Gorilla Protection

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Nov 13 2008 | By: paula

GOMA, Congo, Nov 10 (Reuters) - East Congo’s conflict has put more than a quarter of the world’s last mountain gorillas at the mercy of armed groups who hunt and camp in their territory, park officials said on Monday.

With no rangers left to protect or care for them, the gorillas face even greater risk of extinction, they said.

Recent fighting between Tutsi rebels and the government army and its militia allies has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province, home to the Virunga Park, Africa’s oldest national park. It has also eliminated all protection and effective conservation monitoring for 200 of the last remaining 700 mountain gorillas in the world, who live in the forested hills of Virunga, on the border with Uganda and Rwanda.

Virunga’s Gorilla Sector has been in the hands of rebel General Laurent Nkunda’s fighters since September 2007 and the Rumangabo park headquarters, from which conservation operations were run, fell to a rebel assault in October this year.

More than 50 wildlife rangers, who had spent years protecting the gorillas and other animals in Virunga, were forced to run for their lives, joining 200,000 other refugees sheltering around the North Kivu provincial capital Goma.

“It’s not possible now to have any news about the gorillas,” one displaced Virunga park ranger, Diddy Mwanaka, told Reuters.

“We don’t know about their health, their security or if they remain in a secure place or not,” he said, speaking at a makeshift camp housing refugee rangers and their families.

The park’s website, www.gorilla.cd, chronicles the Oct. 26 capture of the park’s HQ by the rebels and its consequences.

Samantha Newport, communications director of the Virunga National Park, said park authorities were extremely concerned that the unprotected mountain gorilla families, or solitary gorillas, could now be caught up in the crossfire of combat.

“No one is looking after them in any way, shape or form,” she said. At least 40 percent of the Virunga Park was no longer under the control of the Congolese Wildlife Authority (ICCN).

Newport said that while park authorities did not believe that gorillas were being singled out for killing, they and other animals such as elephants, hippos and antelopes faced threats from armed groups, poachers, land invaders and charcoal burners who destroyed their forest habitat.

POACHING

“All these rebel groups, from whatever side, use the park to train, to camp out, to rest and to eat,” she said.

“We have problems of poaching of elephants, hippos, buffalo and antelope, just to name a few as a result of the presence of these armed groups in the park,” Newport added, saying 40 elephants had been poached in Virunga this year alone.

Over the years, east Congo’s conflict, which has persisted despite the formal end of a 1998-2003 war in the vast, former Belgian colony, has taken its toll on both the gorillas and the ICCN rangers who protect them.

More than 150 rangers have been killed in the last decade protecting parks in east Congo.

Virunga’s Gorilla Sector suffered repeated attacks in 2007 during which 10 mountain gorillas were killed.

Newport said Nkunda’s rebels saw the south of the border park as strategic territory. They used it as a supply route.

“At the moment, there is no chance of going back to the gorilla sector… When you have such a vulnerable, critically endangered population of animals, you really need to keep track of what is going on,” she added.

Newport said that unlike other endangered species, mountain gorillas had never managed to reproduce in captivity.

“So the ones we have in the wild, that’s it, when they’re gone, that’s it, they’ve gone,” she said.

Meanwhile two independent news sources have said the rebels continue to make progress and, as of Wednesday night, CNDP rebels had advanced to about 10 kilometres south of Kanyabayonga, the town looted by government troops earlier this week which is around 175 kilometres (110 miles) north of the Nord-Kivu capital Goma.

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Tags: CNDP, DR Congo, gorillas, ICCN, Laurent Nkunda, Virunga National Park

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Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 24 2008 | By: paula

The situation in eastern DR Congo around Rumangabo remains very bad according to Monuc who has just reported that the CNDP attack on Rumangabo on 7 October, has left over 15,000 people displaced and fleeing or living in makeshift camps. They state that in a recent visit they found Rumangabo had been “virtually emptied of it inhabitants”, and these who had returned had suffered a campaign of “systematic lootings by the armed forces of the DRC (FARDC)”. Emmanuel reports on the Virunga Park website that rangers have been able to prevent any looting of the Rumangabo Headquarters of the the Virunga National Park and while many rangers have returned to Rumangabo but their families are still in the temporary camp for their own security in Goma.

