Global News Podcast - Uganda boosts defences in DRC as fears grow of wider war

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Uganda boosts defences in DRC as fears grow of wider war. Also: the far right AfD party is breaching the so-called firewall in German politics, and why tiger numbers are rebounding in India.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Discover how to lead a better life in our age of confusion. Enjoy this BBC audiobook collection, written and presented by bestselling author Oliver Berkman, containing four useful guides to tackling some central ills of modernity. Busyness, anger, the insistence on positivity and the decline of nuance. Our lives today can feel like miniature versions of this relentless churn of activity. We find we're rushing around more crazily than ever.

Somewhere, when we weren't looking, it's like busyness became a way of life. Start listening to Oliver Berkman, Epidemics of Modern Life, available to purchase wherever you get your audio books. You're listening to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. We're recording this at 14 Hours GMT on Friday the 31st of January. Uganda says it's boosting defences in eastern Congo, even as advances by Rwandan-backed

rebels raise fears of a wider war. We have the latest on the investigation into the air crash above Washington amid reports of staff shortages in air traffic control and how the far-right AFD party is breaching the so-called firewall in German politics. Also in this podcast… It's a wonderful increase in tiger occupancies and it shows that tigers can recover despite the odds of high population pressure, poverty and developmental pressures. Some good news in India as big cat numbers rebound. Uganda and Rwanda have a history of involvement in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Both are accused of backing the M23 rebel group which is currently on the march in Congo and threatening

to go all the way to the capital Kinshasa. Uganda, which like Rwanda shares a border with Congo, says it's boosting its defences inside Congolese territory. For his part, the Rwandan president Paul Kagame has denied supporting the M23 rebels, but that denial wasn't accepted by the Congolese government. Here's its foreign minister, Therese Kaikwamba Wagner. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is being illegally occupied by Rwanda. This is the clear result of decades of impunity and of not holding President Kagame accountable for his flagrant violations

and his disregard for international law. The issue that we're looking at right now is a dramatic humanitarian situation. The main city in North Kivu province, Goma, being occupied by Rwandan defense forces with as a puppet the M23 monster has been created in the Great Lakes region. Our call to action to all the stakeholders, but in particular those countries that have been funding the Rwandan regime, is that this madness needs to stop. For its part, Rwanda has long accused Congo of supporting Hutu rebels who were involved in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Yolande Mokolo is a spokesperson for the Rwandan government. What we're living here in Rwanda and what we have been experiencing for the last 30

years is a situation of extreme insecurity that is born out of the DRC's failure to secure their own country and to give rights to their own people. You know what happened here in 1994 with the genocide. The people who committed genocide fled when they were defeated to the DRC. For the last 30 years, the DRC government has sustained, has financed, has supported, and has armed the FDLR, who have stated that they want to come back to Rwanda to finish the job. So this is what we have to deal with. Well, Southern African leaders are discussing Congo at a meeting in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, today. I had more from our correspondent in the city, Shinga Nyoka.

There are a lot of issues that they intend to address, chief amongst them, the fact that the SADC, Southern Africa Development Community forces, which have been deployed there since 2023, have come under increasing attack. And so over the last week, we've seen about a dozen or so, most of them from South Africa, troops that have been killed. And so there's a lot of concern about the impact that this situation will have on Southern Africa. The Democratic Republic of Congo is a member of the region, even though Rwanda is not. And so I think there will be questions about the future of this particular deployment.

