Global News Podcast - Former Ugandan rebel jailed for 40 years for war crimes

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Former commander in rebel Lord's Resistance Army, Thomas Kwoyelo, sentenced to 40 years for war crimes in Uganda. Also: The tortured monkey released back into the wild, and a scientific breakthrough in eco production.

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Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Miles and at 13 Hours GMT on Friday 25th October, these are our main stories. A court in Uganda sentences a former Lord's Resistance Army rebel commander to 40 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity. An abused baby monkey at the heart of a global torture ring has been released back into the forests of Indonesia. And a BBC investigation has found evidence that small inflatable boats used to ferry

migrants across the English Channel are being hidden in warehouses in Western Germany. Also in this podcast... I feel like we are seeing the beginning of a big revolution that will make a lot of manufacturing much less polluting and much more sustainable for the long run. From algae muffins to bacteria handbags we hear how scientists are hoping engineering biology could lead to a more sustainable future. And as we prepare to put back the clocks here in the UK, a doctor tells us about the potential impact on our health of daylight saving.

Militant groups often abduct and force children to fight in their ranks. The Tamil Tigers did it in Sri Lanka and so did many Liberian warlords. But rarely has it been done on the scale perpetrated by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. Since the late 1980s the LRA, an extremist Christian group, has kidnapped tens of thousands of children and used them in battle. Thousands of civilians have also been indiscriminately killed or maimed. Now a court in Uganda has sentenced Thomas Koyelo, a former LRA commander, to 40 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Anne Soy is our senior Africa correspondent. She told me more about the former LRA commander. Thomas Koyelo is the first LRA commander to be convicted in Uganda. So that

is a huge, very significant development in the country where this group, the Lords Resistance Army, terrorized people across northern Uganda and in neighboring countries for decades. Its leader, Joseph Coyne, was being hunted for many years, but he was never captured. And in recent years, that hunt was suspended because he was deemed not to pose any more danger to society. Now Thomas, his conviction will come as a big relief for his victims. A separate case will be heard by the court for reparations of his victims However, his lawyers told the court that they intend to appeal every conviction

I mean there are so many tragedies in this story. I mean Thomas Coiello himself was abducted when he was just 12 Wasn't he what do we know about the ongoing situation with the LRA? It's not entirely snuffed out, is it? It's not entirely snuffed out, but we haven't heard of any attacks. It has changed for years now. It is not clear where the remnants of the group are living. It was thought at some point they were in the Central African Republic, previously in the Democratic Republic of Congo or in southern Sudan. And therefore, the whereabouts of the founder, Joseph Kony, are unknown. His condition is unknown.

At some point, we had heard that his health had deteriorated. However, the general view of the government of Uganda and the people in northern Uganda is that they no longer pose a threat to them. However, there are many victims that were left behind, others were maimed, many people lost their lives as a result of the activities of this group and those are the people who are seeking reparations and seeking justice. Indeed and many children presumably need to be rehabilitated having been forced to fight for the NRA. That's right and that is why this case and the previous one that was conducted by the

International Criminal Court were the subject of discussions because the commanders Thomas Coelho in this case and Dominique Ongwen in the case of the ICC had themselves been victims of the group. In Dominique's case, he was abducted as a child by rebels who had killed his parents, and they groomed him, and he turned into one of their fiercest commanders. In Thomas's case as well, he told the court that he was captured by the rebels while walking to school at the age of 12, and therefore this has been the subject of discussion when you're trying to get justice for victims, what happens to those who turn into perpetrators themselves.