Efforts however are underway to try and halt the cycle of violence and the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday urged an immediate ceasefire by all parties to halt the resurgence of violence in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

A number of organizations are trying to raise awareness and international reaction including blogs like Peter Godspeed who predicts that “The war the world ignored, at the cost of more than five million dead since 1998, is exploding once again” and Abayomi Azikiwe writing about the historical background and who thinks that the UN is posed for greater intervention in the Congo.

The main concern being raised in the news is the humanitarian crisis resulting from recent fighting which puts the civilian population at great risk and is hampering humanitarian operations. There is universal condemnation for the recruitment and use of children by armed groups, and the continued use of sexual and gender-based violence.

Despite all the attention the rhetoric is escalating, rebels have rejected the call for a ceasefire and the UN is poised to strengthen the Monuc forces in Kivus, while President Kabila himself has been on Congolese television appealing to the people of eastern DRC to take up arms and defeat Laurent Nkunda and his rebels.

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Tags: CNDP, conflict in Congo, DR Congo, ICCN, Kivu, Laurent Nkunda, rumangabo

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Category: Threats | Date: Oct 06 2008 | By: admin

In Innocents latest post on the official website of the Virunga National Park he reports in great detail how soldiers were caught ‘red handed’ making charcoal in the forest.

” We drove to Mwaro and hiked into the forest near a Congolese army position on the road. We very soon discovered vast areas of forest that had been cut down. Logs had been chopped and stacked in preparation to make charcoal. Soon after we found dozens of charcoal kilns at different stages- some had just been stacked, others were still burning, and some had sacks of charcoal next to them ready to transport to Goma for sale.

There were dozens of people working on the kilns, including women and children. We detained all the men and arrested two soldiers who were running the operation. We ordered the men to destroy the kilns they had just built and then marched them out of the forest.

The atmosphere was tense and we had to leave quickly. After explaining to them why we had to stop what they were doing, we decided to let most of the men go free. The two soldiers were placed in our vehicle and we drove them to our headquarters in Rumangabo. They are now under arrest and will be transferred to Goma to be handed over to the military tribunal.

Read more about it and check out the photos here

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Tags: charcoal, DR Congo, gorillas, wildlifedirect

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Category: Political situation, Press, Threats | Date: Oct 05 2008 | By: admin

The situation on the ground in eastern Congo remains tense and the official website of the United Nations Monuc.org the peace keeping force have declared “The United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) firmly condemns the recent declaration of Laurent Nkunda calling for an insurrection against the elected legitimate Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). MONUC and the international community will not tolerate this renewed attempt at destabilizing the political process.”

Sensibilisation campaign organized by MONUC to protect street children. Photo Myriam Asmani / MONUC

Secretary-General’s Special Representative Alan Doss has asked for additional peacekeepers beyond the nearly 19,000 uniformed personnel already there to prevent the vast country from slipping back into “horrendous” conflict.

Photo: MONUC

Responding to this condemnation from the United nations a spokesman for Nkunda, Bertrand Bisimwa, has denied that the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda was threatening to expand his rebellion. It has been captured in the press here and here

“”We haven’t said we are going to wage war outside of the borders of North Kivu,” Bisimwa told Reuters by telephone, responding to questions about Nkunda’s comments.

Nkunda’s statement broke months of silence, amid rumours that he was ill. His fighters have since August launched attacks on the Congolese army in eastern North Kivu province, forcing at least 100,000 people from their homes.

The United Nations, which has its biggest international peacekeeping force, around 17,000 strong, in Congo, said it was studying Nkunda’s comments, which seemed to threaten an escalation of the long-running conflict in North Kivu.”

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Tags: Conflict, DR Congo, Laurent Nkunda, MONUC, United Nations

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