is wallace. Im a turkish british novelist and like every storyteller im drawn to stories but also silence is the things we cannot talk about i have multiple attachments just like all of us to on multiple attachments means multiple stories i am in a shock. I felt i knew a live suffolk even before i met or like when i juror shes often of loggerheads with her countrys government through her works to give a voice to those who are often on her i knew about as the 1st african author to win the nobel prize for literature see it really was the recognition. Of creativity which goes back centuries but also in his role as a defender of feeling rights and freedom of speech i was looking forward to having an open conversation on the scuzzy should start out both timely and. Still as close to. What unites us makes us human. Well its such an honor to share the same stage with him you and i have been talking about the art of storytelling and what it means since they spall arise to worlds and i always thought especially for authors for storytellers who come from wounded the moccasins such as turkey nigeria egypt pakistan venice or the brazil the list is so long and its getting longer i dont think as a writer from such mother lance we have the luxury of being nonpolitical. We can say im only going to write my stories and not really think about whats happening outside the window but one thing that draws my attention is especially after the year 2016 i think more and more western authors to be done to feel maybe the urgency to speak up because weve seen how country after country democracy can die that history can go backwards it doesnt always necessarily go forward and you of course spoken so powerful in eloquently about the need to be vocal in our crude cism on what happens to the human souls if we do not criticize tyranny im very glad i was starting with the very language of the storyteller let me use this appropriately to say that. Nora it is just a story to have a storyteller as a historian is a psychologist is a philosopher is a builder is a creative person so im very happy identifying ourselves here its about our storytellers you started off on a very difficult soul searching subject which is what is my responsibility as a writer what is yours i dont see any special responsibility for a writer be you on the expounding behold. Of is or community of humanity in general i know that i agree with you that some of us do dont have that luxury and i resent it i resent the fact that we burdened by that weight of history i resent that because there is something which existed before but also the colonial experience its kind of a defining as 2nd class humanity and yet we know you and i know that yes we do feel that we have to transcend a set. Wrong positioning which has been given us by external forces and then after that after we chase them out what happens. Weve got our internal colonisers and then you have to fight these new orders all over again to distort the history of our society our past in order to and from themselves permanently with our boots or the next i think sometimes we writers especially from the quote unquote developing world 3rd wall africa i think were really closet miser priests though we love to take on this burden i see no other explanation for it. It is quite irrational i agree but also perhaps of course as storytellers we chase stories we chase words but i equally believe we are drawn to silence the things we can not talk about easily in a society at a given time and that includes taboos political to was helpful to. Us just to be able to ask why is it that we can talk about this issue is important for writers to ask questions not try to guide the answers i was intrigued by what you said and it did resonate with me because i often think turkey has collective uneasy our entire relationship with the past is full of ruptures and because of the vacuum now its being filled with either alter nationalistic interpretations of history or religious interpretations of history where you cant talk about the complexity of history and if you want to draw attention to that you can easily be labeled as a traitor as a betrayer in just just a cognitive flexibility to ask how would i feel had i been a minority member in that period for instance just to focus on individuals is very difficult because the official history has no human beings in it being a novelist in a country like turkey is a bit like being slapped on the one cheek and being kissed on the other cheek at the same time. And im saying this because clearly these are lonsway i would sigh heavy so every rights in this to anyone who deals with words knows that because of something you rights you might use that gets into trouble but on the other hand perhaps politics sickly in countries where i would son not that easily written pronounced maybe that maybe they must even more i watched a film or decades ago as we speak and he just flashed across my mind it had to do with the colonization of the americas it depicted in it of Indian Village and in the village there was a no obviously gay individual who lived. In a hot and who related more with women when it was accepted like that in the community and that it was an hour in that same on that same continent probably in that same part of the world you have those who are. Who are saying that if i this is a saying you know nothing about biology of human and not to me you know nothing about hormones nothing at all about the exploration of the human tendencies are there they are now stigmatizing and this is where the writer i believe yeah especially in the socalled subtle societies the writer has a special responsibility likely as a tourist to rewrite the story conception just like that filmmaker obviously deliberately inserted this kind of domestic scene back contrasts come to a country like nigeria and within this decade the legislators who are all the problems are sailing by jury has the power but did not get cetera et cetera took time off the postle law. Which included phrases like the expression of affection between 2 people of the same sex is going to and i asked myself when i wrote other time what your business or what happens with consenting adults you do not in a problems of your own already and so you have the politicians for their own purposes of the over rewriting and or. Imposing their own newly acquired prejudices deliberate distortions of humanity in the name of progress they do they do rewrites so many things they rewrite history religion and also law and they they pass the laws when i when i look at turkey in particular of course there are so many women who are very vocal and strong in all areas of life from academy up to medicine to the Business World but in one does one field in which women have a few in numbers and thats politics mostly dominated by very conservative very religious. Men one of the laws that theyve recently tried to pass actually involves reducing the sentence of rapists if they agree to may their underage victims because from their according to their mentality in a way the rapist is doing a favor to the family and all they care about is this other concept of honor and of course there was a huge backlash from from