hosting ambassadors from the security council, he said north korea was a real threat to the world. france has entered a period of intense political campaigning between emmanuel macron and marine le pen, the two remaining candidates for the presidency. marine le pen has announced she is stepping aside as party leader of the national front. as forces in syria move towards the stronghold of the extremist group the so—called islamic state, territory held by is is being retaken, including dabiq, which featured heavily in propaganda videos. anzac day services are being held. peggy whitson has broken the record for the number of days spent in space by an american astronaut, beating the previous record of 534 days. she is also the first woman to command the international space station on two missions. now on bbc news, it is time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. africa's wildlife is one

of the wonders of the natural world, but the fate of the continent's elephants, rhinos and big cats is now desperately uncertain. illegal poaching could see these great species disappear from their african heartlands. my guest today is richard leakey, chairman of the kenya wildlife service. he also happens to be a world—famous palaeontologist whose life story reads like an implausible movie script. the question is — will his fight for africa's endangered wildlife have a happy ending? richard leakey, welcome to hardtalk.

thank you. you know, there is an adage, a saying which goes like this: "you should never go back." and yet you have decided to go back, to run and be the chairman of the kenya wildlife service so many years after you did thatjob in the late ‘80s. why have you gone back? well, i go by a different philosophy. if you do a job and you do it reasonably well, and it gets messed up, if you can go back and tidy it up again, why not? i mean, get it back to what you wanted. i think wildlife in kenya isn't in very good shape at the moment but i don't think it is rocket science to get it right. and when the president of the republic asked me "go back," i said, "not really." he said, "yes, really." i said, "well, i'll try it for three years, yes, if you let me do what i want to do." so, what went wrong? you took over in the late ‘80s when poaching was at a pitch and the elephant population was going down, and there

was a great deal of concern. you took drastic measures, militarised the ranger service in the national parks. it appeared you had got on top of the problem. so, what went wrong? i think what went wrong is that to head up an organisation like the kenya wildlife service, you have got to have some political connection. you've got to have the ability to pass over the heads of people who are getting in your way, and you've got to be able to deal with corruption and criminality. and because i had access to president moi, i was able to do that. and i was able to clean up the new organisation, and it was very efficient, very effective, and it worked. corruption, venality, laziness crept back in, and it is rampant. you are using the present tense. it is rampant today. now it is rampant. but can it be cleaned up? absolutely. if i get the right new director, which i hope i will do in the next month or two, with a new board

i have and with the backing of the government of kenya, under the president, give me a year and i would think, call me back, it will be fine. i will call you back but let's stick with the present for now. it seems to me you've undertaken an enormous gamble here because you are suggesting to me that the current leadership in kenya has allowed corruption to slip back in, has allowed the international poaching networks to do their worst inside kenya. what gives you any sort of faith at all that those very same top leaders are gonna back you? everything i've done, i've had backing. i have no skeletons in my cupboard. and i can call a spade a spade and get away with it. most people cannot. i have every confidence that if i feel the need to encourage the removal of certain people, to put in tough programmes, nobody‘s gonna get in the way. i'm quite sure of that. really? last year, you said, and i'm quoting you, "there is no doubt the government knows who the kingpins

of the poaching operation are. corruption and incompetence have allowed the last great wildlife species to be slaughtered," you said. "no question, there's high—level protection of individuals who engage in the illegal export of elephant ivory." so, are you prepared to name names to president kenyatta, for example? tell him who is rotten? no question. to president kenyatta, i will, but not to you. why not to me? well, there's no point raising alarms and things of the kind you want me to do when we can deal with it in another way. our biggest problem, stephen, is corruption in the courts, corruption in law enforcement, corruption in prosecution. and this is a situation that goes right across the board in kenya. i mean, our courts were a mess. the new chiefjustice has done a lot to clean it up. i think with a new brood of people coming in, younger people, and with a president not interfering himself, this can be done. i don't know why it hasn't been done sooner. but are you going to put your own

integrity on the line here? i mean, are you prepared to walk away if, over the next few months, you don't get the right sort of backing, the right sort of signals sent from the very top? well, let me put it to you this way, when the president persuaded me to take this position, i said to him he was a very courageous man, because of course i will walk away if i can't do it. if i face up to an intolerable situation, as i've done several times in my history, i will state the problem and walk away from it. naming names. yeah, good. we are talking about "the" problem but we need to be specific. i've seen figures suggesting that anything from hundreds to more than 1,000 elephants are being poached in kenya every year. what is the actual poaching problem, the scale of it, today? much different. when i made that statement you alluded to earlier on, last year, i think we were losing close to 1,000 elephants a year. and this is in a population of kenyan elephants of what,

between 30,000 and 40,000? between 30,000 and 35,000, i would think. this year alone, to the month of september, we've lost under 400. the situation has already changed dramatically. and in the last few months we are talking about tens. we are getting back very, very quickly. what was wrong, stephen, is that the wardens were demoralised, the rangers were demoralised, the vehicles were broken down. i was asking one senior warden why he wasn't getting cattle out of the park. he showed me his vehicales, he had three land rovers all without wheels. this can be put right and it is going to be put right as i talk to you. you are, last time around when you took over the ranger service as head of the wildlife service, you armed them, you trained them, and there were allegations that they used force sometimes beyond the call of duty. i mean, many, many poachers and alleged poachers were shot dead

by your men. is that the way you're gonna do it again? i didn't do it then and i wouldn't do it now. when i went in the first time, i made it very clear that if poachers continued to shoot at my men, they were now armed and they would shoot back, and in the first few months we did lose a couple of our men, and we lost about 15—20 poachers. within the first few months, by 1990, i can't remember the dates, but it was about then, it had stopped. but will your men, you know, in your new regime, will they shoot to kill if they are fired upon? stephen, if they are fired upon, they will shoot back. whether they shoot to kill or shoot to immobilise, i have no idea. they are trained as soldiers. i am not training them.

but there is no point running away from people who are absolutely destroying the natural heritage of our country. in the end, this isn'tjust about a supply problem, is it? it is a demand problem as well. you have to, as part of your overall package solutions to the poaching problem, you have to try to stop china and other countries so eager to import ivory and the rhino horn for their domestic consumption. how are you gonna do that? at the moment, i think kenya is in more difficulty by being a transit station for ivory from elsewhere in africa. the number of our elephants killed is relatively small. in neighbouring tanzania they have a terrible problem. shocking. we have had the minister responsible on the programme and i put him all of the allegations about corruption inside his country, with the police and judiciary, all allegedly involved in the poaching network. you can't control that, can you? no, but others can. what we've discovered is that ivory has become a commodity and the dealings in ivory have been infiltrated by criminal syndicates. as they have for child export and as they have with drugs and various other things.

and the people who are now controlling it are criminals outside kenya, often with huge sources of money. they've bought the judges, they've bought the prosecutors, they've bought the police, they've bought the authorities. now, at this stage, my charge is to stop the killing of our elephants. i must work very closely with others to stop kenya being used as a port of transit. i think we can do that given the connections that i have in thejudiciary. well, let me put it bluntly, do you think neighbouring governments have the right level of commitment? no, i don't. but if they can't export their ivory through kenya, and i think that we can control, then i think the situation will improve dramatically. is extinction a real possibility? you know, it's talked about that within a couple of generations, if the scale of poaching continues on the scale it's been for the last five years, we could see the african elephant disappear, even more the rhino, disappear. is that in your view realistic? i think at the moment,

no, for elephants. i think they'll disappear from some countries. i think black rhino may in some countries. but there is still a lot of elephant. when i started kws, we were 17,000 elephants. we are now 35,000, despite a lot of poaching. we counted our ivory the other day and we found that we had 137 tons, far more than we expected. but there are still no examples i have seen going around in the parks where elephants hear a vehicle and run away. they're still very, very placid, which is a very good sign if you know elephants. a final thought on ivory, then i want to move on. you've just said we have 130 tons of ivory, worth a vast amount of money, in your kenyan government's stores. one of the arguments about the ivory trade is that it's very confusing and very easy for the traders to continue their work because there is this so—called legal ivory,

that is, historic ivory, as well as the poached, illegal ivory. the best way of ending that confusion is to destroy your stocks of ivory. are you prepared to do that? if you remember, we destroyed a lot of ivory when i started kws. the price of ivory went down. the ivory we have today, far more than i expected to find in the stores, will be destroyed. it has been stated to be the case by the president, supported by the cabinet and the government, and at the right time, the full 137 tons will be put to the torch and destroyed to ash. definitely within 12 months. that is an absolute guarantee? absolute promise. very good. alright. i want to go back now, back in time. because your career, your life story, is extraordinary. you were born to famous palaeontologist parents in kenya. but you are a white man. and this has always interested people, whether you feel completely

african in the way that, you know, black kenyans feel completely committed to their country and their continent. just try and explain to me how you have always seen yourself? i can't explain why it is but the only people who don't think i am an african are usually white people. i've been totally accepted as an african, and as a kenyan. as you well know, i've got into politics, i've got into all sorts of situations, which you couldn't do if you kept yourself apart. do you think in english or in swahili? swahili, it's my first language. absolutely? absolutely. and if we think about the extroadinary things you have done in palaeontology, and i am thinking now about the discovery of the skull of the boy which told us so much new about the origins of homo sapiens, you always made a point of saying that for you the discovery mattered partly for ideological reasons because it was a way of explaining to fellow kenyans,

fellow africans, that, in your view, evolution was now proven, that darwin was right, and that they should understand, africans should all understand that the notions of god, of tribal myth, couldn't trump science and rationality. you're opening a pandora's box but let me comment on some of the points that you've made. i think the turkana boy, not the skeleton, which was found in 1984, went a long way to persuading notjust africans, but europeans and chinese and americans, who are much more in the camp of fundamentalism than kenyans are, that here was evidence that at least 1.5 million years ago there was a full skeleton that you or anyone who wasn't a specialist could recognise as human. it was embedded in rock that could clearly be dated. you know, in turkana now, for the second year they've had

a festival with close to 5,000 turkana and other kenyans attending. the festival is entitled: "welcome home, the cradle of humanity." now this is one of the greatest assets turkana considers it has, and i think africa is beginning to recognise that our heritage is real. i think we're beginning to realise that blue—eyed guys like you, and scandinavians and people from all over the world, actually are part of the african diaspora. that's powerful! but you want the lesson to go even further. you said, it is important to educate boys and girls in the developing world that their destiny belongs to them. it won't be decided by a god, it will be decided by their knowledge and their commitment

to build the planet. do you feel that approach to life, sort of a philosophy, a rational philosophy of life, is making inroads in the culture of kenya? i think it's slow but it's coming and we are beginning to recognise that our problems with disease, hiv, ebola, crop pathogens, these have been caused by new things that have evolved and changed. and the only science is going to deal with them. —— that. we have our young scientists, we have our laboratories, and we recognise this is the way to tackle the future rather than the relying on aid from other countries. we are a long way from where i want to be, but i think it is coming and i think it will come. and i think more and more young people are beginning to recognise that we cannot expect the british for americans or chinese to constantly bail us out of our own problems.

it's degrading. i would not want to be temporary second these challenges are easy. —— would not want to pretend for a second that these challenges. it comes down to this very personal issue of the degree to which you are working from the inside or the degree to which for some kenyans sometimes see you like an outsider. i have seen no sign of that, either favourable or negative. but you have lots of enemies. you have talked yourself to the degree to which some of the things you have said, particularly about the wildlife issue in kenya, you have had people out to kill you. if you pick on criminals in england, you don't think they are looking for ways to get even with you? come on. this is normal human behaviour. if you're fingered and you lose your career 01’ your source of money, you will be unpopular. you're not unpopular because you're white, you're unpopular because you pulled the plug on their scheme. it would happen herejust it would happen here just as easily.

i haven't been picked on as somebody who is white. i have been picked on as an individual who said, enough is enough, stop stealing the resources of the country. people do not know your incredible life story. they will not know that you lost both of your legs in a plane crash in 1993. your light aircraft, the engine cut out. you have always said you believe that plane was sabotaged. but do you have proof of that? i have no proof that it was not and i have no proof it was. i have always said, what happened happened and we need to move forward. i still have reasonable grounds for thinking it was interfered with. could i take anyone to court? do i want to follow it up? certainly not. but you, in your own mind, think you know who is responsible? i think i know. i have got a pretty good idea. but you have got to move forward. and remember, my legs could have lost me, and they didn't. you have done a remarkablejob.

the point remains, i suppose, bringing it back to your life's work at the moment, which is all about conservation and wildlife, there are people working alongside you, a lot of kenyans in this campaign. you have warned them that they, too, must expect to face real difficulties and dangers. is that the reality, even today? it is reality, but it should not be overstated. i think you can probably do far more now than you could, 30 years ago. you still say there are a lot of rotten people at the very heart of the power system in the kenya. do you not think there are a lot of people in america or canada, 01’ france, 01’ even — i don't know about this sacred country, britain?

there are a lot of people in public life everywhere. at our situation of development, some of them would use rougher means to survive. but we cannot sit back, we have to fight back. the country as a whole... listen, do you realise how few terrorist attacks we have had compareds to how many there might have been? kenya is really doing its utmost to prevent the fundamentalist islamic insurgency taking over. you have no idea what efforts have been made to sustain a free and peaceful country. iadmire it. that is an optimistic message to take away. just one other thing i want to put to you before we finish — which is not the enemies you might have made among those nefarious types who are trying to smill make a living out of poaching, you have at least made severe critics, if not enemies, within the conservation movement for somethng that has been discussed of late inside kenya and in tanzania as well, which is the future of the serengeti, and the idea that a highway will be

built across this wonderful national park, because resources need to travel from central africa to the coast. you support the construction of an elevated highway, right across one of the most precious pieces of wild territory in all of africa. why? 100% i support it. because if you are going to develop tanzania the way it is developing, with a new port going in, one of the biggest ports in east africa, if you are going to develop seaports on lake victoria, huge ones, and have cities of several million people, how will you get the produce out? if we take the initiative and say let's put it up, so the animals can go underneath, we can save the serengeti. the point is you have to build that. there is the resources required, the expense, and also the disruption. i have been lucky enough to see the wildebeest migration... so have i.

..and you have seen it many times. all of the experts, one says the cost of this alone will be ten times more than richard leakey says. it will be so disruptive, we cannot let it happen. if it costs 50 times or 100 times, it has to be done to save the serengeti's ecosystem, which affects ta nzanias, —— tanzanians, kenyans, and ultimately is our global heritage. you cannot allow a parliament in tanzania ten years from now to say that economically we have to do it. we have two start the process of winning friends, now. there are miles of highways in america, in europe. we have none in kenya. what is wrong with putting a road up, if the animals can pass under it? most of the conservationists, most of the people involved in engineering projects across the world, have looked at this and said it is unrealistic. everything that has worked in the world, that has been ambitious and dramatic, there have been thousands

of people, naysayers, naysayers. i say, get off your rear end, we will lose the serengeti otherwise. we must find out how we can sustain the ecology, the wildlife migration, the integrity of the park, except for an elevated highway, and provide effective, efficient transportation. come on. it is positive. a final thought. and this makes me smile even thinking about it. there are plans afoot, led by angelina jolie, to make a movie of your life. her husband, brad pitt, is mooted to be the young richard lea key. do you like this idea? it is not a matter of liking it. if somebody could produce a film in which people of reputation starred and if the richard leakey played by brad pitt said,

"enough killing of elephants, chinese must not use ivory," and angelina jolie said the same thing, that has far more impact than if richard leakey were to say the same thing. it is based on your book, wildlife wars. is this a war to save africa's wildlife that you believe you can win? it is a war. we have to save the planet, notjust in east africa, but we have got to stop the killing of the rhino, we have to save the ecosystems. and we have to have something that everybody cares for beyond whimsical tourism. we need to have a heritage that everybody cares for. it can be done. if you can kill the market, and china is a big market, and i think powerful hollywood films could change a lot of attitudes. you were talking about the market. that is a way to do it. burning ivory is another way. it is another battle to fight. we might not succeed, but if we did not think we might, we would not win it.

i think we can. a great way to end, richard leakey. thank you for being on hardtalk. thank you very much. hello. we may be hurtling towards the end of april, but the weather feels like it's plunged us back into winter. a very chilly feel over the next couple of days. a frosty start to tuesday. plenty of wintry showers around, and this cold air has come all the way from the arctic. it's worked its way southwards across the british isles, brought in our direction by pretty strong northerly winds. notice tightly squeezed isobars across the north and north—east of scotland, particularly. gales here, at times, and in areas exposed to that

northerly wind, we start off tuesday with lots of showers. northern half of scotland seeing a mixture of rain, sleet, hail and snow. most of the snow over high ground, but even to low levels, there could be snow for a time. some icy stretches, as well, some of those showers across north—east england. also some showers feeding into northern ireland. but for south—west scotland, down the spine of england, we start the day with fewer showers, more in the way of dry weather and sunshine. chilly, though — three degrees in birmingham and coventry, and some showers just clipping into parts of pembrokeshire, cornwall and devon. and as we go on through the day, the showers will gradually become more widespread across the country, so just about anywhere you could catch one. the odd rumble of thunder, some rain, some sleet, some hail, some snow, mostly over the hills. 7—13 degrees on the thermometer, but add on the strength of the winds, and take aberdeen, for example, it will feel freezing,

even in the middle of the afternoon. another cold night to come, tuesday night into wednesday. the showers, though, becoming mostly confined to eastern areas. again, some of them will be wintry. these are the temperatures to expect if you live in the middle of our big towns and cities. out in the countryside, we are looking at lows of minus six or minus seven, a widespread frost. but some subtle changes into wednesday. this ridge of high pressure begins to build its way in from the west, and that'll cut off the worst, if you like, of that biting northerly wind, so maybe not as chilly on wednesday. still some showers, but most of these across eastern areas. some sunshine, as well, but thicker cloud starting to roll into northern ireland and western scotland. a few spots of rain. it will mostly be rain, because temperatures will be creeping upwards. 10 degrees in stornoway. and that is the story for the end of the week, the cold air, slowly but surely, being eroded by some milder air pushing in from the atlantic. so we can expect those temperatures to begin to creep upwards through thursday and friday.

there'll be fewer showers, often a lot of cloud, but those temperatures returning to something closer to what we would expect at this time of year. this is bbc news, i'm chris rogers. the headlines this hour: as north korea prepares to mark the 85th anniversary of its armed forces, president trump warns of new sanctions over pyongyang's nuclear and missile tests. a special report from syria, and a former is stronghold, where the militants are losing ground. and why record—breaking commander peggy whitson is feeling out of this world. and i'm aaron heslehurst. what do ivanka trump, christine lagarde and angela merkel have in common? they are gathering to close the gender gap. yep, some of the world's most powerful women take action on equality. but they have got a big task,

because according to some,