Witness History

In April 2001 the Peruvian Air Force mistakenly shot down a small passenger plane as it flew over the Amazon jungle. The Peruvians believed the aircraft was carrying drugs. Onboard was a group of American missionaries. Mike Lanchin spoke to Jim Bowers, who survived the crash, but whose wife and baby daughter were killed.This programme is a rebroadcastPhoto: The missionary plane shot down by the Peruvian Air Force lies in shallow waters of the Amazon River. (Photo by Newsmakers)

The Colombian drug trafficker, once one of the richest men in the world, was shot dead by police in December 1993. He had been on the run from the authorities for over a year. Jordan Dunbar has been speaking to Elizabeth Zilli who worked for the US Drug Enforcement Agency in Colombia and who helped track down Pablo Escobar.Photo: Colombian forces storm the rooftop where drug lord Pablo Escobar was shot dead on 2nd December 1993. (Credit:Jesus Abad-el Colombiano/AFP/Getty Images)

The first 'war on drugs' was launched by US President Richard Nixon in 1971. He described drug abuse as a 'national emergency' and asked Congress for nearly four hundred million dollars to tackle the problem. Claire Bowes spoke to one of Nixon's policy advisors, Jeffrey Donfeld, about an approach to drugs which he describes as more 'find them and help them' than 'find them and lock them up'. And how he convinced the President to roll out a nationwide programme of methadone treatment for heroin addicts.This programme is a rebroadcastPhoto: US President Richard Nixon (BBC)

Greenwood was a flourishing and prosperous black neighbourhood of Tulsa, often referred to as Black Wall Street. But in May 1921, a white mob descended on the district, destroying homes, businesses and lives. In this Witness History, Josephine Casserly talks to historian John W. Franklin, of Franklin Global, about the story of his grandfather, Buck Franklin, who survived the massacre. The words of Buck Franklin are voiced by Stefan Adegbola.Image: An African-American man with a camera examining the ashes of a burned-out block after the Tulsa Race Massacre. Credit: Oklahoma Historical Society/Getty Images

On May 31st 1986 a small group of musicians staged the first charity rock concert ever held in the USSR. It was organised in less than two weeks to raise money for the victims of the Chernobyl disaster. The nuclear reactor accident had happened just a month before in Ukraine. Some of the artists who played at the concert had been previously banned by the Soviet authorities, so the concert was a social revolution, as organiser - Artemy Troitsky explains to Rebecca Kesby.(PHOTO Credit Sputnik: 1986 Charity concert arranged to raise funds for accident management at the Chernobyl power station. Olimpiysky sports complex.)

In the 1960s and 70s, Amilcar Cabral led the armed struggle to end Portuguese colonial rule in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde in West Africa. Cabral was an unusual rebel leader. He was an agricultural engineer, writer and poet who founded the liberation movement, the PAIGC, in 1956 to end Portuguese rule of his home country. In Guinea Bissau, the PAIGC fought a successful guerrilla war against a much larger Portuguese army. But Cabral was assassinated shortly before Portugal officially conceded independence in 1974. Alex Last spoke to former liberation fighter, Commander Manuel dos Santos about the struggle and his memories of Amilcar Cabral.(Photo: Rebel soldiers on patrol in Guinea Bissau during the Portuguese Colonial War in West Africa, 1972. Credit: Reg Lancaster/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Despite opposition from her father, Lotfia Elnadi was determined to realise her dream to fly. With her mother's consent, she secretly took flying lessons from an English instructor at a small airfield in the desert outside Cairo. And in September 1933 she made history by becoming the first female pilot in the Arab world. Mike Lanchin has been hearing from the Egyptian film-maker and writer Wageh George who interviewed Lotfia at the end of her long life for a film about her amazing achievement entitled 'Take Off From The Sand'.Photo credit: AlamyArchive of Lotfia Elnadi from 'Take Off From The Sand'

When one and a half million Indian railway workers went on strike for 20 days in 1974 it brought the country to a halt. Essential food, goods and workers were unable to reach their destinations. Despite this, the general public were largely sympathetic to the strike as they too felt a sense of anger at the government over the economy and allegations of corruption. Claire Bowes has been talking to union leader Subhash Malgi about why the government attempt to prevent the action with mass arrests and harassment backfired and to author Stephen Sherlock about how it became - what was at the time - the biggest strike in history and led to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's declaration the following year of a national state of emergency.Photo: Train from Darjeeling to Siliguri 1970. Credit: Paolo KOCH/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

