Global News Podcast - WHO chief blames racism for world's neglect of Sudan

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus calls the situation in Sudan very alarming and the largest displacement crisis in the world. Also: Flooding from Typhoon Yagi has killed more than 220 people in Myanmar. And how to windsurf from the Netherlands to the UK and back.

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service, with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. 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 Thank you. Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson, and at 13 Hours GMT on Tuesday 17th September, these are our main stories.

The head of the World Health Organisation says the war in Sudan is not getting the attention it deserves, and race may be a factor. Flooding caused by Typhoon Yagi has now killed more than 220 people in Myanmar. Also in this podcast, a Frenchman accused of drugging his wife and recruiting dozens of people to rape her has admitted his crimes in court. And in the morning, I was more or less floating for two hours because there was not enough wind. So there I traveled maybe one or two kilometers in two hours. How to windsurf from the Netherlands to the UK and back.

Escalating violence in Sudan is creating the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the United Nations, and the head of the World Health Organization, who's just returned from there, has seen for himself the scale of the devastation. Tens of thousands of people have died and 12 million have been forced to flee their homes since April last year when Sudan was thrown into disarray after its army and a powerful paramilitary group began a vicious struggle for power. Three out of every four children there are going hungry. That's 16 million kids. Starving mothers are unable to feed their babies. Speaking to the BBC's Michelle Hussain, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

said one reason the crisis in Sudan was being overlooked was racism. The situation in Sudan is very, very alarming. You know about the massive displacement. It's now the largest in the world. And, of course, famine. Imagine destruction, displacement, massive diseases everywhere, and now famine. That's so tragic. When I was in Sudan, actually, I visited a camp for IDPs. And also I have visited a hospital, especially the children's ward.

And you see there are many children, skin and bone, emaciated. And you can see also famine is in restricted areas like Al-Fasha and so on, but starvation is almost everywhere. So the scale is really big. And as you know, half of the population needs support now, which is close to 25 million of the total population. And that's really big. And 12 million of the population is already displaced, 10 million internally and more than 2 million who fled the country. So it's really tragic, and the attention it gets from the international community is really low.

It's not getting the attention it deserves. And I have seen it all and I will continue to speak about it. I think Sudan deserves to be the centre of attention. Why do you think it isn't? That's the sad part because you see it repeatedly. It's not just Sudan, but you see it in other areas. You remember when there was war in Tigray, Ethiopia, I made the same comment. It was a very tragic war. The number of people killed is even more than what you see now in Sudan. And the level of rape was in tens of thousands. My observation is when it comes to thousands, especially in Africa,

I think the attention is really, really low. Is race a factor in that? And I ask that because I think you did some time ago say that you wondered whether the world gives equal attention to black and white lives. And you were thinking on the one hand about Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, and you were contrasting that with concern for Ukraine. Exactly. I think race is in the play here. That's what I feel now, because we see the pattern now. Were you shocked by what you saw in Sudan? Because I feel listening to you that you were, and yet I know that you must have seen many terrible things, not only in your time leading the WHO, but before that. Yeah, before that, because I know war.

You grew up as a child during war? Yes. So I was brought up actually in the middle of war. And I know the smell of war, the image of war, the sound of war. And its impact on you? That's Ethiopia you're referring to? Yeah, of course, the impact on me, but from that I can understand how it impacts others. And I remember my mother actually praying that I survive a day at a time. The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. A court in southern France, which is holding a high-profile rape case has heard from the accused for the first time.

71-year-old Dominique Pellico is accused of administering anti-anxiety drugs to his wife, of raping her and of recruiting others to do so while she was unconscious. I heard more from our Paris correspondent, Hugh Schofield. This case has attracted a lot of attention in France and around the world, of course because of the extraordinary circumstances which it relates about this man, Dominique Pellico, who he has admitted now in court today that he did what he was accused of doing,

which is of drugging his wife repeatedly over ten years and in her state of unconsciousness, raping her himself, but also, and this is where it becomes so sort of strange and upsetting, arranging through the internet for men from the area to come and have sex with her as well. So today he was in court for the first time, at least he was speaking for the first time, he's been ill, and he said, court for the first time. At least he was speaking for the first time. He's been ill. And he said, I recognize the facts in their totality. This is what I'm charged with is true.