And soy. A baby monkey at the heart of a global monkey torture ring has been released back into the wild. Taken from the forest in Indonesia when she was just days old, Minnie was tortured by her owner who filmed it for sadistic customers, mainly in the US and the UK. She and the other monkey who was being held with her were rescued after a BBC Eye investigation. Rebecca Henschke, who spent more than a year finding Minnie and her torturers, went along for her release. It's five o'clock in the morning and we've arrived at a black sand beach and the truck

has just pulled up that's been driving through the night. Inside the truck is metal boxes. There's around 40 of them and the one that I'm staring at has MINI written on it. Denny Rahmadani, one of the vets, is checking in on her. We give hydration and vitamins for Minnie. It's very nice, very active and nice condition. She looks like she's ready to go back to the wild, very active. Monkeys are being loaded in their boxes onto small fishing boats. Crossing over to a pristine jungle covered island reserve that's been a protected area since the Dutch colonial times.

So humans have rarely given access to it. It's the perfect place for Minnie to be released into. I first saw Minnie in this video, just days old and very vulnerable. She was being abused in a bathroom. It was one of many videos. The people who were commissioning the torture were on the other side of the world, mainly

in the US and the UK. Mike McCartney, who called himself the torture king, was one of the ringleaders of a telegram group where people were brainstorming and then crowdfunding the torture videos. The group viewed many as almost like a sadistic trophy, so to speak. In this little demented circle of ours, you know, Mini was the epicenter of what they all wanted to see in these videos. We went undercover to expose the sadistic community and rescue Mini. After two years at a sanctuary run by the

Jakarta Animal Action Network, the founder, Femke Den Haas, says she's ready. If we would have any doubts about her being ready to be released or any of her family members, we would not bring them to the forest. They underwent like a very long process of rehabilitation, different stages. We observe every detail of this process and they are ready to be an independent long-tailed macaque back in the forest where they belong. Everyone has to carry a monkey. I'm tasked with taking Mini.

Been walking for about an hour now, it's hot and I'm sweaty. And inside Mini's cage, now, it's hot and I'm sweaty and inside Minnie's cage I imagine it's pretty uncomfortable too. She's moving around a lot, she can hear the sounds of the forest and the other monkeys out there. They're released into a temporary net cage where they can recover from the journey and then a few days later we return.

We're waiting behind a tree and the net is being ripped open and the keeper's moving away and the monkeys are jumping right out of the net right onto a tree and there goes Minnie. She's leaping into the trees. On the other side of the world those responsible for torturing her are being put behind bars. Minnie has just gone free. Rebecca Henschke reporting. Smash the gangs were the words of the Prime Minister of the UK Keir Starmer in the run-up to the general election earlier this year. He was talking about the organised crime that enables migrants to illegally cross the sea into the UK from France, often on dangerously overcrowded small boats. But cracking down on the operation might be more complicated than first thought.

An undercover BBC investigation has found the dinghies and engines used are being kept in secret warehouses in Germany. Jessica Parker is our Berlin correspondent. Our undercover journalist spent months in contact with a smuggler, a contact. We got through an individual within the migrant community. And what our undercover journalist said was that he'd had bad experiences with the gangs in the Calais area of northern France, from where crossings are often organised, and he therefore wanted to organise his own crossing with his family and friends. And after these exchanges, they finally met in September in the city of Essen, West Germany.

So our undercover journalist sat down for a coffee with this smuggler and then they were joined in fact, we didn't necessarily expect this, but by another smuggler as well. And here is some of what our undercover journalist was told. His words are voiced by a BBC producer. They took my phone. Al Khal started asking questions. Who are you? What are you planning? I want to know all about you. They tell me the equipment comes from Turkey. They have about 10 warehouses around Essen. Police raided one a few days ago, but they separate their

stock and give the bait to police. The smuggler says one option, I can get you a boat. You will pay me 15,000 euros. You will get the boat with 60 life jackets and all the equipment, guaranteed delivery to the Calais area. They tell me they have a new crossing point. No one knows about it. So Jessica, clear indication there that a boat for 50 people would be supplied to this new crossing point. To what extent are the German authorities getting a handle on what may be a growing trade there in Germany? It's a really interesting question. I think, you know, from a British perspective, they've been quite frustrated in the government by the German legal framework. So actually in

