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From Our Own Correspondent: Held captive in DR Congo

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29/04/2023 GMT

Held captive in DR Congo

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Held captive in DR Congo

The ADF rebel group preys on civilians; stories from Laos, Paraguay and Switzerland

The ADF abducts, kills and spreads fear in eastern Congo; an unfinished job of demining Laos; changes come to Paraguay's Chaco region; the Swiss grannies suing over climate policy

There are more than a hundred different armed groups operating in eastern Congo, but in recent months the ADF movement has been causing the most concern after it attacked towns and villages, killing dozens of people and abducting many more. Hugh Kinsella Cunningham talked to one woman who had survived months of captivity in an ADF camp - and who managed to escape. 

Laos holds an unhappy record of being the world's most heavily-bombed country per capita - after the US rained down munitions on its territory during the Vietnam War era, trying to eradicate Viet Cong bases and shelters in Laos during that conflict. Many of those millions of bombs and shells are still lying in Laotian fields - and still killing and maiming dozens of farmers and children per year. Antonia Bolingbroke Kent went out with one team trying to locate and disable this potential harvest of UXOs.

Once, Paraguay's Chaco region was nicknamed the "green hell" for its spiky scrubland, and few outsiders ever entered. But after many decades of settlement by Mennonite religious communities, some of the scrubland's giving way to farmland - and now a new highway is making the area more accessible than ever before. Jane Chambers heard that not all of the longer-term inhabitants are so keen about the outside world moving in...

And Imogen Foulkes considers how the impact of climate change is being felt in Switzerland - as mental pictures of snowy Alpine peaks are now edged out by increasingly frequent heatwaves and temperatures so high that Swiss households are warned of "tropical nights" when it never gets any cooler than 25C. Now a group of older, female campaigners have taken the Swiss government to a human rights court, claiming climate change threatens older women's health in particular. 

Presenter: Pascale Harter
Producer: Polly Hope
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

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