Rangers in the mist can't protect Congo gorillas

By Todd Pitman

updated 8:54 a.m. ET Jan. 14, 2008

VIRUNGA NATIONAL PARK, Congo - Not far from a hillside where several mountain gorillas shot dead last summer lie buried, park ranger Innocent Mburanumwe peers across a primordial canopy of treetops into what may be the most dangerous game reserve on earth.

The lush sanctuary — home to some of the world’s last mountain gorillas — was thrust onto the front lines of Congo’s latest war in September. Since then, the fragile habitat in the Central African highlands has been overrun by rebels and soldiers, transformed into an off-limits war zone.

In the world of wildlife conservation, the biggest worry most rangers face is the extinction of endangered animals. But in Virunga National Park, where more than 120 rangers have been killed over the last decade, they also worry about their own survival.

In recent months, some have dodged bullets while driving in their cars. Some have spent nights hiding under beds with their families. All were forced to flee the park’s so-called gorilla sector when rebels swept in, some taking shelter in tents on the sanctuary’s edge.

“There are undoubtedly risks associated with this job,” says Mburanumwe, 35, whose brother — also a ranger — was killed in the line of duty a decade ago. “But our concern is for the gorillas. That’s the reason we’re here.”

The gorillas have the potential to draw tourist revenue to a desperately poor region and bring in vital funding through conservation groups. Over the last 12 months, though, rangers have watched helplessly as the gorillas have been massacred.

2007 was the apes’ bloodiest year on record since famed American researcher Dian Fossey first began working in Congo in the mid-1960s to save them. The toll: 10 shot and killed, two others missing. The rangers don’t know for sure who killed the gorillas, but they believe illegal charcoal traders are trying to sabotage the park for easier access to its trees.

Rangers driven from park
Now armed groups have seized the habitat. With park staff unable to set foot inside the reserve for the last four months, the gorillas’ fate is unknown.

“Nobody knows what’s happening to them, nobody can track them anymore,” Mburanumwe says bleakly, eyes fixed on the verdant slopes of dormant Mikeno volcano, where about 190 of the world’s remaining 700 mountain gorillas live.

“It’s a catastrophe,” he says, turning away from the mountain, its mighty peak rising through the mist. “For them and for us.”

When Mburanumwe was a boy, he watched his father put on a uniform and boots every morning as the light of dawn crept into their home. His father was a ranger. He became one, too.

Rangers in eastern Congo take great risks to save animals in a part of the world already heavy with human suffering. The job doesn’t come with a steady paycheck, but it offers the security that comes with cradling a weapon in a region where the most powerful people — soldiers and militiamen — are usually the best armed.

Another ranger, 46-year-old Diddy Mwanaki, joined the park service in 1991 after a friend tipped him off to a vacancy. It’s the only job he’s ever had.

After weeks of training, Mwanaki was given a camouflage uniform and a rifle and taught how to fire it. Soon he was deployed with a radio-equipped team of trackers, observing the massive, jet-black gorillas that he and other villagers back then thought of as “monsters.”

“I was surprised to find they were just like man, except that they cannot speak — at least not like we do,” Mwanaki says. “It’s true they can be aggressive — but only when they are aggressed. This is not always true of man.”

When war first broke out in 1996, he fled the park’s southern gorilla sector along with dozens of other rangers. Mwanaki and Mburanumwe are used to gauging the intensity and nearness of volleys of gunfire while on patrols or tracking missions — and deciding when to flee.

Kidnappings among the threats
Threats abound: Heavily armed poachers, charcoal traders, traffickers who kidnap young apes to sell them for thousands of dollars. The rangers, who sport army-style berets and sometimes bandoliers of bullets wrapped over their shoulders, have even set fire to thatch-roof homes erected illegally in the reserve.

The biggest threat are militias and rebels from Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. Some rangers have been abducted and forced to work as guides for armed groups unfamiliar with the terrain. Rwandan militiamen held ranger Anicet Baziheraho for three weeks last year until he escaped from their forest base. “They tied me up and beat me,” he says, showing scars on his wrists from the ropes. “They said I was a spy.”

Robert Muir, who has worked in the region for years for the Frankfurt Zoological Society, describes the rangers’ work as “a struggle to survive.”

“The park is literally awash with military and militia and rebels who may not understand that the rangers are there to protect and conserve the wildlife, who may mistake the rangers for another rebel group, or who may fully understand who and what the rangers are and see them as a threat,” Muir says.

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