In 2009 a war crimes trial in Sierra Leone ruled that forced marriage was a crime against humanity. It was the first time a court had recognised that charge. The ruling came in a trial of three rebel leaders for crimes committed during Sierra Leone's civil war. The legal turning point came largely as a result of the testimonies of the women who had been victims. The prosecution argued that forced marriage should be considered a crime against humanity distinct from other forms of sexual violence. Farhana Haider has been speaking to the former chief prosecutor Stephen Rapp about the trials.Photo: Sierra Leone, repatriated refugees reaching Freetown January 2001 Credit: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

Iran hosted a meeting to save the world's wetlands in 1971. The Ramsar Convention - named after the village on the Caspian Sea where it was originally signed - is seen as the first of the modem global intergovernmental treaties on the sustainable use of natural resources. Claire Bowes has been speaking to the Belgian representative, Eckhart Kuijken, about the battle by conservationists to interest people and governments in the value of wetlands. He describes how his home country had no planning laws protecting natural landscapes until 1962 - so that many were lost to industry and agriculture.Photo: Hawizeh Marsh in Iran. Credit: courtesy of the Convention on Wetlands

There were strikes and student protests across South Korea in May 1980. The military government responded with a brutal crackdown in the city of Gwangju and elsewhere striking workers faced arrest and even torture. Heongjun Park has been hearing from one of those strikers, Bae Ok Byoung, who worked in a factory making wigs in Seoul. She, and the other female employees had gone on strike demanding better working conditions, but after the industrial action ended she was jailed, tortured and then blacklisted for decades. This is a 2 Degrees West production. Photo: Labour activist Bae Ok Byoung talking to some of the workers at the wig factory in Seoul where she worked in 1980.

The controversial Israeli opposition leader visited the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jersualem's old city in 2000. His appearance was followed by an upsurge in violence between Palestinians and Israelis. Mike Lanchin spoke to an Israeli, and a Palestinian who were there that day.This programme is a rebroadcast.(Photo: Ariel Sharon at the compound. Credit: AFP/Getty Images.)

How a brick wall in Beijing became a beacon for those calling for change. But when Wei Jingsheng posted an essay demanding democracy in 1978, he was arrested and imprisoned for 18 years. He's been telling Rebecca Kesby why he thinks it was worth it.(PHOTO: BEIJING, CHINA: China's prominent dissident Wei Jingsheng (R) laughs as he talks to reporters at his Beijing apartment 20 September 1993. Wei was arrested again shortly after this and eventually released from prison on medical grounds in 1997. He currently lives in the USA. (credit MANUEL CENETA/AFP via Getty Images)

The trial of a South African doctor accused of multiple murders under the Apartheid regime. Wouter Basson, nicknamed 'Dr Death' by the country’s media, was alleged to have run a secret chemical and biological weapons project in the 1980s to eliminate perceived enemies of the government. But after the country’s longest and most expensive trial and despite evidence from 150 witnesses, in 2002 a judge found him not guilty on all 46 charges. Bob Howard talks to Dr Marjorie Jobson, the national director of Khulumani, a group which campaigns for justice on behalf of the victims of apartheid.

In the summer of 1971 around 2,000 Iraqi Jews were forced to flee the country following persistent threats and persecution. The Jewish community in Iraq dated back to the Babylonian times, but by the mid 1950s numbered less than eight thousand. Mike Lanchin has been speaking to Edwin Shuker, who was just 16 years old when he and his family were smuggled over the mountains to safety in neighbouring Iran by members of Iraq’s Kurdish minority. Edwin and his family eventually settled in the UK.Photo: Edwin Shuker and his parents and grandmother at home in Baghdad before they left in 1971 (courtesy of Edwin Shuker)

Contraception wasn't easily accessible in Ireland until 1985. Activists spent years fighting for the right to control their fertility but faced opposition from the Roman Catholic church which traditionally played a central role in Irish society. Paul Moss has been hearing from Betty Purcell who was a teenager when she first started campaigning.Photo: a woman holding up a condom and some contraceptive pills. Credit: Getty Images.