The term had been expected to run up until the end of December. But there have been calls, especially in South Africa, which has suffered the highest number of casualties about whether the troops should be pulled out. Yeah, I mean, we've seen a war of words between the South African president and the Rwandan president. Now we're hearing Uganda is strengthening its position. And of course course Congo has a history of embroiling other nations in the region in its conflict. Absolutely, and I think Zimbabwe has learnt that lesson in about 20 years ago. It went into a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, lost billions of US dollars, but

that really hasn't brought peace to the area and so I think that's one of the issues really for discussion here is what to what extent can SADC leaders bring to bear some kind of an agreement to a cessation of hostilities but what as you said we've seen is a war of words increasingly between South Africa and Rwanda, where South Africa accused Rwanda of killing its peacekeepers and said that further attacks would be a declaration of war. And Paul Kagame retorted and said that he believes that the Sadiq forces should pull

out and that it's a belligerent force because essentially they're helping the Congolese army to fight against its own citizens. And so I think there really is a fear about the impact that this particular conflict, in the way that it's deepening, will have broadly on regions such as southern Africa. Chinggai Nyokka in Harare. Was a lack of staff to blame for the air crash above Washington DC on Wednesday night. 67 people died when a military helicopter collided with a passenger jet coming into land at Reagan National Airport, just across the Potomac River from Washington. At the time, only one

controller was handling local plane and helicopter traffic rather than the usual two. Sean Pruchnicki is a former pilot who has landed at the airport many times. What's his assessment? From everything that I've heard and seen, there doesn't seem to be anything unusual at all. In fact, it seems to be business as usual, with one exception, that there was one controller working two separate frequencies. That's very unusual. That's not what you would expect at such a high density, busy airport such as this. At a news conference at the White House on Thursday, Donald Trump blamed diversity employment

policies for the crash. But Democrats pointed to the president's recent decision to sack the head of the Transportation Safety Administration, dismantle the Aviation Security Committee and impose a hiring freeze that could affect air traffic control staff. At the time of the crash, the Federal Aviation Administration had no leader after Elon Musk called on the previous boss to resign. Pete Buttigieg, Transportation Secretary in the Biden administration, said they had grown air traffic control under their watch and had had zero commercial airline crash fatalities.

Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen also criticized the rhetoric from the White House. I was absolutely appalled that President Trump would take this moment of tragedy and politicize it, start pointing fingers at different people without any basis for doing so. In fact, he conceded in response to a question. He had no basis for making those claims, and yet he recklessly and irresponsibly did that. I think he owes the families of the victims an apology.

I think he owes the country an apology. We need to get to the facts. What we don't need is President Trump making a political show out of this awful tragedy. I got the latest from our correspondent, Carl Nassman, at Reagan National Airport. We were just speaking, actually, with some NTSB officials. That's the federal agency, obviously,

in charge of this investigation. And they did confirm that those two black boxes, the flight data recorders from the American Airlines plane, that those have been recovered from the river, that they've already begun the process of now starting to extract the data, you have to open up these black boxes and then take a look at what clues might be within that information in those boxes. Of course, as you mentioned, there's going to be lots of factors that these investigators are going to be looking at. One of them is staffing.

As we heard there, there was one person essentially doing two people's jobs. It's not normal, but if you look at the actual guidelines, it is considered satisfactory. It's not something that would necessarily raise a red flag because we know that there have been some serious staffing issues when it comes to these sorts of air traffic control towers. The staff that are in charge of safety here, it's been a problem really dating all the way back to the pandemic when we know that many people either left the industry or forced out due to flights being grounded.

They're also going to be looking at some other close calls that have taken place in the past here at Reagan National Airport, just about 24 hours actually before this collision. There was another kind of close call. A plane was told to divert after a helicopter got too close to its intended landing path. So many factors will be looked at as this investigation moves on.

