Friday, 8 December, 2006

By Liz Gibbon
Producer, BBC Newsnight

Presented by Kirsty Wark

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DARFUR

Since 2003, some 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur.

Another 2m have been driven out of their homes. Yet the world's attention is elsewhere.

Sunday is a Global Day for Darfur, focusing on the appalling incidence of rape and other sexual violence which is the hallmark of the rebel Janjaweed militias.

Kofi Annan today promised to make the crisis his top priority for the remainder of his time at the helm of the United Nations.

But in the meantime, a whole generation has been brutalised.

Tonight, we have moving testimony from a Darfuri woman who has horrific experiences of the very worst of the conflict.

Not only did she witness the violent gang rape of a group of girls - some as young as eight years old - by the Janjaweed, she also was repeatedly raped herself by Sudanese government security men.

She believes there is not one woman in Darfur who has not suffered a similar fate.

Eventually finding her way to the UK, she has now been told her application for asylum has been refused, and she must return to Khartoum.

She tells us she'd rather return to her village, and die with her people, than go there.

We'll be talking to the Sudanese ambassador to Britain tonight. MULTICULTURALISM

Tony Blair was defiant today about multiculturalism. After months of hand-wringing in government circles about whether the concept of multiculturalism is "dead", the prime minister said in a speech today that it most certainly isn't.

"We like our diversity", he said, and argued we should celebrate it. Instead, he then laid the blame for the failure of some minorities to integrate on a particular section of a particular community.

It is not a problem with Britons of Hindu, Afro-Caribbean, Chinese or Polish descent, he said, but a problem of Muslims originating from particular countries. Is he right? And what will the impact of his words be in Muslim-dominated communities?