Paulin Ngobobo knows the mountains and rich green forests of Virunga in
eastern Congo like the back of his hand. Over the years, through the good
times and often bad, the short, bespecta-cled, smiling 43-year-old game
warden has roamed all over them, battling for the survival of Africa’s rare
mountain gorillas.
In the process, Ngobobo has risked his life and got to know the gorillas who
inhabit Virunga intimately. To protect them he has frequently had to
negotiate with ruthless rebel leaders whose troops infiltrate the park, and
he has faced corrupt politicians and local officials whose business
interests run contrary to preserving the forest and the gorillas.
For his efforts Ngobobo has endured threats, torture and imprisonment. “He has
taken huge risks,” said Emmanuel de Merode, an anthropologist and the
executive director of Wildlife Direct, a conservation group funded by the
European Union, whose staff are stationed in Virunga working with the
Congolese park staff to protect the wildlife.
So when some residents in the park heard gunshots in the forest late last
month, members of Ngobobo’s team set out to investigate.
Dawn comes suddenly to Virunga. The warmth of the sun’s rays burns the mist
from the forest floor and gives a sense of life renewed. On this morning,
however, heavy rains were thundering down as Ngobobo’s men, armed with AK-47
assault rifles, made their way into the forest.
They had not gone far before their worst fears were confirmed: they came
across the corpses of three female gorillas. “It was crushing to hear the
news,” said Ngobobo.
One of the young females had been pregnant; her killers had set her body on
fire after they shot her. The two others lay nearby. The bodies were intact.
Why they had been killed was not clear.
“I think it must have been done to offend us, but I don’t know,” Ngobobo
added. “It’s difficult to get into the minds of people who can do a crime as
terrible as this.”
The next day the rangers made another shocking discovery: the body of the
dominant male in the gorilla family, again riddled with gunshot wounds. He
was Senkekwe, the son of Rugendo, who had been one of Virunga’s most famous
male gorillas until he was killed in a clash between the army and militia
forces in eastern Congo in 2001.
The four dead gorillas were tied to stretchers and carried for hours through
the forest. There were many willing helpers and great sadness among the
villagers and porters. Senkekwe required a giant stretcher such was his
enormous size. Their destination was a burial ground at Rumang-abo that has
been set aside as the last resting place for Congo’s gorillas. Here the
bodies were interred.
The gorilla deaths have stunned animal conservationists because the killings
happened just as hopes were rising that Virunga’s gorilla population was
stabilising and even increasing. Now conservationists are having to
reconsider their strategy, analysing why the gorillas were killed and how
the slaughter can be stopped.
Commercial poachers have sometimes killed Congo’s mountain gorillas to sell
for food or trophies. They have even captured live babies for the pet trade.
However, there was no evidence of poaching this time. The bodies had their
feet and hands, the usual trophies, intact. They had been left behind,
perhaps, to send a warning to the wardens to quit the park.
Yesterday de Merode, who had accompanied the team to recover the dead
gorillas, said the “execution-style” slaughter of the gorillas was identical
to the killing of a female gorilla last month. Her infant Ndakasi was still
clinging to her body when the rangers found her and she is likely to have
permanent lung damage from the pneumonia she contracted while exposed as her
mother lay dead.
“We don’t think it was the villagers who did it,” de Merode said. “This was
deliberate . . . an act of sabotage.”
He said there was evidence from the site of the killings linking the incident
to the area’s lucrative charcoal trade involving the illegal extraction of
wood from the park.
With little electricity and almost no gas in this part of eastern Congo,
charcoal is the main source of domestic energy for cooking. Demand is
overwhelming and more than 90% is coming from wood plundered from the
Virunga national park.
The financial interests behind the trade are powerful. The annual turnover of
the charcoal industry, just for the city of Goma on the borders of the park,
was calculated at nearly £15m two years ago. It does not bode well for the
gorillas. Goma has already mushroomed from a village in the 1950s into a
city of several hundred thousand and its population is expected to rise
sharply.
“This is not a mom and pop industry of peasant farmers going into the park to
make a bit of charcoal,” said one international conservationist. “It is
highly organised and highly structured. Certain individuals in various
administrations, sadly including, we have found, the Congolese wildlife
authority itself, are involved in the trade.”
The result has been that the wildlife authority has become divided between
those who have stayed in the park to protect it, like Ngobobo, and those who
are actively involved in the charcoal trade destroying it. “There is an
office in Goma that could be said to be almost the stock exchange for
illegally exploited resources from the national park,” the official said.
“They effectively broker the sale of charcoal.”
Transporters take it to Goma and on to neighbouring Rwanda, which passed a law
in 2004 banning the domestic production of charcoal and has since been
getting its charcoal illegally from eastern Congo.
“It is all illegal and it has been getting worse and worse in the past few
months,” said de Merode. “We are doing everything we can to try to protect
the rangers and the wardens. But they are up against individuals in their
own administration.”
This was why Ngobobo was arrested last year and tortured and was arrested
again recently, and why a couple of his officers have been harassed by
civilian and military authorities. Another official said: “For the charcoal
traders, the quickest and easiest way to get access to that forest is to
kill the gorillas. If there are no gorillas, there is no one who is going to
protect the forest. That is basi-cally the problem.”
However, deeper problems also underlie the charcoal trade and the plight of
the gorillas. Virunga, founded in the 1920s when Congo was a Belgian colony,
is the oldest national park in Africa with a long and proud tradition of
conservation. It stretches for 200 miles from the volcanoes near Lake Kivu
to the Ruwenzori Mountains of the Moon in the north.
