Blood Cobalt
Thursday 24 February at 8pm
The world is embracing renewable technologies but how much do we know about the metals that are powering this green revolution?
This story exposes the shocking truth about the mining of cobalt, a metal essential to making the batteries in electric cars, laptops and mobile phones.
The world’s richest deposits of cobalt are in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the poorest countries on earth. It produces about 70% of world output.
This buried treasure has lured hundreds of thousands of Congolese to work in the country’s mines, big and small.
But mining is dangerous, corruption and violence is rife and though child labour has been banned, it’s common.
In recent years, the cobalt trade has been taken over by Chinese companies which operate 15 of the 19 big industrial mines. Locals say that under their management, low safety standards have dropped even further.
“Unfortunately people even are dying for lack of safety,” says an employee of one big company.
Australian reporter Michael Davie travels to this mineral-rich country to investigate the industry - from the major Chinese-owned companies to the conditions of the small-scale workers on the fringes of the big mines.
It’s a dangerous mission and Davie is followed, harassed and arrested by mine and government security officials.
What he uncovers is shocking.
The day he arrives there’s been a mine cave-in, killing at least six miners.
He sees miners tunnel 25 metres underground with no safety equipment.
He meets children as young as six handling cobalt, a toxic metal which can cause serious health effects.
He meets a mother whose 13-year-old son has just been killed on the fringes of a mine whose embankment collapsed. Companies in Congo are obliged to make sure their perimeters are safe.
He secures a video which shows a man being beaten by a Congolese soldier as Chinese mine managers watch on laughing.
And he interviews a whistleblower who accuses the Chinese mine he works for of covering up the deaths of co-workers. He also says the country isn’t benefitting from the boom.
“There is no investment coming back in terms of environment, infrastructure…We don’t have road facilities, we don’t have communication. There is nothing.”
But there’s hope amidst the gloom. Davie meets the Good Shepherd Sisters, nuns who’ve set up a school near the mines and educated thousands of children.
“If the children are given education, if schools are spread all over and every child goes to school, then we are redeeming this country,” says one nun.
This is a rare insight into a powerful industry which operates a dangerous business with seeming impunity. All of us use the end product.
https://twitter.com/ForeignOfficial/status/1494243724490166280?s=20&t=A_9SQ453Ea1V_I0p2gkuSA
Thursday 3 March at 8pm
https://twitter.com/ForeignOfficial/status/1496780942718881795?s=20&t=HCmIWZYSLSvco9__HHUQiQ
The world is watching on in shock as Putin’s army invades Ukraine. Despite months of Russian military build-up on Ukraine’s borders, many thought Putin would never dare to try and crush his neighbour’s independence with military might.
Now these two countries, with a shared history spanning centuries, are fighting each other in the streets of Ukrainian cities.
How did it come to this?
In the weeks leading up to the invasion, Foreign Correspondent explores both sides of this dangerous conflict.
Reporter David Lipson travels across Ukraine to find a country whose identity has been forged in the heat of the eight-year war between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists occupying regions in the east.
Former Moscow correspondent Eric Campbell works with a local Russian crew to get rare access inside the separatist region. He speaks to locals whose loyalties lies with Russia and who believe Ukrainians are Nazis.
Starting in the capital Kyiv, Lipson meets a young mother who’s bearing the scars of the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine has lost 14 000 lives in the conflict that began in 2014.
“At that moment we already understood who the enemy was and we just wanted to stop him from going further into our land,” says Victoria, a former soldier, whose partner was killed by a landmine. “I am sure this war has definitely changed the country.”
As Lipson travels east towards the frontline, he discovers just how much the country has changed. Close to the separatist region, there are destroyed villages, their residents living under constant shelling. One farmer has been cut off from his farmland. The young have fled. The old remain.
“My heart aches every time I turn on TV, for our soldiers. What did we do to deserve this?” cries one old woman, who is caring for her blind husband. “I was born in 1942, during the war, and I have to witness it again, the ninth year in a row.”
In Mariupol on the east coast, also close to the frontline, Lipson finds a city increasingly divided. Pro-Russians are suspicious of the Ukrainian government, pro-Ukrainians are preparing to take up arms.
Eric Campbell’s team takes us inside the separatist region. We meet a young woman who says she will never live under Ukrainian rule. “We can’t live in the same country as the Nazis. We can’t forgive all that we experienced through the years’, says Alexandra.
Days later, she evacuates into Russia, as Putin’s propaganda machine bombards the region with stories of Ukrainian saboteurs and aggression.
The courage and determination of ordinary Ukrainians to stand and fight the Russian invaders has stunned the world. But will it be enough to save their country?