Germany it's not technically a criminal offence to aid the smuggling of people out of the EU to a third country like the UK, which the UK obviously is after Brexit. That having been said, there are raids, there are arrests. It's often in cooperation with other countries like Belgium, France, the UK as well. And gangs can be arrested if there's so-called collateral crimes, so if they're caught money laundering or possessing weapons illegally, and that sort of stuff can be prosecuted in Germany. The German government insists that cooperation is very good with the UK, that there are legal means, as I've mentioned, of cracking down on these gangs. But I think as well, there is this sense

that for Germany, this is not such a massive political issue because this is not happening on their border. It's happening on the French border and the UK border. So it's less of a political pressure point here than it is in the UK and Northern France. Jessica Parker. Next to a report about how science can help us make everyday objects in a cleaner, more sustainable way. We're talking about items

grown in a lab using what's known as engineering biology. The UK government's chief scientific adviser, Professor Angela Maclean, has called the use of such products a revolution that's just beginning. Here's our science correspondent, Pallab Ghosh. Engineering biology involves harnessing and adapting the power of nature to produce many of the things we need. One approach is to grow materials or foods from microorganisms, for example, as an alternative to leather to produce handbags and shoes,

and as egg and dairy substitutes which are fat free but when used to make cakes have the same taste as their full fat alternatives. Both these products and many others can be produced more sustainably than the original. Professor Dame Angela Maclean thinks that the science could transform our lives. It really excites me because I feel like we are seeing the beginning of a big revolution that will make a lot of manufacturing much less polluting, less polluting now, and much more sustainable for the long run, all of which are problems

we do need to solve. Critics, though, warned that the benefits of engineering biology are often overstated, and it can also be used to create dangerous weapons as well as sustainable products. Palabh Ghosh. British summertime comes to an end this weekend when the clocks go back and we revert to Greenwich Mean Time or GMT. Greenwich has been the standard for global time since 1884 when it was used as the prime meridian by more than two-thirds of the world's commerce which relied on sea charts. But as happens every year not

everyone is happy with lighter mornings and darker evenings. Doctors say the annual switch back to winter can have a negative impact on our health and well-being. Chris Smith is a consultant virologist at Cambridge University. If you think about it our bodies are geared to when we're going to be active and when we're going to be inactive. We don't want our metabolism thundering away at night when we're trying to sleep. We want to be resting, recuperating and repairing ourselves at night and then going all guns blazing during the day. So we're driven. We are literally, as Grace Jones sang, slaves to the rhythm. We have a really powerful entrainment to being

on when it's light because we're day active and off when it's night time. And the way this is achieved is that we have a body clock and although we use the term loosely, it really exists as an entity in the brain, in the bottom of your brain, a structure called the hypothalamus, a big cluster of nerve groups. There is one particular group called the suprachiasmatic nucleus and this is about 20,000 or so nerve cells that keep time and they tick genetically. There's one gene that turns on, it turns on the next one, turns on the next one and that feeds back and turns off the previous one. This takes about 24 hours and it's just slightly more than that to tick round but those nerve cells change

their activity as the genetic clock ticks and that activity is then propagated throughout the brain but also through chemical signals through the blood to every cell in your body and it then sets the clocks in every cell in your body so your metabolism is tethered to what your body clock is doing and the idea is you keep your body metabolism in line with what time of day it is to optimise performance. You throw that out of kilter, even by an hour, and now there's a misalignment between what your metabolism thinks it should be doing and the demands you're placing on your body. If you get that kind of misalignment, it causes stress. If you get stress, and I don't just

mean psychological stress, you get biochemical stress and then everything is more likely to go wrong, which is why we see more accidents, more people having car crashes, more people forgetting their car keys and losing stuff, more people oversleeping, turning up late for work, more people having strokes, heart attacks and so on for all those reasons. Dr Chris Smith, still to come on the Global News podcast. The world is still now Keep falling The unmistakable sound of Kate Bush on her new animated film project about children, war and hope.

