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 USA Today

KINSHASA, Congo (AP) — Rebels have seized an area in eastern Congo that serves as a wildlife habitat for endangered mountain gorillas, threatening one of the last known populations of the animals, conservationists said Sunday.

Shelling and heavy gunfire could be heard from the headquarters of the Virunga National Park, and rangers were forced to flee over the weekend, said the international conservation group WildlifeDirect.

Only 700 mountain gorillas exist in the world, of which more than half live in the Virunga conservation area, a huge swath of territory at the intersection of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.

Rebels loyal to warlord Laurent Nkunda have frequently battled over the park in their clashes with the army. Caught in the crossfire are the rare gorillas, 10 of which have been killed this year.

“This is a human conflict that is involving the mountain gorillas. They are not a target, but can so easily get caught in crossfire and shelling,” said Emmanuel de Merode, the director of the international conservation group WildlifeDirect.

“We still cannot protect our gorillas. This conflict has no place in the park, least of all in the habitat of these animals. We hope they will be unharmed,” said Norbert Mushenzi, director of the southern section of the park for the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature.

The area containing the mountain gorillas was also attacked in January, when two silverbacks were killed. Four months ago, the dead body of a female gorilla was found. Conservationists say she was killed execution style.

International wildlife groups concerned about the welfare of the gorillas are funding a $100,000-crisis management program to increase the number of rangers patrolling the habitat.

“This appalling security situation is making it virtually impossible to implement the emergency program. There is a lot that we need to be doing, and we simply cant,” said Lucy Fauveau of the London Zoological Society.

Earlier this month, hundreds of people, including rangers and their families, fled the park after fighting broke out. Wildlife groups said huge swaths of the park, including several patrol posts, had been occupied by Nkunda’s insurgents and looted.

Since then, Nkunda’s forces allowed a handful of rangers back to track the gorillas and they accounted for 18 of the estimated 72 mountain gorillas on the Congo side of the park, WildlifeDirect said.

But the most recent outburst of fighting forced the rangers who had returned to flee again, leaving no one to track the rare animals.

Virunga National Park, established in 1925 as Africa’s first national park, is located in a lawless swath of eastern Congo that the country’s government has struggled to bring under control for years.

Eastern Congo has been gripped by violence involving militias and rebels for more than a decade. Government forces have failed to prevent sporadic outbreaks of violence since the end of the country’s four-year war in 2002.

AFP

NAIROBI (AFP) — Rangers in Democratic Republic of Congo on Tuesday arrested two men with a dead mountain gorilla near Virunga National park amid fears over the fate of the endangered species, an official said.

The suspected traffickers were seized with the female infant gorilla around 10 kilometres (six miles) from the edge of the park, where renewed fighting has blocked rangers from tracking 72 gorillas, said Samantha Newport, spokeswoman for Wildlife Direct.

“The suspects said the gorilla was taken from DR Congo’s gorilla sector … and they were aiming to get 8,000 dollars for the infant. The cause of death is unknown and the infant died about one week ago,” Newport said in a statement.

“It is thought that another gorilla is being held by the same group,” the statement said.

This brings to 10 the number of gorillas killed in the park in 2007. Two others are still missing.

Local and foreign militias as well as Congolese soldiers, poachers and illegal miners regularly cross the same area of the Virunga park, one of Africa’s largest and a UNESCO world heritage site. Sometimes parts of it are occupied.

The mountain gorillas are a major tourist attraction in the Virunga park, where poaching is widespread.

Only around 700 endangered mountain gorillas remain in the wild, all of them living in the mountains of Rwanda, Uganda and the eastern DRC.

Since fighting erupted last month between the DRC army and forces loyal to cashiered general Laurent Nkunda, rangers’ efforts to track the rare species have been paralysed, Newport said.

She expressed concern that fresh clashes on Monday, which ruptured an 18-day truce in the volatile region, could further endanger the gorillas.

The Scotsman

GREAT apes laugh when they are tickled and cry when they grieve; they think about their past and plan for the future. But that future seems to be a long road to extinction.

The World Conservation Union, which yesterday published this year’s Red List of Threatened Species, said the western gorilla was “critically endangered” - one step from global extinction - because of poaching and the Ebola virus.

One expert said anti-poaching measures and the use of available vaccines could halt a terminal decline and cost as little as £1 million.

The western gorilla is just one of 16,306 species at risk of extinction - 236 animals and plants were added to this year’s list - out of more than 41,400 assessed.

One in four mammals, one in eight birds, a third of all amphibians and 70 per cent of the plants out of those that have been studied are in jeopardy.