# Warning: This programme contains scenes of drug use #In 1955, a British member of parliament, Christopher Mayhew, took the hallucinogenic drug mescaline and had his experience filmed by the BBC. The drug was legal at the time and the experiment was supervised by the pyschiatrist Dr Humphry Osmond. The film was part of a wider public debate about psychedelic drugs following the publication of The Doors of Perception by the writer Aldous Huxley. But the film of the experiment was never broadcast and years later mescaline was put on the banned list of drugs in the UK because of fears of its potential impact on mental health.. Photo: Christopher Mayhew (right) preparing to start the experiment, watched by Dr Humphry Osmond (left), December 1955. (BBC)

In the early 2000s, Rudy Kurniawan was a newcomer to the hedonistic world of wine auctions in the US. He quickly became well-known for his warm and friendly manner and his profligate spending on wines. But where was all his money coming from? Josephine Casserly tells the story of one of the most high profile cases of wine fraud and speaks to Laurent Ponsot, French winemaker, turned Sherlock Holmes.(Photo: Corks, foil capsules and wine labels used as evidence in the trial. Credit: Stan Honda/Getty Images)

The American writer, Ursula Le Guin, was one of the most influential authors of the second half of the 20th century, publishing 20 novels in genres from science fiction to young adult. Le Guin pioneered feminist science fiction with The Left Hand of Darkness and created the enduringly popular Earthsea series of fantasy novels. She died in 2018. Simon Watts introduces the memories of Ursula Le Guin, as recorded in the BBC archives.PHOTO: Ursula Le Guin in the 1980s (BBC/Marion Wood Kolisch)

In 1981 the British government was faced with prisoners dying on hunger strike in a jail in Northern Ireland. The Irish republican activists were demanding to be treated as political prisoners not criminals. Several of them died during the hunger strike, the first, Bobby Sands on May 5th 1981. Louise Hidalgo spoke to Laurence McKeown who took part in the protest but survived.(Photo: Protestors wearing balaclavas in support of the hunger strike. Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

How Amsterdam became the home of cannabis coffee shops .The Mellow Yellow Café set a pattern in 1973 of attracting customers, which hundreds of others would follow. Although selling and smoking the drug was illegal, possession of small quantities of cannabis was tolerated by the Dutch police. Bob Howard talks to the café’s owner, Werner Bruining.Photo: Mellow Yellow Cafe, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Credit: Alamy

The US tracked down the al-Qaeda leader to a city in northern Pakistan in May 2011. Special operations troops were sent to capture or kill Bin Laden in a top secret raid in the dead of night. The Americans did not tell their Pakistani allies about the raid beforehand. Gabriela Jones spoke to Nicholas Rasmussen who was in the White House situation room with President Barack Obama and US military chiefs as the raid took place.Photo: Osama Bin Laden's fortified compound on the outskirts of Abbottabad in north-west Pakistan. Credit: BBC

When the Taliban were ousted from power in Afghanistan in 2001, the hunt for Osama bin Laden began in earnest. One American in particular led the search. He was CIA commander, Gary Berntsen, who had been tracking the al-Qaeda leader for years. In December 2001 he ordered a small group of special forces soldiers and Afghan fighters into the White Mountains, close to the border with Pakistan, in the hope of cornering bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora. But as Gary Berntsen tells Rebecca Kesby, in spite of heavy bombardment bin Laden managed to give them the slip.(PHOTO: Local anti-Taliban fighters help US special forces in the assault on the White Mountains and Tora Bora cave complex in Afghanistan, December 2001. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

In August 1998, more than 200 people were killed in co-ordinated bomb attacks on two US embassies in East Africa. They were among the first major attacks linked to Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network. We hear from George Mimba who was working inside the embassy in Kenya when the bomb detonated. Photo: Rescue workers at the scene of the Nairobi embassy bombing (AFP/Getty Images)

When the Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan agreed to go and interview Osama bin Laden in 1996 he was apprehensive. By the time he reached the Al-Qaeda leader's mountain hideout - he was shaken and scared - but what was the man himself really like? Claire Bowes reports.This programme is a rebroadcast.Photo: Osama bin Laden. Credit:AFP/Getty Images