hope. Lebanon's information minister has described an Israeli attack that killed three journalists as a war crime. Ziad Meccari accused Israel of deliberately targeting reporters while they slept in a guest house early on Friday morning. Video footage from the scene in southeastern Lebanon shows cars marked press covered in dust and rubble. Meanwhile, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has left the region and is here in London for talks on ending the fighting. It comes ahead of an anticipated meeting in Qatar this weekend when mediators will reconvene for the first time in weeks trying to revive lapsed negotiations on a ceasefire in Gaza. Mr. Blinken has spoken to the Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and is also

talking to the Foreign Ministers of Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. The Secretary of State promised to work with real urgency to get a diplomatic resolution to the conflicts both in Gaza and Lebanon. We've had very good and important conversations this week, including this morning, on ending the war and charting a path for what comes next and those conversations will continue but I think this is a moment of importance that we're working to seize. Our State Department correspondent Tom Bateman is traveling with Mr. Blinken. When Yahya Sinwar was killed the

Americans thought that that removed in their view the chief obstacle to getting that deal done but I have to say the sort of haste with which they put this trip together, I think, has shown in the sense that making real progress in that diplomatic effort hasn't been as apparent as they might have liked. Having said that, they did manage when we were in Doha yesterday to say that they will get the mediators back around the table probably over the weekend in Doha. So crucially, the head of Mossad from Israel, Bill Burns, the head of the CIA, along with the Egyptians and the Qataris will be talking again. But

the fact is, you know, they had a plan that had ceased to make any progress. And the question now is, is that still on the table? It's not entirely clear. And it's still not clear that they've got any real engagement from Hamas and who is going to make the decisions within Hamas now with its leader dead in Gaza. So a lot of unanswered questions. We had a moment this morning, and Antony Blinken has just left,

heading to the Emirati Foreign Minister's house in London, Abdullah bin Zayed. Before that, a meeting with Ayman Safadi, the Foreign Minister of Jordan, who sat across the table from Mr Blinken, looked him in the eye as the press were in the room at the start of the meeting and accused the Israelis of carrying out what he called ethnic cleansing in the north of Gaza and said it had to stop. He said the Israelis weren't listening to anyone. That really felt like it amounted to a snub to his more powerful American counterpart.

And it gave a sense, I think, of the degree to which anger is being felt across the Arab world and Mr. Safadi really giving voice to that directly to the Americans here. And what the US now hopes to do is make progress on a post-war plan. That's what they're talking to Arab leaders and foreign ministers here about. Tom Bateman, this time yesterday we were reporting on calls by some Commonwealth nations for Britain to pay compensation for its part in the slave trade more than two centuries ago. Today King Charles has spoken at the opening of their summit in Samoa. He didn't mention reparations, but said that the Commonwealth

should acknowledge its painful history. Our cohesion requires that we acknowledge where we have come from. I understand from listening to people across the Commonwealth how the most painful aspects of our past continue to resonate. It is vital, therefore therefore that we understand our history to guide us to make the right choices in the future. Milton Walker is a journalist in the Jamaican capital

Kingston. He insists that compensation should be about more than just money. We're not asking for the 200 billion pounds in terms of compensation, we believe it should be a multifaceted approach. Key among those would be debt relief. We believe that we should get some help in terms of technology transfer or public health crisis. The cabin has a serious problem with non-communicable diseases, which is directly linked to slavery. I'm talking hypertension and diabetes primarily. We don't need help with that. But the British historian Professor Lawrence Goldman disagrees. We need to think about our moral responsibility today and of course these events took place 300 years ago and we ourselves

today are not responsible, not morally responsible. There were individuals who traded in slaves, there were individuals who owned slaves on Caribbean islands and made a lot of money out of it but we were not a nation that supported the idea of the slave trade. We did become a nation that supported the idea of ending slavery and that's a very important thing to remember. Our correspondent Katie Watson is at the Commonwealth Summit. So how did the King's words go down there? This came off the back of a state visit here in Samoa where the focus was about meeting Samoans,