We're expecting a preliminary report in about 30 days time, but any kind of final conclusions, that's going to take much longer. We're looking at months, potentially a year. And has the actual recovery operation restarted after the pause earlier? Well, looking out the window now, you know, the sun came up here about 45 minutes or an hour ago. It's still cold and the water out there is also really icy. So some of those recovery operations overnight had really slowed down. The people that have been working hour after hour facing some difficult conditions. In fact, we were hearing this is normal, but it

does sound difficult that their dry suits that they used to stay warm had been getting cut by either debris or ice out there. That is expected to pick up now that the sun has risen. It is getting a bit warmer here. But what they'll be doing, you know, is looking for clues. They want to try to recover pieces of the aircraft. And they're also presumably still looking for the remains of the other 30 or so people that they have not yet recovered. So certainly a grim task taking place out there in the waters of the Potomac River even as we know, you know, flights beginning to really get back up to almost normal here. Lots of people coming to the airport. We saw that morning rush, people coming in with their

suitcases ready to take their flights. Carl Nassman at Reagan National Airport in Washington. India is home to three-quarters of the world's tigers, which are classified as endangered on the international red list. But now in a rare conservation success story, a study has found that India's tiger population has doubled over the past decade to around 3,600 animals. Yadind Radev Jala is a senior scientist at the Indian National Academy of Sciences. It's a wonderful increase in tiger occupancies and it shows that tigers can recover despite the odds of high population pressure, poverty and developmental pressures, provided you have the right attitudes and the right governance.

Our South Asia regional editor Anbarasan Eti Rajan told me how India had managed to achieve this growth. It didn't happen overnight. It has been a project going on for the last four decades. It started in the 70s when the then government declared wildlife sanctuaries are protected. They established new reserves. So basically some of the reasons why the tiger population went down was rampant poaching and the loss of natural habitat. So once you declare a particular area as a tiger sanctuary, then you cannot set up industries.

And also it prevented sometimes local communities to go inside the forest to cut trees or other resources because under the guise of these local communities, even poachers were moving in. So it has been a broader effort in terms of protecting the natural habitat, number one. And also, the local communities are also the first line of defense in terms of protecting tigers. So helping them in terms of providing job opportunities, economic growth, ecotourism, the money coming from them.

So they became the guardians of these sanctuaries. And the third itself is taking various measures to stop poaching because there is a huge demand for tiger body parts in the Far East because they believe that in the traditional medicine it has value. So the various efforts have made this tiger number increase. That's what we saw in many new areas where because of the increasing density of tigers, they're moving to new areas where people are spotting. When I was in one of the reserves in southern India where for the first time they said that tigers are coming from across the other state from Karnataka

because of the population. So it is indeed a very successful conservation story but there are other issues as well. Yeah, I mean tiger numbers going up, moving to new areas, but also India's population, human population is growing. Isn't there a risk of encounters between humans and tigers? That's what we see in many parts of India where there is increasing human-animal conflict where tigers attacking human beings because many communities, they still depend on forests to collect leaves, to collect firewood, and then also take their cattle inside for grazing there. So that is when it comes into contact. And also villages are increasing. So in that case, the human

wildlife conflict happens and that is when the government tries to solve the problem either by relocating some of these communities or educating them how not to enter into. But then recently we had an instance of a man-eating tiger in Kerala in the southern state where people said it killed three, four people. Finally they found this tiger dead. So yes, it is increasing but at the same time the government is trying to contain by educating the villagers as well as providing them other opportunities. South Asia regional editor Anbarisan Etirajan. Advances in technology mean more people have devices that offer rewards for meeting fitness goals. It's called gamification, basically turning

exercise into a video game. More companies are taking up this approach as they try to win a share of the $100 billion global fitness market, but are trackers and leaderboards a positive step? Sean Allsop has been investigating. Growing up, I used to play a lot of video games which incorporated elements of physical exercise like the iToy for the Sony PlayStation or Wii Sports and Wii Fit for the Nintendo Wii. They were marketed as games first and foremost, but now more people have gamification methods built into their fitness routines everywhere. I spoke with Falaz Assembla, Professor at the Near East University in Cyprus.

The use of gamification in the fitness sector started with the 2000s. However, with the technological advancements, gamification has become more sophisticated and integrated in particular smart devices. A report by the media company Business of Apps indicates that 326 million people around the world use fitness apps, with 224 million using smartwatches which made gamification in fitness more accessible.