In 1979 Islamist militants seized control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam. Hundreds were killed as Saudi security forces battled for two weeks to retake the shrine. The militants were ultra-conservative Sunni Muslims who believed that the Mahdi, the prophesied Redeemer, had emerged and was a member of their group. The BBC's Eli Melki spoke to eyewitnesses who were inside the Grand Mosque during the siege.Photo: Fighting at the Grand Mosque in Mecca after militants seized control of the shrine, November 1979 (AFP/Getty Images)

On 12th April 1981, the space shuttle Columbia made history becoming the first ever reusable space craft to fly into orbit. It marked the start of a 30-year shuttle programme which revolutionised the history of manned space exploration. Using NASA and BBC archive we tell the story of this historic test flight. Photo: NASA photo shows the first launching of the space shuttle from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Columbia carried astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen. (AFP via Getty Images)

The National Rifle Association represents gun owners in the USA. In 1977 it faced a turning point when its members revolted against the organisation’s leadership to concentrate on political lobbying in Washington. Would the gun lobby in America be as strong as it is, without the 1977 turnabout? Bob Howard talks to John Aquilino, a former NRA spokesman, who was at the historic meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio.National Rifle Association Holds Its Annual Conference In Dallas, Texas. DALLAS, TX - MAY 05 2018. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

In 2011, an American man shot dead two people in the streets of Lahore. The crisis that ensued saw accusations of espionage and US-Pakistani relations brought to the brink. For Witness History, Josephine Casserly tells the extraordinary story of the Raymond Davis incident.

In 1970, the Republican president Richard Nixon signed a bill returning a sacred lake to the people of Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. The lake, and surrounding land, had been taken from the Taos people in 1906 and turned into a national forest, even though it was central to their centuries-old cultural rituals and beliefs. The return of the lake was the first time the US government had given land back to a Native American community. Louise Hidalgo talks to Laura Harris and her mother LaDonna Harris, who with her senator husband helped the Taos people get the Blue Lake back.Picture: President Nixon signing the Blue Lake bill in the presence of Taos leaders, 15th December 1970 (Credit: UPI/Getty Images)

In April 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official in charge of concentration camps, was put on trial in Israel.The trial helped reveal the full details of the holocaust in which millions of European jews were killed during World War Two. One of the prosecutors, Gabriel Bach, spoke to Lucy Williamson for Witness History.This programme is a rebroadcast.PHOTO: Eichmann in the dock. (AFP/Getty Images)

The Mosuo community in China’s Himalayan foothills is matrilineal, so a family’s ‘bloodline’, inheritance and power is passed down through the female side. There is no such thing as marriage and monogamy is actively discouraged. The women rule and the men don’t mind. Rebecca Kesby has been speaking to Choo Wai Hong, a Singaporean corporate lawyer who came across the community as she travelled through her ancestral homeland of China. She liked it so much she learnt the language and built a house there. (PHOTO: Mosuo Women. Credit Patrick AVENTURIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

South Asian vultures started dying in huge numbers in the 1990s but no one knew why. They were on the verge of extinction before scientists worked out what was killing them. Bob Howard has been hearing from Munir Virani of the Peregrine Fund, who discovered that the vultures’ livers were being damaged when they fed on the carcasses of cattle which had been treated with a widely-used painkiller.White-backed vultures in their enclosure at the Vulture Conservation Centre run by World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-P) in Changa Manga. September 20, 2017. Credit: ARIF ALI/AFP via Getty Images

On April 17 1961 a group of Cuban exiles launched an invasion of communist-ruled Cuba in a failed attempt to topple Fidel Castro. After 72 hours of fighting many of the invaders were captured or killed. Gregorio Moreria was a member of the local communist militia who fought against the US-backed invaders. He was injured and briefly captured during the fighting. He spoke to Mike Lanchin for Witness History in 2016.(Photo: Members of Castro's militia during the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion. Credit: Three Lions/Getty Images)