He then said, I'm a rapist, as are all the other defendants with me here in court. And there are 50 other men on trial in this mammoth case. So he's saying they're rapists, too. They knew what this was all about. They understood what was happening when they had sex with my wife. This is obviously a point of contention, though, because the defense of all these men, or nearly all these men, is that they did not consider themselves to be rapists. They thought they were doing something that was consensual and which had the agreement of the woman in the case, his wife, Giselle, even though she's, of course, absolutely unconscious and flat out at the the time they say they think it was part of a sex game he's saying

no they knew what what they were doing and that of course is at the heart of of this trial I mean he himself has admitted and he was tearful today he's described his you know a kind of split personality on one side leading a perfectly happy life with this woman who he said he loved and at the same time unable to resist these impulses to to humiliate her and have rape her and have her raped unconscious in this way how did his co-accused react when he made these admissions and implicated them well there are 50 of them there so it's hard to say you know individually they will react in their different ways but we we know that, I mean, certainly, when he said this in court, there was a kind of hubbub among the defendants, because he was basically attacking their defense. Their defense is going

to be, at least many of them, that they thought this was a sex game, they went on the internet, this seemed to be something which had been agreed with the man and his wife, and they thought, they say, that it was all something which was therefore not constitutive of rape, but of sex between consenting adults. That is clearly going to be a highly controversial defence, and it has been undermined already by the statement from the principal accused, the man who set up the whole thing in the first place. Hugh Schofield.

Deadly floods continue to cause devastation in Myanmar. The military government now says more than 220 people are known to have died after Typhoon Yagi struck the country. This man fled his village home in Lykhor district and said people were becoming desperate. We have lost many things. We lost houses, clothes in the wars, and now the floods have swept away the house we were living in, and we cannot save it. So there's nothing left for us. We can't even catch fish, and we're in trouble for food. We can't stay in our houses anymore because of the floods. Villagers asked the monks to help us, Our correspondent in the region is Rupert Wingfield-Hayes.

It has been a dramatic rise, a doubling of the death toll, but this has been going on, this is over a period of about a week, and one of the things that's making this situation much more complicated in Myanmar is the fact that the country is riven by civil war. Since the military junta took over in 2021, the country has really been split up into different fiefdoms, different warring factions, and that's making this natural disaster a great deal worse, because it makes it much more difficult to find out exactly what's going on in much of the north and the border areas along the Chinese border, the Thai border and even the border with India. It's very hard to tell exactly what's going on. But it looks like a very large area of central Myanmar, all the way from Mandalay down to Naypyidaw along the Irrawaddy River,

has been very badly flooded and also in the Shan State towards the border with Thailand. And this is really, you know, this has come from Typhoon Yagi that hit Vietnam more than a week ago. So this is a monster typhoon that came across the South China Sea, slammed into northern Vietnam and Laos, and is still causing this massive flooding all the way across in Myanmar. It sounds from what you're saying as though the death toll actually could be even worse than we know.

I think it's almost certainly going to be a lot higher than this latest figure that the military government is giving because they control a small, you know, relatively small amount of the country, although they do control quite a lot of the area that has been flooded around the capital, Naypyidaw. But there are areas, like I said, in the Shan state and further north that the government has very little control of. We understand there have been landslides in the Shan state. It's a very mountainous, hilly area. There are many people still missing. So I think we will see the death toll continue to climb. And that's after it killed well over 200 people in northern Vietnam, causing real devastation in the mountains of northern Vietnam and people in Hainan in southern China.

So this storm has really caused a massive amount of chaos wherever it has gone, right across this part of Southeast Asia. Rupert Wingfield-Hayes. Donald Trump has spoken publicly for the first time since the latest apparent attempt on his life at a golf course in Florida. He praised his protection team and commended President Joe Biden for his response, saying he couldn't have been nicer. Ryan Wesley Ruth, the suspected gunman,

has appeared in court in connection with the incident. The attack on Sunday has once again raised questions over the safety of presidential candidates, barely two months after the former president sustained a gunshot wound to his ear. Christopher O'Leary spent more than 20 years with the FBI working on counterterrorism investigations. Well, it's a very charged political environment. And unfortunately, there has been building momentum to change this

political frustration into mobilizing towards political violence. There are trends in American history and in other places around the world where you see patterns where this develops. And here in the United States, there is very tense times right now, and it's a lethal combination of rhetoric, polarizing rhetoric, the Internet and the echo chambers that exist within the internet and some media outlets, as well as the political rhetoric from many different sides in the U.S. political arena are definitely creating a really lethal cocktail. I don't see failures, but I certainly see concerns. Now, the Secret Service has been analyzed and criticized by many, but the Secret