I'm in the UK in a gym called Digme about to take part in my first spin class and what makes his sessions different is that he uses the latest technology to add gamification to the classes, with tracking progress, level up difficulty mechanics and achievements by high scores. The key is to make as entertaining as possible for 60 minutes, so it's not just a bore festival going do do do do do do. You've got to try and get a little bit of light and shade in there. It is at the end of the day an entertainment, people are paying, they want some sort of show.

I'm going to return to the gym later. In the meantime, I wanted to see how home workouts have changed. In the 1980s, home fitness exploded in popularity, with workout videos, exercise channels and affordable home equipment all contributing to a new form of exercise that today is worth nearly $12 billion according to the research company Fortune Business Insights. The fitness videos are now fitness streaming services like Peloton. They're a company

that make equipment like stationary bikes and treadmills and have online classes available on subscription. The Senior Vice President of Product, Brent Toreski. Since the first days of Peloton, we've had the idea of a leaderboard showing you people with your soul. When you get started and we start tracking how many days in a row that you worked out, that notion of streaks really matter to some members where their personal identity says, you know, I'm a fit person and I'm going to maintain my weekly workout streak. When the smartphone came out and people started getting notifications, we'll add notifications into our experiences to help people achieve their fitness goals.

Back at Digme Gym in the UK, my spin class is nearly finished. Gets the results. Unproved, changed, super, the record. Goal for Ananamish Jannigan. It was pretty intense, but I had fun. The scores are read out at the end, there's a leaderboard and some people have gotten their points, some people have levelled up. I've not got

many points but it's my first time and I'm a swimmer not a cyclist. Sean Olsop reporting and you can hear more stories like that by searching for Business Daily wherever you get your BBC podcasts. And still to come on the Global News podcast... Today Taranaki Aomanga Tupuna is released from the shackles of injustice, of ignorance, of hate. A mountain in New Zealand gets the same legal rights as a person. Discover how to lead a better life in our age of confusion. Enjoy this BBC audiobook collection, written and presented by bestselling author Oliver

Berkman, containing four useful guides to tackling some central ills of modernity. Busyness, anger, the insistence on positivity, and the decline of nuance. Our lives today can feel like miniature versions of this relentless churn of activity. We find we're rushing around more crazily than ever. Somewhere, when we weren't looking, it's like busyness became a way of life. Start listening to Oliver Berkman, Epidemics of Modern Life, available to purchase wherever you get your audiobooks. The Palestinian group Hamas has handed over the names of the next hostages to be freed as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal with Israel on Saturday. In return, more Palestinian prisoners

held in Israeli jails will be released. From Jerusalem, here's Joe Inwood. Keith Segal, Yadan Bebas and Ofa Calderon. The name which people may recognize first, I guess, is Yardhan Bibas. The abduction of Mr. Bibas and his wife Shuri and their children, Ariel and Kfir, from near Oz was one of the defining images of the start of this conflict of October the 7th, these two tiny redheaded children being taken away in their mother's arms on a motorbike. And ever since then then there's been real concern around the fate specifically of Shuri and the two children. Joe Inwood reporting. They call it Germany's firewall, the refusal of established political parties to cooperate

with the far right. But the first cracks appeared on Wednesday when a non-vinding motion on migration passed in the Bundestag with the help of the far-right AfD. Today German MPs have begun debating actual legislation on immigration put forward by the man tipped to be Germany's next leader, Friedrich Merz of the conservative CDU. Critics have staged protests outside the CDU's headquarters. Jens Zimmermann is an MP for the governing Social Democratic Party. Dietrich Merz, everybody also in my own party, we said if he goes into the basement saying nothing for the next four weeks he will sail into the chancellery. But he was in a very obviously emotional moment. He went in front of the cameras and

