Revisited

A 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Nepal on April 25, 2015, killing nearly 9,000 people as it destroyed homes and heritage sites across the country. The quake also triggered avalanches on Mount Everest that claimed the lives of 22 hikers. A decade later, the nation is still rebuilding, with fresh solutions to protect lives in the event of future quakes. FRANCE 24's Navodita Kumari and Nabeel Ahmed report.

Five decades after the start of Lebanon's civil war, veterans of the conflict are speaking out about their past role in the country's warring militias and how they broke with their respective parties. With the threat of war ever present, they worry that young Lebanese – who do not learn the history of the conflict at school – will fall into the spiral of violence like they did. Our reporters Sophie Guignon and Chloé Domat went to meet them.

On June 24, 2022, an attempt by mostly Sudanese migrants to force their way into Europe led to dozens of them being killed in the Spanish enclave of Melilla, on the border with Morocco. Nearly three years on, attempts to find out exactly what happened that fateful day have been thwarted. Meanwhile, migration routes to Europe have been redrawn as a result of the tragedy. Our correspondents investigate.

In May 2017, a Catholic Mission in Bangassou in the Central African Republic became a symbol of resistance. Priests formed a human chain to defend Muslims from a massacre by Christian majority anti-balaka militants. The priests sheltered the persecuted Muslim community for four years. Caroline Dumay and Stefan Carstens report on the current state of reconciliation in Bangassou, in a country where some 15 armed groups are still active.

Thirty-five years after the horrors of the Ceaușescu dictatorship were discovered in Romania, our reporters investigated one of the darkest episodes in the country's history – the squalid, state-run institutions where thousands of children were locked away and abused. An estimated 15,000 children died, mostly in so-called hospitals for those often misdiagnosed as severely disabled. While part of society is nostalgic for the Communist era, the work of collective memory and justice is far from complete.

In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of thousands of students took to the streets of the Thai capital Bangkok, leading to huge demonstrations and an unprecedented protest movement in the “land of smiles”. These young Thais defied the biggest taboo in the kingdom by calling for a reform of the monarchy. Five years on, some of the protesters are still fighting for more democracy. Others, disheartened by the severe crackdown, have lost hope of changing their country's politics.

During World War II, the Japanese imperial authorities abducted, coerced, tricked and sometimes recruited hundreds of thousands of women from Japan's colonial empire to become sexual slaves for soldiers. Sometimes minors, these women were called "comfort women" and were raped repeatedly in brothels near the front lines. With only a handful of survivors still alive in China, our correspondents met one of them: 95-year-old Peng Zhuying. She is determined to share her story in a country where the subject remains taboo.

Four years after the deadly assault on the US Capitol, two opposing narratives persist about what took place that fateful day. More than 1,500 people have since been criminally indicted in federal court, but President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon them all on his first day in office. Our correspondent Fanny Allard met a convicted rioter, a policeman who was injured on January 6, 2021 and a member of the bipartisan committee tasked with investigating the attack.

Twenty years after the devastating tsunami that hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the province of Aceh has returned to peace after a civil war and is now living under Koranic law. Our correspondent reports.

For nearly five years, our reporters have followed "the project of the century" – the reconstruction of Paris's Notre-Dame Cathedral, which was devastated by fire in April 2019. In this final episode, we take you across France to discover the craftsmanship that has helped bring the Gothic masterpiece back to life. The world's most famous cathedral is set to reopen to the public on December 8. FRANCE 24's Mélina Huet reports.