Service is a very small federal agency within the United States. Only a few thousand sworn Secret Service agents and uniformed members, and they have a finite amount of resources, and they have a massive undertaking to prevent political violence and assassination attempts against the current president and the vice president, all visiting heads of state, as well as every former president and their immediate families. So it's a massive undertaking and they can have zero failures. The challenge is, you know, with former President Trump, he's a current candidate, so he rates Secret Service protection. But it's not at the same level as the sitting president. So the resources that he's been given are clearly not adequate to the threat level that he's facing. I will say somebody hiding in the shrubs for 12 hours while concerning is not something that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody.

Although the former president's desire to golf that day wasn't publicized, it does not take an investigator to figure out that President Trump, when he goes down to Mar-a-Lago, likes to golf on weekends. So that's a pattern that you can analyse and predict. And then golfing, unfortunately, is a sequential sport. So he's going to follow the numbered holes on the golf course. Somebody just has to lie in wait. So that's a concern. When you're protecting somebody, you like to mix things up and prevent patterns.

Christopher O'Leary. Now, if you had to travel from the Netherlands to England and back all in one day, you'd probably fly. But a Dutch windsurfer has done the 400 kilometre trip on his board in just 18 hours. Bob van der Bergd spoke to Victoria Uwenkunde. It was rough and really, really long. In the end, it took around 18 hours to be back on the land in the Netherlands. So it was really late last night. What was rough that in the morning, I was more or less floating for two hours because there was not enough wind. So there I traveled maybe one or two kilometers in two hours, which is super slow, of course.

Then the wind picked up and we had to go through the shipping lane. And then we just had to go for hours and hours and hours until we arrived in Lowestoft. There, actually, I had a really rough time because it was quite cold on the beach and the boat had to refill. And I was there waiting and my back locked up a bit. So I felt super, super stiff. So you are doing this for a reason

because you're talking about rough seas and having your back locked. You are raising money for children, in particular one child, Lucas. Tell us more about him. I do this for a charity, which is called Muscles for Muscles. So it's a charity,

which is fighting muscle diseases for kids. And through this charity, I met this kid Lucas, which is 10 years old with a muscular disease. So I'm happy I can do something good on my own way. Windsurfer Bob van der Berg speaking to Victoria Uwunkunda. Still to come in this podcast. She knows that for me to give her 100 bucks is a big thing and that she'd better take it seriously. And she did. And the thing about the experiment, it really worked. The mother bribing her child to swap her smartphone for a book. 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 Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. Floods are continuing to wreak havoc and devastation as they sweep through Central Europe in the aftermath of Storm Boris. In the Hungarian capital Budapest, the mayor has asked those living near the Danube to evacuate. Three months' worth of rain fell in the Czech Republic in three days.

Andreas von Weissenberg is in charge of the response for the Red Cross. He says his staff are braced for more to come. These masses of water, and I mean some places in Austria have gotten 400 millimetres in just a few days. These are extreme numbers, and before the water levels make their way through rivers and waterways, it will take a number of days, it could take until the end of the week, even into early next week. Here in Hungary and in Slovakia, sort of downstream, teams are on high alert to intervene as the floodwaters come through. Nick Thorpe in Budapest gave us this update. I'm on Margaret Island in the middle of the river Danube, right in the centre of Budapest. I can see the Hungarian parliament building just on my shoulder, and where I'm standing, there's a long wall of sandbags

right up to my waist, really, and a crowd of men packing more sandbags. These are some of the sandbags which the mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karachony, has said a million sandbags are being put along these more vulnerable points in the capital waiting for this flood wave coming down the Danube towards us now. And that is the thing isn't it more bad weather is expected to come and the storm is heading south. That's right I would say at this moment it's not so much the bad weather it's

actually the sun is actually shining to the relief of many of the people working on these flood barriers here now. It's really the effect of the rains and even snow. Several metres of snow fell on the high ground on the mountains in Austria over the weekend. Obviously the heavy rain and the devastation we've been seeing in the Czech Republic and in Poland. Now the Danube, all those smaller rivers which have been causing such problems in the mountains and in the hills in other countries of Central Europe, now funneling all of that water down into the Danube here, all those big tributaries and small tributaries of the Danube, and bringing that flood wave down.