talking about their ways of life, really welcoming a few days, obviously touching on climate change, which was also in the speech. But the King isn't able to express any political opinions publicly. He's very much, you know, politically neutral. So I think this is a topic where he's got to really tread the line, hasn't he? A very careful line. So, I mean, I think it's about making a point that everybody feels and everybody can see is clearly an issue without actually coming down on any side or any kind of definitive path forward. I mean, that's why he talks about the fact that about, you know, finding creative ways to write inequalities. And from what you're hearing there at the summit, do you think the individuals who speak

after King Charles will mention slavery and reparations explicitly. Will it be enough what he said? I think it's a push to start talking about it, looking into it more and looking for a path forward. Obviously the UK has said there won't be any financial reparations, there won't be an apology, but clearly there's going to be some pressure from many countries in the Commonwealth to at least address it in some way. What that wording will be in a communique is unclear, but the pressure certainly is on whether it's now, whether it's a conversation that now needs to be started and continued beyond being here in Samoa is unclear, but I think

there's definitely that feeling that needs to be talked about more. From what you're hearing, is there a particular group of nations, are they West Indian nations, African nations that are pushing this and feel this most strongly? I think there's a big push to talk about it from the Caribbean. I think in Samoa there's less of that pressure. I mean certainly when I went to talk to some Samoans earlier, I mean obviously it's very anecdotal but chatting to people here, I think there's less of that feeling. I mean actually Samoa here is just so excited that this is a massive event and they're really

pleased that people have come here. I think that's the overriding feeling. It's being driven by some member countries more than others. The candidates to replace the Secretary-General, all three of them are from Africa and I know have talked about the idea of reparations. So, I mean, you know, clearly there are, there's more pressure from some parts than others, but certainly that pressure is building. Katie Watson in Samoa. Over the weekend, but Donald's rose to the top of social media when

Donald Trump staged a photo opportunity serving fries at an outlet in Pennsylvania. But now the fast food chain is back in the headlines for a different reason, an outbreak of E. coli from its quarter pounder. Mariko Oye is our business reporter. It was quite a surprising and shocking news when the Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced this and it has recorded 49 cases of illness across 10 states in the United States and 10 cases of which have resulted in people getting admitted to hospital and also one person, an elderly person has died as a result of it. As you said, it appears that they all had quarter pounders. So the company has been looking at both beef patties

and onions. But according to McDonald's, the stores that had those cases used multiple suppliers for the beef patties. But they all shared a single supplier of onions. And that company has been identified as California-based at Taylor Farms. Now, Taylor Farms has told our U.S. partner station that it has conducted tests on raw and finished onion products and found no traces of E. coli.

But it also works with other food suppliers such as U.S. Foods. So it has issued its own recall of some batches of onions out of, I guess, caution for anything. So the investigation continues but quite a worrying news for a lot of customers. Mariko Oye. The musician Kate Bush has written and directed a new short film to raise money for children affected by war. The singer has shied away from the spotlight in recent years and last released a studio album in 2011. A new audience discovered her music

through the TV series Stranger Things with the use of her hit single, Running Up That Hill, sending it back to the top of the charts 37 years after it was first released. Kate Bush's new film, a four-minute animation called Little Shrew, is set to her track Snowflake and is aimed at raising awareness and funds for the charity War Child. She spoke to Emma Barnett about what prompted her to begin work on the project. So I started working on it over a couple of years ago and it was not long after the Ukrainian War broke out. I think it was such a shock for all of us, you know, it's been such a

long period of peace that we've all been living through. And I just felt that I really wanted to make a little animation that would feature originally a little girl. It was really the idea of a child and children that are caught up in war. I wanted to draw attention to, you know, how horrific it is for children.