“Life on Earth is disappearing fast and will continue to do so unless urgent action is taken,” the World Conservation Union, which is known by the French acronym IUCN, warned.

But the plight of the western gorilla - the most common of the gorilla species - suggests humans will move too slowly to make a real difference.

Dr Peter Walsh, a member of IUCN’s primate specialist group, said the rate of decline in populations was “dizzying” and unless action was taken in the next ten years, numbers would fall to unsustainably low levels, with ultimate extinction.

In some areas, 90 per cent of the gorillas have been wiped out by outbreaks of Ebola. “It’s in the next ten years that the real damage is going to be done,” Dr Walsh said. “They’re being reduced to tiny populations of a few hundred animals.”

He said the situation could be reversed with just a few million pounds spent tackling poachers and vaccinating gorillas.

“In the future, people are going to remember this as a period when we knew our closest relatives were being wiped out and did nothing,” he said.

A Malaysian herb, the woolly-stalked begonia, was the only species declared extinct this year. Ten species of seaweed are listed as critically endangered, with six possibly extinct.

The Yangtze river dolphin remains critically endangered but further studies are to be carried out to establish whether it is extinct, as many experts believe.

Vultures in Africa and Asia are also believed to be in trouble, with the red-headed vulture deemed critically endangered and several others facing problems due to a lack of food, habitat loss and power lines strikes.

But what is the hope for these animals, given the lack of action to save the gorilla?

Russ Mittermeier, head of IUCN’s primate specialist group, said: “We could fit all the remaining great apes in the world into two or three large football stadiums. There aren’t many left.”

The Independent

They are the latest victims of the chaos in Congo: nine mountain gorillas slaughtered in an apparently motiveless crime. Now the UN is trying to uncover the truth behind the massacre. Michael McCarthy and David Lewis report

Published: 22 August 2007

 

 

Here it comes again, in an acute form, one of the most agonising questions for anyone who cares about the natural world: can Africa’s wonderful wildlife ever be effectively protected?

It is being thrown into sharp relief by the killing this year, in four separate incidents, of nine mountain gorillas in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Mountain gorillas are among the world’s rarest animals; there are only about 700 left, in two populations, one in the Virunga region, and one in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda.

But they’re not only very rare, they’re very special. Although all creatures surely have equal worth, it remains the case that some appeal to us more than others - the ones that serious zoologists sometimes lump together and label, with a sarcastic suggestion of the celebrity culture invading even natural history, charismatic megafauna. Tigers, giant pandas, golden eagles, dolphins, orchids - you couldn’t really argue that most of us aren’t drawn to them more than we are to rats and goldfish, spiders and lichens. And in that megafauna list, few creatures have more charismatic appeal than Gorilla berengei berengei.

It is nearly 30 years since the largest of all the great apes burst onto our consciousness, in the close encounters with David Attenborough, filmed for the twelfth episode of his seriesLife On Earth. In those magical 1978 meetings, when Attenborough patiently sat and waited for the Virunga animals to get used to him, and then actually played with them, we saw at first-hand what magnificent creatures they were - especially the huge, older males, known as silverbacks for the grizzled coat they develop. And we also saw the surprising truth about this beast which had been demonised as a skyscraper-toppling monster in King Kong: it is the gentlest of all the apes.

Five years later the American primatologist Dian Fossey published her own remarkable account of life with the Virunga animals,Gorillas in the Mist, which gave them a romantic, almost mythical status, enhanced by Fossey’s own murder as she worked to protect them, in 1985.

Ever since, they have been among the world’s most cherished animals - at least in the rich west. Yet they live at the heart of a region which exemplifies all that is increasingly tragic about Africa, in human terms, for the last three decades: the combination of poverty, unsustainable development, and war.

The Virunga region, the forested slopes of a range of extinct volcanoes, actually stretches over three countries: Rwanda and Uganda, as well as the DRC. All are very poor; all have been ravaged by conflict. Rwanda saw the genocidal war between Hutus and Tutsis in 1994; earlier, Uganda saw thousands die under the dictatorial regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. But it is the DRC, one of Africa’s biggest (and potentially richest) countries, which has suffered on the widest basis.

In 1998 the regime of President Laurent Kabila was challenged by rebels backed by both Rwanda and Uganda; Kabila in turn brought in troops from Angola, Chad, Namibia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. It was one of Africa’s worst civil wars. Though it was officially brought to an end by Kabila’s son Joseph, after his assassination, various rebel bands roamed at will, with Virunga one of the worst affected regions. When the people are desperately poor and civil order is in tatters, where is the funding for conservation? Where is the priority?

