World Tour: Rebels advance in the DRC

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: WORLD Tour, with our reporter in Africa, Onize Oduah.

AUDIO: [Memorial service]

ONIZE ODUAH: M23 Rebels — We start today in South Africa at the official memorial service for some 14 soldiers killed in ongoing fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Violence surged in January as the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels captured the region’s largest city of Goma.

Rudzani Maphwanya is the defense chief of the South African National Defence Force.

RUDZANI MAPHWANYA: To you, my family, and the entire DOD (Department of Defence) family, your sorrow and grief is shared by a nation that recognizes and understands that yours is a noble task, a task that none would stand and carry out except those who are patriots.

On Sunday, the M23 rebels advanced into the region’s second-largest city of Bukavu with little government resistance.

The African Union warned about the risk of a larger regional conflict.

Bankole Adeoye is an African Union commissioner.

BANKOLE ADEOYE: This new escalation should not become an open conflict that will disrupt an impact on humanitarian activities and the already very weakened social fabric in the region. The only way to solve the problem in eastern DRC is for all parties to sit around the table.

M23 is one of more than 100 armed groups active in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The region holds trillions of dollars’ worth of mineral wealth.

AUDIO: [Rescued workers]

Myanmar scam centers — And in Southeast Asia, hundreds of workers rescued from scam centers are in Myanmar, also known as Burma, as they await repatriation to their home countries.

Authorities rescued them near Myanmar’s shared border with Thailand. The border region has increasingly become a haven for criminal groups running online scams worth tens of billions of dollars. Many of the people carrying out the scams were also falsely recruited in what’s now called virtual slavery.

Guo Jiakun is a spokesman with China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

GUO JIAKUN: [CANTONESE] China is working with Thailand, Myanmar and other countries to actively conduct bilateral and multilateral cooperation, comprehensively adopt a series of policies, address both the symptoms and root causes of the issue, and prevent lawbreakers from crossing borders to commit crimes.

He says here that China is working with Thailand and Myanmar to address the symptoms and root causes of the criminal groups.

Last week, Thai authorities announced that they are repatriating more than 250 rescued people from more than 20 countries, including from Africa.

AUDIO: [Memorial goers singing together]

Navalny memorial — Next, to Russia, where mourners and foreign ambassadors laid flowers at the grave of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny last weekend.

Sunday marked one year since Russian authorities announced Navalny’s death in detention blaming chronic diseases and a sudden spike in his blood pressure.

But his family and other supporters insist Russian authorities killed him.

His mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, attended the memorial at the Moscow cemetery.

LYUDMILA NAVALNAYA: [RUSSIAN] The entire world knows the contractor, but we want to find perpetrators, those who facilitated it and those who did it.

She says here that the world knows who ordered his death, but Navalny’s supporters still desire to find those directly involved in his killing.

Similar memorials occurred in other countries, including Poland, Spain, and Germany.

AUDIO: [Chanting protesters]

Germany protest — We end today in Germany, where tens of thousands of people joined demonstrations to push against any cooperation with a right-wing populist party.

The Alternative for Germany party is expected to emerge as Germany’s second-largest party after elections on Sunday.

The weekend rally followed a speech by U-S Vice President J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference. He said that free speech is in retreat in Europe and insisted that everyone must be allowed to participate in politics.

JD VANCE: The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within - the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.

Sven-Christoph Blaesing is a civil servant within the German government. He told a WORLD reporter in Germany that the country’s political institutions protect free speech by limiting some forms of hate speech. But he says the same institution also keeps all political parties in check.

SVEN-CHRISTOPH BLAESING: A lot of the things that are happening here simply can’t be changed by any party. So even if the AfD comes to power, they cannot change certain things, we will still have nine country borders versus, for instance, two that the US has that cannot be changed.

That’s it for this week’s World Tour. Reporting for WORLD, I’m Onize Oduah in Abuja, Nigeria.

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