And so I came up with this idea for a little storyboard and felt that actually it would be more, people would probably be more empathetic towards a little creature rather than a human. The animation is very cute but it also brings home the vulnerability, the defencelessness of people in those situations. And it's very powerful with the song that you picked for it. I mean, when you wrote Snowflake, what were you trying to bring across? I was just looking at some of the lyrics, you know, one of them is, the world is still round

Keep falling I'll find you What were you writing about? The idea of this little snowflake falling to ground and that this person managed to find it and catch it amongst all the other millions of snowflakes that were falling. And a few people at the time said to them what they imagined the song to be was a mother and a soul who were looking to find each other. I thought it was a really beautiful image that actually a few people said that quite independently.

And then you thought perhaps it would work in this instance, the idea of finding each other amidst the rubble, but also sort of hope? Yes, yes, very much so. I mean, that's one of the key features of the animation is that there is hope. Hopefully, hopefully there is hope. It's something that I think we all need big time right now. The musician Kate Bush on her new project to raise money for children affected by war. Finally, can we really live on Mars? It's such a conundrum that married couple Kelly and Zach Wienersmith now have 26 rows of books on the topic. It took them four years of research before they wrote their own, which won Royal Society Science Book of the Year here in the UK. So are they convinced they've

been speaking to Nick Robinson? There's so much we still have left to learn about how bodies are going to respond in space and Mars is so different than any environment we already have data for. What the astronauts experience on the International Space Station is very different than Mars. There's just so much we still have left to learn. And Zach, you're a cartoonist rather than your wife's a biologist as I understand it. What did you want to know and what did you find out? Oh gosh, well we hoped we could sort of help point the way forward for space settlements, which we thought were coming soon and it just turned out to be much more difficult than advertised. Kelly, give us an example. What's the problems that we

might face? Well, space radiation is very poorly understood. The astronauts on the International Space Station are protected by Earth's magnetosphere, so they don't encounter a lot of the space radiation, which is very different than the radiation we encounter on Earth. So we know very little about whether cancer risks are going to go up, what kind of impacts this could have on, you know, cognitive abilities. That's one of many problems that we don't understand well enough. And one question you ask is whether you can make babies in space. It's a family show, but help us with the answer.

Yeah, the short version is the fun part probably works. The 18 years that ensue are a pretty open question. And there's lots of reasons to worry. Low gravity probably causes problems for muscle and bone development. You may not know this, but the soil of Mars is full of perchlorates, a chemical used in dry cleaning, which has deleterious effects on hormones. So, you know, those are just a few among many problems that may make it impossible to actually have children on Mars. And Kelly, I have to say, I hadn't thought of this question, but apparently it's central

to the book. Why do astronauts love taco sauce? Why do they? For reasons we really don't understand, a lot of astronauts complain that foods are less flavorful when you're in space. And so they want the like spiciest, saltiest things so that they have something that they can taste. And so there was a shuttle mission where taco sauce packets were actually used as currency and they were traded like, you know, if you clean the toilet for me today, I'll give you four taco sauce packets.

So they really like spicy stuff. Wow. I may tell you more about the astronauts than the sauce. And Zach, if somebody said now if Elon Musk said, well, yeah, we've cracked it, you can go, would you? Oh, God, no, I wouldn't even do the rocket part. Never mind the part where you stay on Mars. I mean, if you take all the trips ever to space, I think the rate of death is close to 1%. I do believe it's much safer now, but it's still for daredevils. Kelly, what about you? No, I'm a coward.

I'd stay here. I also have two young children who need me around, so I can't be taking trips to Mars. And that's all from us for now. But before I go, it's still not too late to send in your questions about climate change for a special podcast we're recording ahead of this year's UN meeting. A lot of you have already sent in questions about the impact of wars on our climate, how companies can be held to account over the emissions cuts they've promised, how the wealthy world is helping nations most at risk of sea level rises and many, many more besides.

Please just send us a voice note with your name, where you're from and your question. Our top climate change experts will be here to answer them. Send them to the normal address, globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. Thanks. This edition was mixed by Tom Bartlett. The producer was Nicky Verrico.

The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Nick Miles and until next time, goodbye. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon

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