Last night the river peaked in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, at 9.5 metres. So that's one issue, the sheer level of the water rising, where I am here rising at about a metre a day, expected to peak on Thursday. But then the other question will be how long this lasts, because obviously the flood defence is very well prepared in each of these countries, but if it lasts a long time, those defences, the sandbag walls like the one I'm standing next to now,

can get soaked through. And so if this lasts a long time with all that water and snow melting in austria then problems could be up further down the line and the number of people who've lost almost everything it's huge isn't it this is such a large area it is huge um i mean this is europe's second biggest river it flows through nine countries it has a catchment area of 19 countries and further down south, so the poorer countries, Romania in particular, that's where the biggest loss of life has been so far. Nick Thorpe in Budapest. The philanthropist and billionaire

founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, has told the BBC that 40 million more children will suffer from hunger's worst effects in the coming years because of climate change. He also believes a big drop in international aid means hundreds of millions of children are at serious risk of dying or suffering from preventable diseases. Mr Gates told my colleague Rob Young that although there has been progress, rich countries have a moral duty to act.

The period 2000 to the start of the pandemic, everybody should be very, very proud that aid generosity cut the childhood death rate in half. And the biggest reason for that was things like vaccines from Gavi for diarrhea and pneumonia, and things like bed nets from Global Fund. So we were spoiled. I mean, that was great. Deaths were going down. Since the start of the pandemic, not just the pandemic, but the interest payments and the cuts in aid mean that we're flat.

Whether it's improving malnutrition or reducing deaths, we're basically flat. And so this year, we're particularly focusing on nutrition. But our overall message is, hey, health in Africa, let's get back to the generosity and the progress that was miraculous to 2019. It's easy to say you need to get it back, or you want the world to get back to that generosity of years gone by. But the pandemic has loaded rich nations governments with vast amounts of debt. People in richer nations have been, like everybody around the world, suffering with the cost of living

crisis. And so what do you say to those people who say there just isn't enough money to spend more on aid? Some people in your home country, the US, as they look toward the election in November, who say America first, everybody else second. It's important to dimensionalise the ask here. What we're saying is that rich countries, if they are willing to spend 1% of their budget to help poor countries, then the stability in those countries avoids all sorts of things that you'd have to intervene in militarily or you'd have a pandemic coming out of those countries. And just the pure moral thing of we can run a measles campaign or buy a vaccine and save a child's life for a thousand

dollars. Do you feel good about that? Or should you take that thousand dollars, less than one percent of your budget and spend it on other things? And of course, voters get to decide. You know, I claim if all of this was visible to them, they would choose to spend that 1%. The founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates. India's Supreme Court has said states cannot demolish homes of people accused of a crime, a tactic plaintiffs in court hearings called bulldozer justice. It's a practice that is increasingly used throughout the country. Critics say it seems to be largely practiced in states ruled by India's governing party. They also say it unfairly targets minority communities, especially Muslims. The Supreme Court will now issue new guidelines on property demolitions and it begins its hearings today. Our South Asia correspondent Samira Hussain

reports from Mandla in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. I'm standing in front of a pile of broken bricks and rocks with steel rods and wires that are all twisted up that just lay in a pile of rubble. I can see a pair of sneakers, some broken mirrors, and even the head of a plastic doll. This used to be Asya Bano's home. But one day in June, authorities came and bulldozed it to the ground. Social media videos show the moment police entered the village, accusing Asya Bano's husband, a Muslim, of having beef, which is illegal in most Indian states. By morning, authorities bulldozed her house, saying it was illegally built on public land. Overcome with grief, Asya Bano sits in a pile of rubble and broken dreams. Where will we go now? We were taking shelter in other people's homes.

All our belongings are buried. But what pains me the most is that I lost my daughter too. Her daughter, 16-year-old Zeenath, died of pneumonia just six weeks after her home was demolished. Asiabano is convinced it was because she was forced to sleep outside with no shelter from the monsoons. Asiabano's home is not the only one that was destroyed. Actually, along this narrow one-lane dirt road, there's about 26 homes that make up this community. But on that June day, authorities came in and bulldozed almost half of the homes. Homes being bulldozed of people that are accused of crimes. And that's why the Supreme Court is taking it up. Authorities are saying, well, some of these are illegally built

or the building itself is unstable or unsafe and has to come down. Amnesty International has documented quite a few of these cases across the country in the last few years. And they say the reasonings are much more sinister. It's not always the case that it is those who dissent who are targeted, but it is generally the case that it's those people the government doesn't like. And it is most often the case that these are minorities, particularly Muslims. Akad Patel is the chair of Amnesty International here in India.