Trapped In Idlib
https://twitter.com/ForeignOfficial/status/1501006787738095621?s=20&t=n38sJBbKroI1C822772iGQ
Thursday 10 March at 8pm
Before Ukraine, there was Syria.
Now in its 11th year, this ongoing conflict is Russia’s forgotten war. Since Putin got involved in 2015, Russian military support has helped the dictator Bashar al-Assad turn the tide and take back control of most of the country.
The intense aerial bombardment being felt now in Ukraine is all too familiar to the Syrian people.
In 2016, Syrian journalist Yaman Khatib lived through the brutal Russian bombing campaign which left the city of Aleppo in ruins and delivered it into Assad’s hands.
Khatib fled to neighbouring Turkey, but he’s come back to Syria to see how the people who stayed are faring.
Khatib visits the embattled province of Idlib in the northwest, the last opposition holdout against Assad and his Russian allies.
More than 3 million people live there, two thirds of them displaced from other parts of the country.
He meets families who’ve just arrived, families who’ve lost everything and the brave people who help them.
Khatib meets Ahlam, a mother and herself a refugee. She and her family have lived in Idlib for a decade.
Every day Ahlam heads out onto the streets seeking out people who’ve just arrived, offering them help. She blogs about the situation on social media, hoping to draw attention to their plight.
“We never imagined that one day, in our country, in our own homes, that someone would come to us and say, ‘Leave! Get out! Go live in a tent!’” says Ahlam. “That’s why I can truly relate to the pain of others. I’ve experienced it myself.”
Khatib says that the world’s indifference to Syrians’ plight continues to surprise them.
More than half a million dead. More than six and half million refugees outside the country, and 6.5 million citizens internally displaced. No meaningful international help.
Khatib meets Abu Medien, a farmer and father of 8, their belongings all crammed into their truck.
The family has been on the road for three years and have moved 15 times. He wants to go home. “That would be the best thing for us. We don’t want anything, not even a house.”
But with international borders now closed, the people here are stuck, Khatib says, “like ghosts”.
Despite the ceasefire in Idlib agreed to by Russia and Turkey in 2020, bombings have continued.
Both Russia and Syria are guilty of war crimes, says the UN, but neither have been held accountable.
Watch Foreign Correspondent’s ‘Trapped In Idlib’ on Thursday 10 March on ABC TV and iview, and streaming live on the ABC News Facebook page and ABC In-Depth YouTube channel.
Mapuche Rising
Thursday 17 March at 8pm
On a sacred volcano in central Chile, the Mapuche are staking a claim to the land they say was stolen from them.
Once the owners of vast tracts of forests and mountains, the country’s largest indigenous group is fighting to take back what it lost.
In parts of Central Chile, it looks like a war zone.
Military convoys clog the road, soldiers armed with rifles patrol towns.
Low-level conflict has broken out between the indigenous Mapuche people and the local landowners. The Mapuche are occupying famers’ land because, they say, it belongs to them. The state is hitting back with military force.
The Mapuche are Chile’s biggest indigenous group, making up more than 10 per cent of the population. Until the 1880s, they controlled a vast territory independent of Chile.
But colonial military forces seized their land after a brutal military campaign. Later, the dictator Pinochet took much of what they had left, handing it over to corporations to exploit.
Kicked off the territory, successive generations of Mapuche moved to the cities, where over time they’ve been losing their language and culture.
Now the Mapuche want to reclaim their lands and re-embrace their culture.
Many have lost patience with waiting for justice from the government. South of Santiago, in Central Chile, some Mapuche groups have begun to take land by force and are even using violence to do so.
Line about violence and killings
In response, state paramilitary forces called carabineros patrolling impoverished towns and the countryside to protect white landowners, logging and mining companies.
Eric Campbell travels to central Chile to meet the Mapuche leader Alberto Curamil.
We film with Curamil as he and his people occupy the sacred Tolhuaca volcano in order to stop the construction of a geothermal plant.
“The state usurped this territory knowing that the Mapuche nation existed,” says Curamil. “And to this day continues to try to govern our territories.”
Curmail says that his group doesn’t condone violence but his activism has landed him in trouble. He’s been shot, arrested and jailed in pursuit of his cause.
In the cities, pride in Mapuche culture is growing amongst the young.
In the capital Santiago, some Mapuche leaders are trying to defuse the violence by fighting for a political solution. Elisa Loncon rose from rural poverty to become a Mapuche linguist. She was recently elected the head of the Convention which will rewrite Chile’s constitution.
Loncon hopes that for the first time, the Constitution will enshrine rights for the Mapuche and the country’s other indigenous people.
