Rangers in the mist can't protect Congo gorillas

Some rangers have died in assaults where hundreds of fighters surround a park station and rake it with automatic weapons fire, even rocket launchers. Attackers often pillage everything they can from park stations, from VHF radios to computers. They have ripped off solar-paneled rooftops and carted away stocks of food, including live chickens.

Muir’s group has expanded beyond wildlife conservation to supply emergency food, clothing, medicine and shelter to rangers.

In the past decade about 120 of the 660 rangers have been killed on the Congo side of the border alone, a tenth of them in the gorilla sector.

Meanwhile, the gorilla population in Central Africa’s Virunga Conservation Area — a fertile volcanic mountain chain spanning the frontiers of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda — has risen by roughly 10 percent over the same period to about 380 today. The world’s other 320 mountain gorillas live farther north in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

Villagers are perplexed by the rangers risking their lives to watch over the giant creatures which sometimes eat their corn stalks.

Protecting 'a source of income'
“People often ask us, ‘Do you think gorillas are more important than man? Why do you protect them and not us?”’ Mwanaki says. “I tell them it’s in all our interests, because if we don’t protect them, we’ll have lost something forever — not just the gorillas, but a source of income.”

Across the border in Rwanda, tourist cameras click nonstop at a family of 23 gorillas on the edge of a dense bamboo forest. Youngsters tumble on top of each other in the crisp morning air.

More than 12,000 tourists make such treks to Rwanda each year, paying $500 a piece for the privilege. Back in Congo, tourism operators can’t even get insurance to bring groups in, Muir says.

Still, Mwanaki and other rangers managed to escort about 817 people on gorilla visits in 2007. Most were expatriate humanitarian workers — not tourists — living in the nearby provincial capital, Goma.

Graves for slain gorillas
Beside the park’s southern headquarters at Rumangabo, six crude wooden crosses rise from a hillside.

Most of the graves belong to a gorilla family named Rugendo, whose 12 members were cut to five in July in the worst single assault recorded to date. The dead included the group’s leader, a gray-haired silverback named Senkwekwe who took charge of the family in 2001 when his own father was killed during clashes. The names are given to them by the rangers.

Mburanumwe learned of the massacre after a call on his cell phone from his father, who is still a ranger. The rangers cut down nearby trees, converted them into makeshift stretchers and carried the slain gorillas out of the park “up high, like kings,” Mburanumwe says.

Conservationists suspect the assailants were linked to the lucrative charcoal trade, dependent on trees chopped down illegally. It is conducted so openly that even trucks overloaded with hundreds of sacks move easily through army roadblocks.

Today, the rangers’ daily gorilla tracking expeditions have ground to a halt, with the front line of the war cutting straight through the Virunga reserve. But the rangers continue to blog about their lives on an Internet site hosted by WildlifeDirect, which helped draw in more than $260,000 of cash for equipment and salaries last year, according to the American charity.

These days, the blog is filled with reports of shelling and gunfire, and sometimes seems more like a war diary than a conservation log.

“We’re not used to this,” Mburanumwe says, sitting in a Goma house with other colleagues unable to enter the reserve, typing on a laptop fueled by a humming generator outside.

The blog is online at wildlifedirect.org/blogAdmin/gorilla/.

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