Revisited

Transnistria is a rebel republic inside Moldova in the far east of Europe, born from the ashes of the Soviet Union. More than 25 years after a peace agreement was signed in 1992, the self-declared state has not been recognised by a single UN country.

One year ago, former Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh waved to his supporters for the last time on the tarmac of Banjul airport before fleeing to Equatorial Guinea, where he still lives in exile. A few weeks earlier, Adama Barrow had surprised everyone by winning the country’s presidential election. Barrow promised democracy and development to Gambians who were yearning for change. How do they feel today, one year on? FRANCE 24’s Sarah Sakho reports.

Between 1996 and 2006, a bloody civil war between Maoist revolutionaries and the state tore Nepal apart. A decade later, FRANCE 24 Reporters head to Nepal for the first legislative elections under the new constitution adopted in 2015. In this report, they meet three former Maoists who spent their childhoods fighting for the revolutionary cause, but today they are hoping to make a change not by staring down the barrel of the gun, but through the ballot box.

FRANCE 24's reporters returned to the Central African Republic, 40 years after Jean-Bedel Bokassa crowned himself emperor. Nicknamed the "Central African Napoleon", Bokassa was the protégé of then French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Today, with its dilapidated palaces and abandoned imperial villas, the country is among the world’s poorest, plagued by corruption and civil war.

Egypt’s Tahrir Square is emblematic of the Arab Spring uprising. In January 2011, thousands of Egyptians thronged onto the Cairo square to protest society-wide corruption and police brutality. Today, and despite the country’s financial crisis, some Arab Spring participants still converge there in a bid to relay their revolutionary ideas to new generations...

For three decades, Rivesaltes in southern France was home to the largest internment camp in Western Europe. FRANCE 24 returns to the site where tens of thousands of people were imprisoned from the Spanish Civil War through World War II to the Algerian War.

At the end of the 1967 Six-Day War, the victorious Israeli army took control of East Jerusalem, placing both Muslim and Christian holy sites under the control of the Israeli state. This annexation created tensions that remain today, granting Jerusalem unique advantages but also making it a symbol of perpetual conflict. FRANCE 24’s Cyril Payen reports from the city that is holy to three world religions.

As Russia’s cultural hub, St. Petersburg delights millions of tourists every year. Founded by Peter the Great, the city was renamed Petrograd during World War I then Leningrad upon the death of Lenin. It became St. Petersburg again when the Soviet Union collapsed. Although the city’s identity was forged by all of these eras, it was the 900-day Nazi siege during World War II that left the deepest scars. Today, survivors of the siege or their descendants can be found in almost every family. Historians estimate that around 1 million civilians – but perhaps many more – died during the siege of the city known then as Leningrad. The courage of the inhabitants, known as the "Blokadniki" (the besieged), and the bravery of those who fought on the front still make Russians proud. Life in St. Petersburg is punctuated by ceremonies commemorating the siege, which began in September 1941, and its inhabitants still bear the scars of this dark era.

>> Also watch our report: "Ghosts of 1917 revolution still haunt Russians"

Our reporters returned to the Indian city of Pondicherry, in the Gulf of Bengal, a former trading post of the French East India Company. Fifty-five years after it was handed back to India, French influence is waning in this former colonial enclave. But residents are keen to maintain the unique character of this little piece of France. With its elegant buildings and rich gardens, the southern city of Pondicherry is known as the Indian Côte d'Azur, or the Riviera of the East, where French style and vision live on. The French link with the area began back in 1673 when the French East India Company set up a major trading post there. The city was later invaded alternately by the Dutch and the British, but always ended up back in French control. Amid the great wave of decolonisation, Pondicherry was finally handed back to India in 1962.

Today, the official name of the city is Puducherry. But the legacy of French colonisation lives on – in its architecture, its language and its cooking. Even now, some residents seek to renew closer ties with France, far more than just traditional tourism. Sreya Banerjee and Camille Le Pomellec report.

Straddling the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest saline lake in the world, an inland sea of 66,000 square kilometres. But in 1950, the Soviets diverted the two rivers that fed it in order to irrigate fields and grow cotton. Little by little, the Aral Sea dried up, ruining thousands of livelihoods. Since the construction of a dam in 2005, the water is slowly beginning to rise, and with it residents' hopes. FRANCE 24 went to meet them.