But many militants brand those political activists as traitors.
Watch Mapuche Rising on Foreign Correspondent at 8pm Thursday March 17 on ABC TV and iview, or streaming live on the ABC News Facebook page and ABC News In-Depth YouTube channel.
https://twitter.com/ForeignOfficial/status/1501853617946570754?s=20&t=TZnldyW1WuQe0q1TG6OH8Q
The Femicide Detectives
Thursday 24 March 8:00 PM
They’re called Femicide Units; Mexico’s special teams of detectives, lawyers and doctors set up to investigate violent crimes against women.
They’re the country’s solution to an entrenched problem. In the land of machismo, on average 10 women are murdered every day.
The head of Mexico City’s first Femicide Unit, Sayuri Herrera, is clear about the reasons behind the violence.
“Discrimination. Hate for who we are. It is an attempt to keep us in the place and role that society has assigned for us.”
Last year, women’s anger erupted onto the streets of Mexico City. Tens of thousands gathered to show their fury, not only with the high rates of violence but also with the fact that the men were getting away with it.
Herrera admits that old school policing wasn’t working, that police weren’t believing women’s stories.
“More weight was given in investigations to the partner’s version,” she says.
In this compelling true crime episode, correspondent Sarah Ferguson goes on the road with Mexico’s City’s femicide detectives, following them as they visit crimes scenes, gather evidence and solve cases.
“It’s very important to have women police,” says one of the female detectives. “We can put ourselves into the victim’s shoes. And tomorrow, it might be our family members, our mother…even ourselves.”
Ferguson witnesses some raw and confronting scenes.
She visits the blood-strewn apartment of a woman who’s been the victim of a vicious knife attack at the hands of her ex-partner. Her brother watches on as police comb for clues.
“She was facing a real monster, the guy that did this to her,” says the woman’s brother.
Later, she meets the woman in hospital.
“In Mexico not all cases have justice,” she says. But she’s optimistic about the work of the Femicide Unit. “I hope that justice in this case is final.”
Outside Mexico City, Ferguson speaks with the distraught mother of thirteen-year-old Melany who was kidnapped and killed last December. Melany’s cross is pink, marking her death as a femicide.
But here, there are fewer police resources to investigate femicides and Melany’s mother has no confidence the police will catch the killer.
“The only thing I can say is that we’re in Mexico and there is a lot of impunity. So, it’s impossible they’re going to catch him.”
The Minister for Women in Mexico City, Ingrid Saracibar, acknowledges that governments have a long way to go in reforming Mexico’s police culture.
“An institution that’s as vertical, as masculine as that of the police takes hard work to change’, she says. 'But of course, we aren’t satisfied. We don’t want to count the death of any more women.”
Promo
Watch The Femicide Detectives on Thursday March 24 on ABC TV and iview, and streaming live on Facebook and YouTube.
March to the Right
Thursday 7 April 8:00 PM
“We have a history. We have a past we care about and it’s very threatened.”
Thais is a social media influencer and a fierce supporter of France’s most extreme-right candidate, Eric Zemmour.
She’s been convicted of causing public disorder and banned from Tik Tok. Now, she’s promoting her anti-immigration message on YouTube.
“We live in a multicultural society and we’ve just seen that … multiculturalism doesn’t work,” says Thais.
A few years ago, Thais’ views were considered toxic. Now many in France fear they’re becoming mainstream.
In the upcoming presidential race, candidates on the far-right are polling higher than ever before, around 30%.
The candidacy of Zemmour, a high-profile media commentator, has been a game changer. He’s been convicted of hate speech three times and promotes the ‘Great Replacement’ - a debunked conspiracy theory that a master plan exists for Muslims to replace Europeans.
Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founding father of France’s modern far-right movement, is currently polling in second place, after incumbent President Macron.
The divisive rhetoric of Zemmour, Le Pen and their followers is making many in France’s immigrant communities uneasy.
“I’m really concerned about the fact that people like Eric Zemmour are really pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable or not,” says Ahmed, a deputy mayor on the outskirts of Lyon in France’s southeast.
Reporter Michael Rowland takes a break from the News Breakfast couch to travel through France on the eve of an unprecedented election.
He visits Paris and the regions, talking with social media influencers, community leaders, workers and commentators.
In a nation where voter apathy means low turnout, the far-right’s ability to galvanise people gives it a real advantage. Days out from the election, Le Pen is closing the gap with Macron.
The results of this election could change France forever.
Promo
Watch March to the Right this Thursday 7 April on ABC TV and iview, and streaming live on Facebook and YouTube.