The Congolese have tried to make a fist of it, in spite of all the difficulties, through the Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN), the DRC’s wildlife and protected areas authority. But the cost has been huge. In the last 10 years, no fewer than 120 rangers from the Virunga National park have been killed by rebels and poachers. Yet despite all this - or perhaps because of the heroic effort these fatalities represent - Virunga’s mountain gorillas have been doing well, and the population has increased from 330 to about 380. Which is why the recent killings have been do disturbing.

In January, two lone males were shot in separate incidents, it is thought by militiamen loyal to a rebel warlord, General Laurent Nkunda. In June, an adult female was shot in another incident, but her baby was saved and taken into care. The most distressing incident of all occurred in late July, when four members of a well-known, 12-strong gorilla band in the Mikeno sector were found executed - there doesn’t really seem any other word for it.

They included the silverback and leader of the group, named by the rangers Rugendo, and three females: Neeza, Mburanumwe, who was pregnant, and Safari, whose baby Ndeze was brought to the town of Goma to be cared for by vets. (Another female gorilla and her baby are missing). The pictures of the group of four slaughtered animals, which went round the world, were wretched in the extreme.

Although there is a growing African trade in “bushmeat”, (the hunting of forest animals, including primates, for human consumption) the gorillas’ potentially valuable carcasses had been left lying where they were shot. Nor were they shot for trophies: the bodies had been burnt and slashed with machetes.

“It seems the people who did this were making a point,” said Dr Noelle Kumpel, Bushmeats and Forests Conservation Programme Manager for the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), which is one of the western groups actively trying to help with gorilla conservation. “There are a lot of problems within the park, a lot of people living and trying to work inside the park.” The main suspect at the moment is the local charcoal industry. Illegal charcoal traders have been cutting down trees in the gorillas’ habitat and see the national park as a direct rival. It is an industry thought to be worth about 30 million dollars a year, as charcoal is in heavy demand in the mushrooming town of Goma - a village 10 years ago, now with a population of 400,000 - and also in neighbouring Rwanda, where there are heavy demands for charcoal but there are stict laws on producing it.

“There is a lot of pressure on the park to fuel the charcoal industry,” said Samantha Newport, a spokeswoman for WildlifeDirect, a group supporting conservationists in Africa working in dangerous situations. “The killings are being interpreted as an attack on the park itself. There is no reason to suspect it is anything but sabotage. It is a way to exert pressure on the park to try and ensure it doesn’t exist.”

Two major responses to the killings have been made by conservationists. The first is a three-month emergency action plan, which includes round-the-clock monitoring for the six remaining gorilla families in the Mikeno sector. Teams of park rangers are working in relay to ensure that the remaining families are protected from attacks 24 hours a day. Furthermore, there will be increased patrols of critical areas by 30 guards mobilised from other parts of the park, and a census of the remaining gorillas by the endof August, to ensure an accurate, up-to-date understanding of the current situation.

The second has been a formal investigation into the killings by Unesco, the United Nations cultural organisation, which maintains the list of World Heritage Sites, of which the Virunga National Park was one of the first to be declared, in 1978.

A team including representatives from Unesco, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the United Nations Environment Programme and the DRC’s conservation body, the ICCN, have spent the last week trying to find out the truth about the massacre of the Rugendo band. The leader of the team, Yvette Kaboza, gets back to Unesco’s Paris headquarters today and the report should be ready within 10 days.

It is hoped that its conclusions will feed into the emergency protection plan. But the scheme, which has been put together by the five main western-based conservation groups supporting the gorillas, including the ZSL, only has funds for three months and more money is urgently required.

The protection is a tough task. “Each month we go out for 10 days and monitor the families. This is very dangerous - there are armed groups in the park,” said Innocent Mburanumwe, a ranger in charge of monitoring the gorilla families in the park’s southern sector. “We face all sorts of problems, from the armed groups and the charcoal traders to the corruption. But if we risk death, we will fight to protect nature and the gorillas from being wiped out. It is our job.”

“It’s an example of the difficulties that face conservation in so many parts of Africa,” said the ZSL’s Dr Kumpel. And that determination to try, against such great odds, gives hope that conservation may succeed.

But it isn’t all a hopeful picture. At the weekend, the missing female from Rugendo’s band was found - and she too, had been killed, and her baby must be presumed dead along with her.

The Zoological Society of London is appealing for funds to maintain the emergency gorilla protection programme in Virunga beyond its three-month initial phase. Donations to the fund can be made by sending cheques payable to the Zoological Society of London to Dr Noelle Kumpel, Bushmeat and Forests Conservation Programme, Outer Circle, Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4RY. Donations can also be made via the ZSL website: www.zsl.org