None of the due process is actually followed, which is why the Supreme Court has taken an interest in this. There is a system that the government must follow. There is a due process which it doesn't actually respect. They go about raising people's homes for no reason other than the fact that these people are Muslim. The government didn't reply to our requests for comment, but has repeatedly denied it preys on minorities. Listen to this clip from the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, where he pushes back against allegations that Muslim homes are unfairly targeted. Show me one Muslim who can say I was innocent

and has been a victim of injustice. Show me one. Nobody can say this. A busy street in the city of Ujjain. Police are making an announcement. We will use the harshest punishment. They're talking about Muslim boys who allegedly spat on a Hindu procession. The video went viral last year. The boys, Ashraf Mansuri's sons. The harsh punishment, raising his home to the ground, as a devotional Hindu song echoes in the neighborhood. They put up a notice saying the building is structurally unsafe and will be demolished. Take what you can, you have an hour. Merely accused of a crime, and the entire family pays the price.

We are in no condition to build it all over again. You cannot build a house just like that. Despite India's highest court taking up the issue, none of the victims I spoke with actually believe that anything will change. Samira Hussain. Now, does this sound like a child who hates reading? They swung me back and forth like I was a sack of flour. I hate you guys, I yelled over their laughter.

One, Jeremiah began. Two, Stephen said. And three, Conrad finished. They launched me into the pool, clothes and all. That's a 12-year-old Canadian girl reading her favourite bedtime book. But it wasn't always this way. The girl's mother is the Canadian author Mireille Silcoff, who became worried when her daughter got a smartphone and all hope of her enjoying books went out of the window.

Desperate to introduce her to the joys of reading, Mireille took extreme action. She offered her daughter a $100 bribe to read. Mireille's been writing about the experience, which has amused some parents and outraged others. My daughter was a pretty gregarious girl. She was happy at just about anything. She'd get excited about a new dessert cooling in the fridge, kind of jumping up and down that sort of thing. And then when she got the phone, which did coincide with puberty, so it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, but there was definitely a change. And she entered what I called the duvet cave stage, which was just, you know, close the door, close the blinds in her room under a duvet

with the phone, as long as we would allow her to stay in there. There was a big change from a gregarious tigger to a bit more of a monosyllabic blanket slug. Wanting her to read real books, physical books, not on a Kindle, not on a screen, was just a way to try to put a wedge into this thing that all parents of preteens and teens and even Gen Alphas, young kids are dealing with nowadays, which is this tsunami of attention grab that we're all dealing with with the phones. You're just a single parent fighting Google and Apple and Amazon and everyone else. And it just seems like an insurmountable battle. And no matter how many time constraints you put in or blackout periods or whatever, it just seems a bit unwinnable because you're one parental unit or, in my case, one parent up against the system. Had your daughter enjoyed reading before she got a phone?

No, she did not enjoy reading at all, as many kids don't these days. You know, there was this really depressing Pew study that came out just around 2021, kind of as the pandemic was starting to wind down, kind of the latter Omicron era. And it basically showed that there was an over 30% decline in children around the age of 12 who said that they ever read for pleasure between 2021 and 1984. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out why. So you offered to pay your daughter $100 then to read a novel. What was her initial reaction? Absolutely, yes. My daughter never gets $100 for anything. And I got a lot of flack from New York

Times readers because, as expected, a lot of readers said, well, that's nice that you've got $100 that you can throw at your daughter to read a single book. I don't have that type of money. I don't have a money tree growing in my backyard. But the point of this was that it was an ungodly amount of money, at least in my household, for a 12-year-old to get. I wanted my daughter to know that this was really, really important and that it was such a serious thing for me and such an important thing for her that I was willing to pay her a mint of money in order to try it. Of course, she would have tried for 20 bucks or something like that, but I just don't think there would have been the same dedication because she knows that, you know, I'm a journalist, I'm not rolling in

money, right? So she knows that for me to give her a hundred bucks is a big thing and that she'd better take it seriously. And she did. And the thing about the experiment, it really worked. So, you know, it's only a few months on now, but she's read a couple of other books. She says she'd read more. And before I did this, she refused to read any book. Canadian author Marais Silkov. And that's all from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. Thank you. Brough and the producer was Richard Hamilton. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritson. 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 Music with a Prime membership.

Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts.