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The Amanpour Hour

Interview with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT); Interview with Vatican's Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development Cardinal Michael Czerny; Interview with Durham University Catholic Social Thought and Practice Professor Anna Rowlands; The Ukrainian Drone Squad Striking Deep Within Russia; Interview with "Backtalker" Author Kimberle Crenshaw; How a Decades-Long Crisis Took Shape in the DRC; Memorable Moments at Roland Garros. Aired 11a-12p ET

Aired May 30, 2026 - 11:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:00:31]

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Hello everyone, and welcome To THE AMANPOUR HOUR.

Here's where we're headed this week.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D-CT): This war has been perhaps the most incompetent-run war in the modern history of the United States, and that's saying a lot.

AMANPOUR: Israel and America's war on Iran. I'm joined by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy on how to get his country out of it for good.

Then can religion teach artificial intelligence ethics? The Pope sure hope so.

POPE LEO XIV, LEADER, CATHOLIC CHURCH: Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.

AMANPOUR: His first major encyclical warns about the existential peril to us humans. I talk to Leo's A.I. point people.

And striking deep into the heart of Russia, Nick Paton Walsh follows a top-secret Ukrainian drone squad that's become Putin's number one target.

Also ahead as civil rights and voting rights continue to be eroded, activist Kimberle Crenshaw on the importance of talking back.

KIMBERLE CRENSHAW, AUTHOR, "BACKTALKER", PROFESSOR OF LAW, COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL AND PROFESSOR OF LAW, UCLA: There are efforts to break our democracy, to unravel basic protections, to render certain voters unable to elect people of their choice, and to take away the ability to say anything about it. AMANPOUR: Plus, as the Democratic Republic of Congo faces an outbreak

of ebola and conflict, from my archives, the decades of instability and strife that made it vulnerable to this nightmare scenario.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Welcome to the program, everyone. I'm Christiane Amanpour in London.

A lot of diplomatic whiplash this week. U.S. and Iranian negotiators coalescing around a draft memorandum of understanding that would to extend the ceasefire for 60 days and launched direct talks over Iran's nuclear program.

I spoke to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy just as news of this deal emerged, and we also discussed his new book, "Crisis of the Common Good".

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Senator, welcome back to the program. And can I start by talking about the latest international news? So, all of this back and forth, as I outlined, over some kind of an agreement to get out of the war on Iran.

I know that you want a ceasefire, but you're not thrilled with the outlines of what seems to be on the table. Where do you stand right now?

MURPHY: I want the war to end on practically any terms because every single day this war goes on, America is humiliated. American consumers are being hammered. People's lives are being ruined in the United States.

Thousands are dying needlessly in the Middle East. And Iran is getting stronger.

This war has been perhaps the most incompetent-run war in the modern history of the United States, and that's saying a lot.

What is this deal apparently about? Essentially, just going back to where we were before the war began.

So, we end our blockade, they end their blockade and then we have the opportunity to sit and talk about sanctions relief for nuclear commitments.

Well, that's exactly where we were before the war began. The problem is Iran is now stronger.

They have more leverage at the nuclear negotiating table today than they did because they have taken America's best shot and they have survived. The doddering 80-year-old ayatollah is gone and a more menacing regime likely is in its place.

And now they know that they have this leverage that they have shown to the world, the ability to close and control the Strait of Hormuz, that they can hold over us like the Sword of Damocles in these negotiations.

So, he has made negotiations much harder. He has damaged the global economy and the American economy. And it's just sad that we had to go through all of this just to talk about a diplomatic agreement that brings us back to exactly where we were but lowers our leverage at the negotiating table.

AMANPOUR: Senator, there are others who will say, well, actually, hang on, in the last couple of months, the U.S. and Israel have severely degraded Iran's military capability, that its economy is on its knees with this blockade.

And you know, it is weakened, although, as you rightly say, because that's all the information coming out of Iran, it has strengthened the hand of the hardliners, particularly the military, the IRGC.

[11:04:51]

AMANPOUR: Do you think, despite your misgivings, that actually it's militarily weakened and maybe more, I don't know, amenable to further nuclear concessions than even Obama got?

MURPHY: No, absolutely not. We are going to get a worse deal because we have given them all we've got. They, I think, always knew we weren't going to launch a ground invasion, but there was definitely the chance that major air operations could do significant damage.

But all the assessments that have been made public show that Iran still has 70 percent of their missiles, has 70 percent of their drones.

Meanwhile, it's taken an enormous toll on America's security. We have significantly depleted our missile stocks, our interceptors. We have exposed ourselves militarily because of all of the weaponry we have had to use here.

Iran is more powerful today. They just are. They are more connected to China than they were before the war. They are more menacing in the region.

They have more leverage than they did at the beginning of this conflict at the negotiating table. We have less.

And that is why every president has been told, don't go to war with Iran. You are going to end up weaker at the end of it. And every president prior to Donald Trump, Republicans and Democrats, paid attention and followed that counsel.

AMANPOUR: So, what about the congressional ability to vote on war, the War Powers Act, et cetera, the War Powers Resolution?

Now, you have been trying to get that through for a while. And just recently, in fact, the Senate did approve it. A couple of Republicans came over, including Senator Bill Cassidy, who then was primaried. He lost his position. And he, you know, flipped to a yes vote.

Then you were going to try to take it to the House, as the procedure demands, but the House Speaker didn't call a vote.

Where do you think that now stands? And do you think more Republicans are becoming more willing to try to stop this war?

MURPHY: Yes. So, since the war began, when it became clear that the Republicans who control Congress weren't going to do their constitutional duty, which is to bring a war vote before Congress, a war is not supposed to happen like this without prior congressional consent.

When we found out Republicans weren't going to do that, a few of us -- Senator Booker, Senator Kaine and myself -- got together and said, OK, we're going to bring up resolutions that under the rules require a vote in the Senate every single week. And we've done that.

We lost those resolutions to end the war for the first several weeks. But we just got 50 votes for the first time on a procedural motion last week.

And we think it's going to pass the Senate shortly. It probably has the votes to pass the House. Now, the president can veto it. So, we would ultimately need veto-proof majorities.

But what we're showing is that as time goes on, more and more Republicans are turning against the president. Why? Because this war is wildly unpopular, except for his very hard base that lives in this pro-Trump media ecosystem.

Everybody in this nation thinks this is a disaster because they're paying $6 for gas. And the only reason they're paying $6 for gas is because of this war.

So pressure is going to mount on Republicans to join us on these resolutions. And we will continue to bring them every single week until we have enough votes to pass them or hopefully to override his veto.

AMANPOUR: So, let's get to your book, because all of this is somewhat related. You talk about, you know, the common good and the assault on the common good.

You begin your book, this book, with an anecdote that is not set in Washington in the corridors of power. It's on, you know, the hockey -- the rink when you're watching your son playing hockey.

Tell us about the anecdote.

MURPHY: Yes. My book opens with a personal story that will sound familiar to people. My son's a hockey player. He's not going to play in the NHL, but he's playing a 60-game season, which is just a lot of hockey games because his league is owned by a private equity-backed investment company.

And I've come to find out that there are some pretty bizarre rules in this league.

For instance, parents can't live stream the games so that a grandparent can watch at home. Why? Because this private equity-backed company has installed a camera system, a streaming system that they charge you for.

And what's happening is that even the most sacred things in our life, like our kids' youth sports, is being purchased and then sold back to us.

And that is part of what is driving -- I think, this great anxiety in this country is that everything is for sale, including our kids' youth sports.

[11:09:44]

MURPHY: We want some things in our world to just be run for the common good. Our elementary schools, parts of our health care system, our kids' youth sports teams.

And when everything becomes a commodity, when we construct an economy in which the only thing that matters is profit, that a company is judged to be successful, even if it pillages the community in which it lives in, it treats its workers miserably, but it makes a profit, it just feels like something's wrong.

And so, this book argues that we have got to rebuild a sense of the common good. We've got to build an economy that serves everybody, not just the people at the top.

We've got to rebuild our democracy so that everybody's voices matter. And that if you do that, once again, people will be less willing to kind of normalize the kind of scapegoating that you see from Donald Trump.

AMANPOUR: Senator Murphy, thank you very much indeed.

MURPHY: Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Coming up later on the show, as the Trump administrations war on DEI continues apace, I'm joined by Kimberle Crenshaw on her personal journey to become a leading civil rights activist.

But first up, the Pope joins the fray as the race to artificial intelligence heats up. Can religion teach ethics to machines? I asked the pontiff's A.I. point people.

[11:11:01]

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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program.

A new Tower of Babel -- a stark warning about artificial intelligence from Pope Leo XIV. In his first major encyclical entitled "Magnificent Humanity", the pontiff doubled down on social justice, individual dignity, and the very survival of our human race.

And he's trying to enlist the opposition, the A.I. companies. The co- founder of Anthropic, Chris Olah, sat alongside Leo as he presented his public letter and spoke candidly about the perils companies like his could unleash.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS OLAH, CO-FOUNDER, ANTHROPIC: Every frontier A.I. lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: Cardinal Michael Czerny of Canada and Anna Rowlands, a British theologian at the University of Durham, were at the Pope's presentation. And afterwards they joined me from the Vatican, and I asked them about disarming this new challenge and working with companies like Anthropic.

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AMANPOUR: Cardinal Michael Czerny of Canada and Anna Rowlands, a British theologian -- welcome to the program.

So, what I want to ask you, Cardinal, is what was the thinking behind bringing Anthropic in?

CARDINAL MICHAEL CZERNY, VATICAN'S DICASTERY FOR PROMOTING INTEGRAL HUMAN DEVELOPMENT: The thinking behind it is that we want to have real dialogue. And what was so moving, really, was that Chris Olah expressed this desire in a sincere, and I would say, humble way.

He said we need what the Church can offer us. We need what the other religions and wisdom traditions can offer us.

And the Holy Father, on his part, welcomed the invitation and in the name of the Church accepted it, said we are ready and willing to talk.

AMANPOUR: Some have complained that the Pope shouldn't be going into business, so to speak, with the leaders of these tech giants. But do you -- are you troubled by it? You don't think it gives them too much weight?

ANNA ROWLANDS, CATHOLIC SOCIAL THOUGHT AND PRACTICE PROFESSOR, DURHAM UNIVERSITY: I think the point that Chris Olah was trying to make today was that he feels that the sector inevitably is captured by exactly those motives that you've described.

He himself, I don't know whether he speaks formally for Anthropic or not, is saying that he needs a space which is not captured.

And he sees the Pope as a figure of moral leadership, and someone who has convening power, who can help, I think, foster relationships that enable that conversation to be truly public.

Now, that crucially means it's not just the tech sector. If the only people around that table in the dialogue are the tech sector, that's when we have the kind of problems that you're alluding to, I think, in your question.

What we need is a common good conversation that puts those who, in fact, at the moment, are at the bottom of that chain of A.I. effects and technology digitalization effects.

We need those people around the same table. It's their voices that the Pope says he absolutely wants at the center of that common good conversation, not the private interest conversation.

AMANPOUR: Another religious question some have raised, Cardinal, is how do you -- and I'm sort of thinking sort of in the future, which religion gets to own A.I., if you know what I mean, when it becomes, you know, the sort of generative, when it becomes much more human or even outpaces human.

And you put all these religions into this thing, that who knows who can control it? Is there going to be a religious competition or religions using it for their own use? Where do you see that going?

CZERNY: No, I don't see it going that way at all. It would be a bit like asking that if all religions are working and calling for peace, that somehow one of them is going to dominate the peace movement. I mean, I think that's completely out of the question.

And in fact, one of the interesting things is that the Catholic Church is not the only dialogue partner.

[11:19:49]

CZERNY: There are other Christian denominations and there are other religions and there are other wisdom traditions.

So, no, I don't think we need to make up new problems. Let's rejoice in the fact that there's serious dialogue -- a serious dialogue about huge problems that are bothering a lot of people and where we're not getting leadership from others in responsibility.

AMANPOUR: Yes. I laughed when you said, let's not make new problems. There certainly are plenty of problems right now, including the problem of what's known as A.I. slop -- A.I. slopaganda.

Anna, I'm going to ask you, I think I may know what the Cardinal might say, but certain political leaders, let's say Donald Trump, for instance, has taken this imagery, A.I.-generated images, portraying himself as the Pope, with Jesus Christ, as Jesus Christ.

You know, his ministry of War, as they call it, which is actually, you know, the Defense ministry, is portraying war, the current ones, in very religious terms and using all sorts of A.I.-generated memes and things to back themselves up. Now, I know the Pope has spoken against that and warned about that. Tell me about where you think this might lead. Would it get worse? What could happen?

ROWLANDS: I think this kind of problem is exactly what the document is trying to address. Everything from what you might call the gamification of war, where the ability to use A.I. to make war feel more impersonal, to reduce the reflective interval, so that there's a possibility for dialogue and pulling back from the brink of conflict, so he addresses that.

But I think in terms of the actual use of imagery and the way that you're describing, which is kind of the construction of a persona for a political leader, exactly those kind of decisions and the kind of public square that that creates is again a kind of conversation that Pope Leo is trying to ask us to have.

Who are we becoming? What does it mean to be human? How do we represent the human?

And I think, in a sense, this idea that the use of very quick-fired A.I. images, I noticed that Donald Trump often puts these out seemingly in the middle of the night, in the early hours of the morning, but in a sense it makes it too easy for us.

There's a kind of immediacy in the tools that prevents that reflective interval, perhaps, and that changes and shifts the way that we behave.

And Pope Leo talks in this document about the way that an algorithmic order is very, very sort of driven by conflict and polarization.

There's something in the use of A.I. memes and algorithms that actually profits, quite literally profits, from conflict and polarization. That's how the money flows into the system and it drives the politics of polarization.

So, if we can break those links between the use of those kind of images, fast-fire, and the kind of polarizing politics, it's healthier for all of us.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: And coming up inside Ukraine's rapidly evolving drone war, a rare look at the units now striking deep inside Russia.

That's after the break.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY: And they are a key target for the Russian Shahed drones flying overhead, constantly interrupting their work, which is going to go on all night.

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[11:23:10] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AMANPOUR: Welcome back.

Russia's war in Ukraine is entering a dangerous new phase, and Kyiv is feeling the full force of it After Russia launched its powerful hypersonic missiles during a sweeping aerial assault on the capital this week.

And it comes as recent incursions into Baltic airspace fuel fears on this side of the Atlantic anyway, that Moscow's aggression could spread beyond Ukraine.

Countries across Europe's eastern flank are now looking to Kyiv for lessons in how to survive this new kind of conflict because Ukraine has been adapting fast throughout.

CNN's Nick Paton Walsh got rare access to one long range drone unit as it prepared for an attack deep into Russia.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALSH: President Trump once said Ukraine has no cards. But now they've built themselves a new deck.

We're now with perhaps Russia's most keenly sought target in the war, a deep-strike Ukrainian drone unit, launching this night a wave of 200 attack drones into Russia.

The issue here is the scale. Potentially 20 drones being launched just from here and three or four other locations around here also involved in tonight's attack.

The sheer number overwhelming. It seems much of Russia's air defenses and causing persistent embarrassment to the Kremlin.

Working fast in silence, knowing an error with the fuel or explosives or launch could kill them all.

They are a key target for the Russian Shahed drones flying overhead, constantly interrupting their work, which is going to go on all night.

Close to here, Russian strikes have just hit Ukrainian civilians.

[11:29:42]

WALSH: And in Russian Stavropol, these Ukrainian drones hit. The mayor telling Russians there to stay indoors.

In another field, another technological leap is at work. Jet boosters used to get drones to their 120-mile-an-hour speed in just seconds.

At their base, one screen is a glimpse of a world order turned on its head. Dozens of Ukrainian drones roaming inside Russia -- code, coordinates, targets, A.I.-powered -- pulsing on the screen faster than your eyes can read. Russia, often seen as the third largest military power, preyed upon by a series of laptops.

VECTOR, DEEP STRIKE COMMANDER, UKRAINIAN DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE: It's our biggest advantage and why it's so hard for Russia to destroy this program, because we split up. We don't have any common centers and we use dozens of places.

Also, the software gives us a chance to work with thousands of UAVs.

WALSH: The (INAUDIBLE) drone can take a huge payload over 1,200 miles. There are decoys and a jet-powered drone, they say, seems to appear like a rocket on Russian radar.

VECTOR: Those are decoys. We sent hundreds of them. Some are empty, some with a payload. The payload is small but it's enough to destroy air defense systems.

WALSH: It is dizzying, the speed of evolution, adaptation, ingenuity. Ukraine two years ago, begging for old American missiles to hit just inside Russia's borders.

But now it builds itself and launches so many drones, often as deep as Russian Siberia. Even Kremlin loyalists are questioning Putin's end game.

Now the West wants to learn from what Ukraine had to do to survive when it didn't get the help it needed. Each leap, advantage lasts just months before the other side catches up.

Ukraine is ahead for now but only because it's learned it'll likely be on its own when it's not.

Nick Paton Walsh, CNN -- Eastern Ukraine.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Ukraine keeping one eye always on U.S. support.

And coming up, the importance of talking back. Civil rights activist and academic Kimberle Crenshaw on a lifetime of resistance still fighting for equality in America.

[11:32:03]

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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program.

The civil rights rollback is a real and present danger as the Trump administration systematically ends diversity, equity and inclusion efforts powered also by a Supreme Court that recently defanged the Voting Rights Act.

And in the midst of graduation season, the Defense Secretary has ratcheted up his anti-diversity attacks on the most successfully integrated institution in America, which is the military, accusing the U.S. Army, for instance, of an obsession with gender and race that he says has seen its standards slip.

So let's ask renowned civil rights scholar and academic Kimberle Crenshaw, where she thinks this will end up. She coined the term "intersectionality", and she helped spearhead critical race theory, which of course has triggered major Republican blowback.

Her new memoir, "Backtalker", traces her own personal journey growing up in Ohio during the Jim Crow era.

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AMANPOUR: Kimberle Crenshaw, welcome to our program.

KIMBERLE CRENSHAW, AUTHOR, "BACKTALKER", PROFESSOR OF LAW, COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL AND PROFESSOR OF LAW, UCLA: So delighted to be here again.

AMANPOUR: Kimberle, can I just start by asking you to respond to what I alluded to, and that is, you know, at a graduation speech at West Point, there goes the Secretary of Defense again, you know, cracking down on woke. And as you know, he's cracked down on black recruits and officers, on female recruits and officers, on and on.

And I wonder, when you see that happening in the military, which I was told is one of the most successfully integrated institutions in all of the United States, what that tells you?

CRENSHAW: Yes. Well, it's shocking, but it shouldn't be a surprise. This administration has made a promise, and they're acting on it.

When you say you want to make America great again, and that moment that you're trying to take us back to was a moment before most of us had rights, before there were laws against discrimination, really before the military was even fully integrated, then that tells you that the goal that they are pursuing is to recreate precisely that image, precisely that reality.

So, yes, among the first things that this administration did, this second administration, was take out the highest-ranking African- American military personnel and women, as well.

It has long been seen as, you know, the most important moment in integration, when the Armed Forces became integrated.

So, yes, they're going to start there, but this is what's more. In their campaign to erase history, in their campaign to censor ideas, there was a time, not recent -- not long ago, that they went through the library at one of the military academies, purging books. They took out books like Maya Angelou, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings".

[11:39:47]

CRENSHAW: But look at what they left on the shelves. They left Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf," on the shelves, and other books like that. So, there is a particular ideology. It was spoken by one of the

administration's officials, who said, if you want to get things done right, you need to put white men in charge. That is the ideology, and that is what you heard from Hegseth and others, who are basically putting words to the actions that they've already done.

AMANPOUR: Clearly, it is shocking what we're seeing being unraveled and what you just said about choosing even the kind of ideology to allow military to read.

Is it going to be successful, do you think? Do you think these people, these leaders, who want to, as you say, roll back history, give it back to when white men were supreme in the United States, is there any way they can actually make that work?

Because they're rolling back voters' rights, you've got the gerrymandering, rolling back all sorts of elements of the Civil Rights Act. There's a lot going on in this regard.

CRENSHAW: Well, you know, it really -- the jury is still out on whether they're going to be successful, but one has to say, on their side, there's historical precedent for the ability of combined forces to actually unravel, dismantle, push back against progress that's been made to make us a true, inclusive democracy.

This faction is a faction that has a long history in American society. Reconstruction was an eight-year program to actually create a real democracy. The Redeemers came through and unraveled every last bit of it. And African-Americans lived in racial tyranny for another seven decades.

The important thing to recognize is that this campaign that they are prosecuting isn't just about the midterms. It's not just about the next presidential election. They're playing for keeps. This is about what will happen throughout this century and the next century.

So, we have to understand this isn't something that we can simply try to pivot away from, try to come up with different words, try to appease.

We are fighting for the soul of a multiracial democracy. And if they are successful, it will be a long time before we'll see the opportunity to regain everything that we've lost.

AMANPOUR: Now, look, you are not just an activist, you are primarily an academic and a law professor, and you have talked about what you want the legal framework to understand.

Back in 2022, you invoked Toni Morrison's warning about restricting racial histories and silencing experience. You said, changing the rules about what racial histories can be taught and what experiences can be acknowledged is not a healthy feature of a robust democracy, it's a symptom of a dying one. That's Toni Morrison, who you invoked.

And your book is called "Backtalker". So, how does that happen? How do you propose backtalking actually achieves, you know, extending that moral arc towards justice?

CRENSHAW: When our democracy was broken before by people who would rather break the nation rather than share it equitably with people who didn't look like them, when that happened, we all suffered.

Of course, some people suffered a whole lot more, but we didn't live in a functioning democracy.

We're at a point where the same thing is happening again. There are efforts to break our democracy, to unravel basic protections, to render certain voters unable to elect people of our choice, and to take away the ability to say anything about it.

These are all the fundamental aspects of a nation that is moving into tyranny. We need to be able to connect those dots and to bring communities together to be able to see what is our common interest in sustaining a democracy that's responsive.

The only way we can do it is for us to tell our truth. The only way we can do it is to refuse to bend the knee. And, unfortunately, too many institutions who ought to know better are bending the knee. So, that's why it's time to talk back.

AMANPOUR: Kimberle Crenshaw, thank you so much indeed.

CRENSHAW: Always a pleasure to be here.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: And "Backtalker" by Crenshaw is out now.

Coming up, as the Democratic Republic of Congo is struck by another deadly ebola outbreak, we look back at the roots of a crisis which has been decades in the making. My report from the front lines in 1996.

That's after the break.

[11:44:38]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AMANPOUR: Welcome back.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is facing a catastrophic collision of disease and war. That was the warning from the World Health Organization this week. As the nation battles the latest deadly outbreak of ebola, decades of armed conflict, combined with recent aid cuts, have left that country deeply vulnerable, with health officials warning the virus could have been detected many weeks ago.

Now, ongoing conflict is preventing responders from containing it.

[11:49:48]

AMANPOUR: 30 years ago, I reported from the front lines of what was then Zaire as it entered a new era of instability. The first Congo war had just begun, and rebel forces believed that ousting the longtime dictator, Mobutu, would bring democracy and stability to the country.

Few could have imagined the years of conflict, corruption and collapse that would follow, sowing the seeds of today's crisis. Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: While the world focuses on delivering humanitarian aid to Zaire, the real solution, say regional governments, must be political.

In less than a month, Zaire and rebels have taken control of the eastern part of the country. They say they want to liberate the whole of Zaire from what they call President Mobutu's corrupt dictatorship.

In Goma, rebel commanders take us to see former Zaire and army soldiers. They say some were captured during last week's fight for the town. Others, they claim, surrendered themselves and their weapons. The rebels don't call these soldiers prisoners of war, rather new recruits.

The rebels have said all along they plan to carry on their revolution. What this here amounts to is a reeducation camp. The aim is to get the Zairean people and the former soldiers of the Zairean army to join their cause.

"Of course, they'll be reeducated here," says rebel commander, Abbas. They've taken part in genocide and other mistakes that have been committed in our country, but now they must join our revolution. This country belongs to all of us."

In truth, these men don't have much choice, but all those we asked said they were tired of their miserable lives in the Zairean army.

"We are the military," says this man. "But we had to wait for months and months to get paid. We had no medical care and we had to scrounge like animals to feed our families."

This was the Zairean army's living quarters in Goma. Even officers were housed in this slum just a few kilometers away from President Mobutu's opulent lakeside villa.

For 30 years, he selfishly plundered the country, say the soldiers, and let the army starve. That's why they say they just turned and ran rather than fight the rebels. Now the rebels are retraining them, letting them sleep at home and giving them food for their families.

Neighboring Rwanda denies supporting these rebels, but Vice President Paul Kagame says they may have just cause.

PAUL KAGAME, THEN-RWANDAN VICE PRESIDENT: The kind of corruption that is in that society, in the government institutions and so on and so forth. I think there is a need for that to change.

And if one way to change that situation is through an armed struggle, like they have started, I think that can be justified.

AMANPOUR: It's pretty strong talk from a vice president of a neighboring country.

KAGAME: Well, this is a problem of being torn between being diplomatic and saying the reality as it is. That's the problem I am facing.

AMANPOUR: Because Zaire has been protecting the former Rwandan army using refugee camps near Goma as bases for military incursions back home. The incursions have stopped since the rebels captured eastern Zaire, so they form a useful buffer zone.

And Rwanda believes the rebels can go all the way to the Zairean capital if they can mobilize the people and prove they represent real change.

Christiane Amanpour, CNN -- Goma, Zaire.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: A year after that report, Mobutu was toppled and exiled from Zaire. And four years later, Paul Kagame would become president of Rwanda. It's a position he still holds after extending term limits and cracking down on the opposition.

The United Nations and other international groups have long accused Kagame's government of supporting rebel groups in Congo and fueling the conflict, profiting from the region's lucrative mineral trade. Rwanda denies these allegations.

When we come back, emotion on and off the court at Roland Garros, the French Open. From the pain of competing in the shadow of war to a French star's final farewell.

That's after the break.

[11:54:10]

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AMANPOUR: And finally, heartbreak, resilience and history-making moments as the Roland Garros French Tennis Open kicked off in Paris this week.

23-year-old Ukrainian player Marta Kostyuk dedicated her first win to her country. But she described the match as one of the hardest of her career. Just hours before she stepped on court, a Russian missile had destroyed a building meters away from her family's home in Ukraine.

It was a sentiment echoed by fellow Ukrainian and world number three Elina Svitolina, who told reporters that it was, quote, "extremely tough" to play while Kyiv is under fire.

And there were emotional scenes on court, too, as the crowds bid adieu to the French favorite Gael Monfils, who is Svitolina's husband.

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AMANPOUR: The 38-year-old fought late into the night in a five-set thriller before falling to Hugo Gaston in the first round of his final role on Garros event.

It's the end of a two-decade journey at the Grand Slam, where Monfils enjoyed some of his greatest triumphs. His hope, to leave a legacy that inspires the next generation of black tennis players, and, most likely that his wife, Elina Svitolina, takes home the woman's crown.

That's all we have time for this week. Don't forget you can find all of our shows online as podcasts at CNN.com/audio and on all other major platforms.

I'm Christiane Amanpour in London. Thank you for watching.