After the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in the 1950s, South African biologist Sydney Brenner was searching for a model animal to help him tease out the genes involved in human behaviour and human development from egg to adult. Brenner chose a tiny nematode worm called caenorhabditis elegans (c.elegans for short), whose biological clockwork can be observed in real time under a microscope through its transparent skin. The worm has since been at the heart of all sorts of discoveries about how our bodies work and fail. Sue Armstrong has been speaking to people who knew and worked with Sydney Brenner.This programme is a Ruth Evans Production.Photo: the c. elegans worm. Credit: Science Photo Library

In 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman judge to be appointed to the US Supreme Court. She was nominated by newly-elected Republican president Ronald Reagan, who'd made the pledge to appoint a woman part of the campaign that led to his landslide victory. Justice O'Connor served for 24 years and had the decisive vote in many landmark cases. Her friend and former law clerk, Ruth McGregor, has been talking to Louise Hidalgo.Picture: Sandra Day O'Connor is sworn in at the Senate confirmation hearing on her selection as a US Supreme Court justice, September 1981 (Credit: Keystone/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images)

The Jet Stream is formed by powerful high-altitude rivers of air which circle the globe and help determine our climate. The existence of these winds was first documented in Japan in the 1920s, but only became more widely known during World War Two, when American airmen encounter high-speed winds on bombing missions over Japan. At the same time, the Japanese military also began to use these powerful transcontinental winds to carry innovative balloon bombs all the way to the West Coast of America. Using archive recordings we tell the story of the discovery and speak to Professor Tim Woollings from Oxford University, the author of Jet Stream: A Journey Through Our Changing Climate. Photo: B-29 bombers passing Mount Fuji on their way to Tokyo, April 1945 (Getty Images)

As the communist system in the former Soviet Union was collapsing in 1991, the people of Leningrad voted to drop Vladimir Lenin's name abandoning the city's revolutionary heritage and returning to its historic name of St Petersburg. Dina Newman spoke to Ludmilla Narusova, wife of the first St Petersburg mayor, Anatoli Sobchak, who campaigned for the hugely symbolic change.This programme is a rebroadcast - it was first aired in 2018.Photo: Communist campaigners demonstrate against the name change in Leningrad in 1991. Credit: Sobchak Foundation.

In 1954, the BBC broadcast a new television programme in Britain. It was called Zoo Quest and it launched the career of a man who has since brought the natural world into millions of homes around the world, the broadcaster Sir David Attenborough. Louise Hidalgo has been listening back through the BBC archives to Sir David telling the story of the first natural history expedition for Zoo Quest, to Sierra Leone in West Africa.Picture: David Attenborough, producer of the BBC wildlife documentary series Zoo Quest, and Jack Lester (right), curator of London Zoo's reptile house, planning their next expedition with the help of Gregory the parrot, March 1955 (Credit: William Vanderson/Fox Photos/Getty Images)

Former female wrestler Juana Barraza was found guilty in March 2008 of murdering at least eleven elderly women in Mexico city over a period of seven years. Barraza, who became known as the "little old lady killer", admitted to murdering three women, and told investigators that it was because of her lingering resentment for the abuse that she'd suffered as a child at the hands of her alcoholic mother. Mike Lanchin has been hearing from Mexican neuro-psychologist Dr Feggy Ostrosky, who spent days interviewing Barraza in jail, trying to understand what had turned her into a serial killer. (Photo: Former female wrestler Juana Barraza. Credit: David Deolarte/AFP/Getty Images)

How women in the North of England took to the streets in the late 1970s to protest against a serial killer dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper. Police advised them to stay indoors to avoid being attacked but the feminist protestors wanted greater protection for women and girls. Rebecca Kesby has been hearing from Al Garthwaite one of the organisers of Britain's first "Reclaim the Night" march.Photo: women taking part in a Reclaim the Night march. Credit: BBC

On Easter Sunday 1967 the Reverend Albert Cleage renamed his church in Detroit the Shrine of the Black Madonna. He preached that if man was made in God's image there was little chance that Jesus was white as most of the world's population is non-white. Reverend Cleage also pointed to the many depictions of black madonnas all over the world throughout history. Claire Bowes has been speaking to his daughter Pearl Cleage, a writer and activist, about her father's belief in black representation and self-determination.Photo: Black Madonna and Child courtesy of BLAC Detroit. Archive: Thanks to the Chicago History Museum and WFMT for the Studs Terkel Radio Archive.