The park’s southern end is home to nearly half the world’s 700 mountain
gorillas. The other half live across Congo’s border, in Uganda and Rwanda,
the country where they were first studied and made famous by Dian Fossey.
The mountain gorillas of Virunga had been largely safe until 1994. But then
genocide convulsed Rwanda. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees,
including members of the notorious Interahamwe militias responsible for many
of the massacres, fled Rwanda and camped on the boundary of the park, which
had been designated a world heritage site by Unesco.
Under the noses of United Nations aid workers, the Rwandan refugees deforested
the park for fuel at an alarming rate. Bamboo, the food of gorillas, was
being cut to make shelters and baskets and the gorillas began being killed.
Virunga had two important gorilla families which attracted tourists to the
benefit of the local economy. One was the Rugabo family led by a massive
silverback who was so accustomed to tourists that they could approach within
a few feet of him. But in 1995 Rugabo was found sprawled on the ground with
his mate full of bullet holes – the first gorillas to be shot in the park in
10 years. In just five months seven adults were killed in the area.
Ever since, the gorillas have faced a battle for habitat and resources with
Rwandan refugees and other elements. In the park the other significant
gorilla group was the Rugendo family – and it was members of this family
that have just been slaughtered.
One hundred rangers have been killed trying to protect the animals and it is
not just gorillas that are under threat. Most of Virunga’s 35,000 hippos
have also been slaughtered. On one stretch of river that used to sustain
10,000 hippos, only 100 are left.
What can be done? More resources and better pay for the park staff would help.
Many have not received their government salaries for months.
Congo’s civil and military administration is poorly paid. A senior civil
servant earns between $5 and $10 a month. The new government in power in
Kinshasa, the capital 1,300 miles to the west, has little direct control
over what is going on in Goma and the eastern Congo. Many of its officials
have no choice but to live off the informal economy tied to the illegal
extraction of natural resources.
International conservationists have not abandoned hope. Reports of the recent
slaughter have prompted both outrage and generosity: more than $100,000 has
flowed in from donations and will go to supplement the salaries of the park
staff and other measures.
The Kinshasa government also appears to have been spurred into taking stronger
measures against corruption. Several park officers, who were suspended by
Ngobobo for their involvement in the charcoal trade, have been arrested.
A new warden, the oldest serving in Congo and respected by all the
conservation groups, has been brought in. A force of 50 rangers who are
deployed when there is a crisis have also arrived and an opera-tional plan
is being put in place to train a second team of rangers to be stationed
permanently with the gorillas.
In the end, however, an alternative fuel to charcoal will have to be found if
Virunga and its gorillas are to be saved. One possibility is equipping
households with butane gas but people are too poor to afford a bottle and
stove. Studies show that it would cost up to £1.5m to convert Goma to gas,
which would knock the charcoal industry flat.
“It is not an unreasonable sum if the world wants to save the park and the
gorillas,” de Merode said. It is a dilemma that has wide implications:
“Essentially we are talking about the energy crisis, which is a global
crisis. It all ties to the same problem of habitat and resources. These
gorilla killings reflect a universal problem.”
Disappearing World
From big to small, thousands of animals are under threat. The World
Conservation Union estimates that 3,000 species are critically endangered,
from the Sri Lankan “relict ant” to the south China tiger. Among larger
animals that the World Wide Fund for Nature says are under serious threat or
at risk of extinction are:
Western Pacific grey whale
Only about 120 are thought to survive and of those only 20 to 35 are
reproductive females. One of the whales’ main feeding areas is near
Sakhalin, an island off the Pacific coast of Russia, where oil and gas
exploration threatens their habitat.
Iberian lynx
The most endangered cat in the world, about 100 are thought to survive in
Spain and Portugal. Its numbers have declined after the destruction of its
natural habitat and prey by farming and development.
Ethiopian wolf
About 500 or fewer survive. As a predator, it has fallen victim to conflict
with humans trying to protect other animals. Rabies has also ravaged the
population.
Giant otter
Found in the rainforests and rivers of South America, the giant otter was
originally hunted for its furry skin. More recently it has been the victim
of pollution, particularly mercury in rivers. Numbers are uncertain.
Snow leopard
A rarely sighted big cat found in central Asia and the Himalayas. Poaching and
loss of habitat are the biggest threats. Between 4,000 and 7,000 are thought
to survive.
Leatherback turtle
Found in the southern oceans, the leatherback can grow to 6ft long and weigh
more than 500kg. About 30,000 may survive worldwide, but in the Pacific,
modern fishing techniques and egg poaching have sent the population
plummeting to less than 2,500.
Polar bear
About 22,000 to 24,000 survive, but climate change threatens their Arctic
habitat. Shrinking ice cover and lack of access to their prey could send
numbers tumbling swiftly.
Albatross
Two species are critically endangered, seven are endangered and 10 are
vulnerable. About 100,000 of the birds, which can have a wingspan of more
than 11ft, are dying each year after swallowing hooks from “longline”
fishing fleets. The lines, which can be 80 miles long, carry thousands of
hooks baited with fish.
Yangtze dolphin
Numbers of the dolphin, which was only found in the Yangtze river in China,
had been falling dramatically in recent decades because of overfishing and
industrial pollution. Last week it was declared extinct.