the society and then they took it back but there is no way im mentioning is this we need we need women to support each other we need a very strong women small and that goes hand in hand with minorities without g. B. T. Rights we need a Strong Civil Society when society is divided when women are. Right and especially i think the only thing that benefits from that is patriarchy itself and i am concerned because earlier we talked about have country after country weve seen a decline of democracy an erosion of democracy and i think whenever theres more nationalists and theres more religious fundamentalism theres also an increase in sexism theres also an increase in homophobia all of these things are related weve touched the national in all the use your bar. I would writers do with fiction with history and so on you know what. Politicians more afraid of history of fiction and the really relevant are the reason why i ask this because i come from a society where we discovered quote. I think not too long ago that history had been taken off the curriculum yeah and that it is a shock for me. And so i asked myself well i havent been able to destroy fiction but we had history of the disposal to go read the history so i asked was a what really free book yeah and i think its precise there were stories and theres a story telling can can make a difference as i was listening to i was thinking one of the books that i read very early on in life left a big impact on me it was the works of iran which. From the balkans when i was reading his work for the 1st time as a High School Student it occurred to me they were like 2 peasants talking the talk about the genesis system which was the heart of the Ottoman Empire in a way that the military and so at school what i had learned was who were a great empire wherever we went we brought civilisation but then there were these 2 balkan peasants talking about that institution and one of them was saying thanks to the system our poor children were able to get education and go all the way up and become to sears and the other one was saying are you sure because of the system and they forgot their identity they were converted to islam without their will you know and they never saw their families again so yes they did get education but at the expense of what as a reader of lover of storytelling fiction i understood what the writer was trying to do you know can you shift your angle its a bit stuck you know flexibility and try to see the same story through the eyes of another person and then another and keep doing this until we realise theres no such thing as history with a capital hage imposed on us but there are all these realities and complexities that we honestly need to talk about if you want to be truthful in the northern people should we share with europe. Have the most one or 2 questions youre both storytellers which youve spoken about but youre also activists in role models and change makers and i wanted to ask you both if there was a specific moment or period in your lives when you came to embrace the next step to your role as as change makers and if so what gave you the courage to step into those shoes you 1st if you feel. I dont see myself as a courageous person at all honestly im just a curious person and i dont want to lose that curiosity about life details the connectivity with fellow human beings maybe i would maybe cause all the way back to my childhood because i realize when i look back there were so many times when i felt like the other myself you know a bit like inside or outside kind of clinging to their heads trying to be long so to me it comes very naturally to give more voice to people who have been other night sed and i think in my work i always want to give more voice to the silenced and try to bring the periphery to the center. That matters to me but also maybe part of the reason is the way i was brought up i grew up without seeing my father and i was raised by 2 completely different women my mom is very westernized very modern urban their action well educated and my grandmother probably would take all the other books as you know more eastern very spiritual less educated i mean its very wise and shes a woman who had been denied a proper education but she firmly believed in the education of girls so to me so watching those sisterhoods their solidarity the way they supported each other had a huge impact on me you know they didnt agree on everything but they supported each other so i think observing people despite the circumstances how we need to empower each other how we need to connect with each other and how we can all learn from those songs that left a huge huge impact on me as i was growing up. I told the hosts. The smorgon a little more i know her i know already story will have a good conversation i know her. And reading about her i just saw myself also the ability the temperament of being affected by ones environment you know while we have the other for good or evil in a few days is im going back to niger and believe me right up to the time i get on the plane i ask myself what on earth are you going back to my blasted country for is neat little life more peaceful here what form that is pushing you i just dont know but ill give you an example of something which is affected me tremendously. And thank goodness this example comes from a child a girl child a name is lee or cherie but she was one of the School Pupils who were kidnapped by boko haram in nigeria. And they were as armed but when they were leaving the fundamentalist terrorists insisted that they must renounce their religion before they were released all of them did except one. Shaariibuu and i ask myself what was it that imperiled the child to say no like Nelson Mandela did when he was given a conditional release she was between 14 and 15 said about taiji no longing for freedom longing for environment from an error meant what was in the pushed or go to know. And stayed behind i she was kept behind shes still a prisoner to attribute i think its the same impulse that drives us as writers and activists something intolerable on our backs up the ball in our environment i would just have to know its something we just i just had to miss so much well written a long poem to her. When you were put on trial french insulting turkishness sent in 2006 i wonder if you could you sort of say a little more about that and also im particularly interested in what you wrote when you were acquitted you felt that the trial was an uprising against authoritarianism so you had some hope for turkey at that point and i just wondered whether you had you know whether you still felt hopeful in the the circumstances that you explained to us earlier turkey is such a complex country doesnt. I cant i dont think it can be simplified no country can of course but it it harbors so many conflicts this government has been in power for such a long time and when they came to power a bit like in hungary they came to power with lots of promises of reform including supporting turkeys e. U. Membership Peace Process with minorities with kurds with armenians making a new constitution that would be more liberal more political stake so the 1st years were shaped by that narrative an