In March 2000, two young English travellers, Tom Hart-Dyke and Paul Winder, were kidnapped by Colombian guerrillas while attempting to cross the notoriously dangerous Darien Gap region on the border with Panama. Hart-Dyke is a gardener who was on a mission to collect orchids, and he survived a nine-month ordeal by building a nursery in the cloud forest and planning his own dream garden for the family castle back home in Kent. He talks to Simon Watts.PHOTO: Tom Hart-Dyke (l) with Paul Winder shortly after their release (Press Association)

How Mrs Thatcher shook up the Soviet media with a landmark interview in Moscow in 1987 focusing on nuclear disarmament. It was broadcast unedited and helped bring in the era of “glasnost.” Bob Howard talks to Boris Kalyagin, one of the three Soviet journalists who interviewed the British prime minister.Margaret Thatcher, circa 1993. copyright Jeff Overs / BBC

In March 1973 guards went on strike at Walpole maximum security prison in the US state of Massachussetts, and the prisoners took over. For the next three months the inmates, organised in the National Prisoners Reform Association, ran daily life in the prison. They were helped by a group of outside observers, drawn from members of the community. Mike Lanchin has been hearing from the organiser of the observer teams, Rev. Ed Rodman, about his memories of this unique, but ultimately doomed, experiment in prison reform. (Photo credit: The Boston Globe)

The American singer, Karen Carpenter, died in 1983 of anorexia nervosa. She was one half of a world famous brother and sister duo called The Carpenters. She was aged just 32. Up until then anorexia nervosa had often been referred to in the media as the "slimmer's disease". Skinny celebrities were seen as both beautiful and successful and anorexia was somewhat glamorised. Claire Bowes has been speaking to Dr Pat Santucci, a psychiatrist who helped set up the world's first national organisation dealing with eating disorders, the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Eating Disorders, known as ANAD. Dr Santucci says wherever western culture has an influence, you will find anorexia nervosa.Photo: courtesy of Science Photo Library

At the end of the 1990s, tens of millions of people across Africa had been infected with HIV and in South Africa hundreds of thousands of people were dying from AIDS. People were demanding cheaper drugs, but the big pharmaceutical companies didn’t want to play ball. They took the South African to court over the right to import cheap drugs in a case which would last three years and which would pit the big pharmaceutical companies against Nelson Mandela and the rainbow nation. Bob Howard talks to Bada Pharasi, a former negotiator at South Africa’s department of health.SANDTON, SOUTH AFRICA - JUNE 17: HIV/AIDS activists demonstrate in front of the American consulate on June 17, 2010. Credit: Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

Dr Ruth Westheimer first became popular on a radio show in New York in the early 1980s. Her frank and open approach to giving advice on all sorts of different questions about sex soon made her a TV personality too.Photo: Dr Ruth Westheimer. Credit: Getty Images

The Jamaican government issued a warrant for the arrest and extradition of the drug lord Christopher Coke, otherwise known as “Dudus” in May 2010. The United States wanted him extradited to face charges of racketeering and bringing drugs and guns into America. Coke controlled an area of the Jamaican capital Kingston, called Tivoli Gardens. Dozens of people in the district he dominated were killed as the police and military stormed the stronghold, even using mortar bombs to try and disperse the gunmen protecting Coke. Human rights attorney Jodi-Ann Quarrie talks to Bob Howard about the events and their impact on Jamaica. (Jamaican police on patrol after a frenzy of gang and drug violence in Kingston, May 24 2010. Credit: Anthony Foster/Getty Images)

An early attempt at power-sharing in Northern Ireland ended after protestant workers went on strike and bomb attacks killed dozens in the Republic of Ireland in 1974. Matt Murphy has been hearing from Austin Currie, the former SDLP politician, about the events of that time. Photo: Dr Ian Paisley addresses a mass gathering of supporters, in the Protestant Shankhill Road area of Belfast in 1974. The Ulster Workers' Council declared that "everything stops at midnight" in an attempt to bring down Northern Ireland's power-sharing executive brought about by the Sunningdale Agreement. Credit: PA.