Channel 4’s critically acclaimed foreign affairs strand returns for a new series with a film uncovering the largely hidden, but bloody, conflict in the Russian Republic of Ingushetia. In a country to which few Western journalists have been able get access, Unreported World reveals allegations that hundreds of innocent civilians are disappearing and being tortured and murdered by the security forces in an increasingly violent campaign that threatens to turn into the next Chechnya.

Friday 25 September 2009
7:35pm, Channel 4

Evan Williams

In yet another incredibly shocking documentary in the Unreported World series, reporter Evan Williams and his colleague Paul Kittel – director and cameraman – travelled to the Brazilian city of Recife, a beach paradise that’s visited by thousands of British tourists every year.

There, they uncovered allegations that the police are involved in ‘death squads’ which murder thousands of ‘undesirables’, including hundreds of street children, every year.

Within minutes of the programme beginning, Evan and Paul were taken to the scene of the murder of an 18-year-old boy at the side of a street. Police officers told Evan that the murder was “an execution” – a close-range shot to the head, typical of many of the city’s thousands of murders each year… Read more & comment »

Unreported World, as brief as it is and shown before the watershed as it is – and therefore often a rather sanitised version of the reportage – takes us to places that the world otherwise largely ignores and/or knew nothing about, and this was the case for me in last night’s programme which was presented by reporter Aidan Hartley. I have a little more to say about the scheduling at the end of this article, but for now, on to my review of it…

As I said, I had absolutely no idea about the coalmines in India, but as this documentary revealed, they play a huge part in the economy of some of the poorest of all India’s communities, and those featured last night were particularly wretched.

Villages, that would be more aptly called shanty towns, were precariously balanced upon a literally burning foundation of coalmines, the seams of which spewed forth noxious fumes and gases and where the heat on the surface – due to uncontained and uncontrollable fires beneath – could set light to paper on contact, as Aidan demonstrated… Read more & comment »

Last night’s Unreported World followed reporter Aidan Hartley and Producer Alex Nott as they visited Haiti, which is just a relatively short journey from wealthy Miami, and what they found there was truly shocking.

I must be honest and say that until I watched this show, I’d been ignorant about Haiti; for me, Haiti has always been synonymous with voodoo and little else. I was – to my shame – unaware of the scale of the humanitarian crisis to which this beleaguered island is subject. And a crisis it is; between hurricanes, poverty and the inability to grow crops due to the lack of tools and seeds, these are a people on the brink of almost total annihilation… Read more & comment »