simply said I want to have this vote and I don't care where the votes are coming from. And this is so wrong. It was emotional. And now people are asking questions. Is this person fit for office? The debates on the immigration legislation was delayed earlier today amid disagreements between the parties. But it got underway just before we started recording this podcast. Our correspondent Damian McGuinness was watching from Berlin. Right now I'm watching the debate from here, Oliver, and I can see the leader of the Conservative Party, Frigier Merz, he's just stepped up to the

podium. He's now addressing parliament. We've just had an incredibly fiery speech from one of the leaders of Olaf Scholz's centre-left Social Democrat party where he accused the Conservatives of opening the doors to hell by allowing his motion on Wednesday, his parliamentary motion, a non-binding suggestion to Parliament to be supported by the AFD. Now the Conservatives have gone a step further today and today we are talking about a bill, so a draft for a concrete law. Both parliamentary procedures are about limiting migration, both contain some quite dramatic and drastic and for many people quite controversial measures about limiting migration, but potentially just as controversial as the measures themselves, is this idea that the leader of the Conservatives, Friedrich Merz, who as you say is tipped to be Germany's next Chancellor

looking at the polls right now, appears to be prepared to allow suggestions and bills he puts forward to be supported by the far-right AfD. And this is unprecedented in German politics because in modern Germany you've always had this so-called firewall which essentially keeps the AFD out of political power and means that they would have no influence on the government. This firewall now appears to be crumbling because what the leader of the conservatives has done, he has allowed the far right to push through or with the far right support he has managed to push through business through parliament and that for many people is the first step of the falling of this firewall. Yeah, so if Friedrich Mertz gets this bill through today with the help of the AFD, what will it mean for the election? Yeah, I mean the bill itself probably won't go much further because it's unlikely to go through the upper house because it's quite controversial so many people in the upper house, they're the regional leads of Germany,

have said they're not going to support it, they're going to block it. So the bill itself will probably stop here but from a symbolic and electioneering point of view it's hard to overstate the importance of it because what it's done, it's really polarised the German political party system even more than it was before. And what we're now seeing is a huge divide between the right and the left. And what we've also seen is that Friedrich Mertz's Conservative Party has taken a hard line tack on migration. What he's done, he's pulled his party to the right, he's saying goodbye to the era of Angela Merkel, who's a centrist who wants to win elections in the centre ground. And what he's trying to do is by talking so

hard line on migration, he wants to win back right wing voters who have defected towards the far right. But many people say that his suggestions and letting himself be supported by the far right is simply legitimising the AFD rather than undermining it. And I think that's why the debate right now in the Bundestag is so ferocious, because it's all about whether this is going to help the far right rather than take away their support. Damien McGuinness in Berlin. Nearly three years of war and the occupation of a huge chunk of Ukraine has left more than 60,000 people missing. Some are soldiers missing in action, many others are civilians detained by Russian forces and then disappeared.

And while Ukraine sometimes gets prisoners of war back in swaps with Russia, civilians are very rarely returned. Sarah Rainsford has met one woman desperate to know what happened to her parents after the Russians took over her town. Every morning they were apart. Tatiana sent a video message to her only child. It was a daily check-in. Because she and her husband were living under Russian occupation in southeastern Ukraine and their daughter was worried. Lyudmila shows me a phone full of those messages and of memories. One is her dad's

50th birthday in life before the Russians invaded. in life before the Russians invaded. In all the images Tatyana and Oleg are full of laughter and life. But in September 2023 they were detained by Russian soldiers and disappeared. Ludmila's grand saw it all, as armed men dressed in black burst into their home and took Tatyana and Oleg away in handcuffs. For four months there was no trace of them. Then one day Tatyana was abandoned at a hospital, in a coma. She never regained consciousness. It's just so tough to think what they did to her and why. My mum was 51, she loved life.

Then everything was cut short. Lyudmila's father has still not been found. Ludmila's father has still not been found. If God forbid something happens to my dad, it will kill me. When the Russian army first rolled into Melotopol, Ludmila joined the protests. Crowds sang their defiance then, waving Ukrainian flags in front of tanks and telling the troops to go home. Then the Russians began rounding them up. Lyudmila fled, but her parents stayed.

I'd say, mom, maybe you should leave. and she'd say, just a little more time. Tatyana was convinced that Ukrainian troops would retake their city soon and liberate them. Some people die on the battlefield and others die in occupation, helping Ukraine in other ways. To Misha as a warrior, she knew the risks, but she had to help. Ludbilla now knows her mother was charged with espionage, but only after she was dumped at hospital, unconscious.

No one will say where she was held before that or what happened to her and her father is officially missing although he was taken by Russian troops This is not an isolated case. In Kiev the Red Cross runs a helpline and most people calling have missing relatives too. Soldiers and civilians. The staff take details and fill in a database. But a tracing system can only work with information. And although international law says both sides in a war have to inform about all detainees,

Russia just doesn't do that. Sarah Rainsford reporting. After years of negotiations a settlement has been reached in New Zealand that allows a mountain the same legal right as a human. Rebecca Wood reports. Taranaki Munga is a pristine snow-capped dormant volcano and standing at over two and a half thousand meters It's the second highest mountain on New Zealand's North Island It's known for its beauty, hiking, snow sports and now something else Today Taranaki-aumanga-Tupuna is released from the shackles of injustice, of ignorance, of hate

That's Debbie Narewa-Packer, a co-leader of the political party Topati Maori and a descendant of the Taranaki tribes. She's speaking during the Parliament session that passed the law giving the mountain all the rights, powers and responsibilities of a person. The agreement aims to compensate Maori from the region for injustices done to them during and after colonisation, including widespread land confiscation. Paul Goldsmith is the government minister responsible for the negotiations. Mountain has long been an honoured ancestor, a source of physical, cultural and spiritual

sustenance and a final resting place. Traditional Māori practices associated with the mountains were banned while tourism was promoted. Pests such as possums were introduced and led to destruction of the native forest in some parts. The mountain will no longer be officially known as Agmont. That was the name given to it by British explorer James Cook in the 18th century and instead be called Taranaki Maunga. It will effectively own itself with representatives of the local tribes and government working together to manage it. Hundreds of other Maori turned up at maunga. It will effectively own itself with representatives of the local tribes and government working together to manage it. Hundreds of other Maori turned up at parliament on Thursday to see

the bill become law and burst into song when it did. The mountains not alone and being a natural feature of New Zealand to be granted legal personhood. In 2014, a native forest became the first to gain such status in the world, followed by a river in 2017. And our report by Rebecca Wood. That's all from us for now, but the Global News podcast will be back very soon. This edition was mixed by Mark Pickett and produced by David Lewis, our editor's Karen Martin.

I'm Oliver Conway. Until next time, goodbye. Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by. And in 2017 Miranda, a university tutor from London, joins a yoga school that promises profound transformation. It felt a really safe and welcoming space. After the yoga classes I felt amazing. But soon that calm welcoming atmosphere leads to something far darker, a journey that leads to allegations of grooming, trafficking and exploitation across international borders. I don't have my passport, I don't have my phone, I don't have my bank cards, I have nothing. The passport being taken, the being in a house and not feeling like they can leave.

World of Secrets is where untold stories are unveiled and hidden realities are exposed. In this new series, we're confronting the dark side of the wellness industry, where the hope of a spiritual breakthrough gives way to disturbing accusations. You just get sucked in so gradually and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise. And it's like this, the secret that's there. I wanted to believe that, you know, that whatever they were doing, even if it seemed gross to me, was for some spiritual reason that I couldn't yet understand. I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this

and to put my reputation and everything else on the line. I want truth and justice. And for other people to not be hurt, for things to be different in the future. To bring it into the light and almost alchemize some of that evil stuff that went on. And take back the power.

World of Secrets, season six, The Bad Guru. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.