Congolese War Contributes to Devastation of Gorilla Population
7/28/99
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Congolese War Contributes to Devastation of Gorilla
Population
Source: The New York Times Company
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: July 28, 1999
Byline: Ian Fisher
BUKAVU, Congo -- Kahuzi-Biega National Park is where Dian Fossey
first saw wild gorillas. It is the first park to allow tourists to
get near them, for a price that enriched local people. Bill Gates
visited there in 1993, and he tipped his guide $400.
Now the park, in the jungles of eastern Congo, is providing a glimpse
of how the war in central Africa, fought for five years now, is
destroying the region's distinctly beautiful wildlife.
In neat rows near the park entrance, workers have created an above-
ground graveyard for the victims' remains: the skulls of more than 40
elephants, 3 grown gorillas and a baby. Nearby lay the tiny severed
hands of two small gorillas.
"In Rwanda they are talking about a human genocide," Basengezi
Katintima, Governor of South Kivu Province in eastern Congo, said,
looking over his shoulder at the skulls. "Here we are talking about
an animal genocide."
Park officials estimate that perhaps 100 of the 250 eastern lowland
gorillas in the park's highlands have been killed since 1996, along
with three-quarters of the 400 forest elephants alive before the war.
Poaching has picked up markedly since April: arrested poachers have
admitted to killing 20 gorillas and 17 elephants since then. Trade in
ivory thrives.
Even as the many combatants in Congo discuss peace, the war is also
clearly disrupting a complex dynamic -- among animals, local people
and rich foreign tourists -- that some conservationists believe is
the best hope for saving the dwindling wildlife of Africa.
Before the war, more than 3,000 tourists, most of them Americans like
Mr. Gates, visited the park each year. They helped keep poachers
away, in part because so many people were in the forest. As
important, their money helped build schools, roads and water projects
that made people in the poor and densely populated area around the
park feel they had a stake in its survival.
Now, with no tourists during five years of war, the local economy has
hit bottom. Mankoto Ma Oyisenzoo, a primatologist and the park's
director, said that elephant meat is popular because it is half the
price of beef ($1 for two pounds). Hostility to the park -- once the
home of pygmies who hunted and collected wood and plants for medicine
-- is rising.
"These people have nothing," said Norbert Mushenzi, director of the
Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature.
On a recent day at the park, the authorities displayed half a dozen
arrested poachers, including Bulabi Lubaga, a 62-year-old pygmy
dressed in an irredeemably tattered jacket and pants. The authorities
say he is a longtime poacher. He said he was in the park collecting
honey and trapping monkeys to survive.
"I was hungry," he said.
But Mr. Lubaga is only a bit player in a poaching problem that
wildlife officials say has risen substantially since the turbulence
in Congo began in the early 1990's. Poaching has always existed,
officials say, but after 1994 the poachers began to do their work
with automatic weapons, which made killing far more efficient.
The weapons were bought cheaply from former members of the Rwandan
Army, members of the Hutu ethnic group who fled Rwanda that year
after killing at least half a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu.
Since then Kahuzi-Biega National Park has been a base for Hutu rebels
and Congolese fighters called the Mayi Mayi through two uprisings.
The first one began in October 1996 and ended in the overthrow of
Mobutu Sese Seko, the longtime dictator of Congo, then known as
Zaire. The second began last August, and continues today in its drive
to oust Mobutu's successor, Laurent Kabila.
Mr. Oyisenzoo, the park director, said poaching had become highly
organized in the absence of any authority in the park. Elephants are
slaughtered for meat, he said, and the ivory is shipped to Rwanda and
then on to Dubai. Gorillas, he said, are also killed for meat --
which he said costs about the same as elephant -- and their heads are
shipped abroad as trophies. Live baby gorillas are also sold abroad,
he said.
What makes Mr. Oyisenzoo's numbers all the more worrying is that he
is only able to see a small part of the park, the highlands that rise
about 7,500 feet to the park's east 15 miles from Bukavu. The vast
lowlands, which make up some 90 percent of the park, are still
occupied by the Hutu rebels and the Mayi Mayi.
And he said he fears that many of the 2,200 eastern lowland gorillas
there -- among a total population of perhaps 5,000 in Congo before
the war -- may have been slaughtered for meat.
"The Mayi Mayi don't eat vegetables," he said. "Only meat."
The park's eastern highlands are distinct for two reasons. First,
some experts say the gorillas there, while called lowland gorillas,
are actually closer genetically to the nearly extinct mountain
gorilla. There are only 650 mountain gorillas left, in parks in
Rwanda and Uganda and farther north in Congo.
Eight tourists were killed in March, by the same Hutu rebels, while
tracking mountain gorillas in Uganda, and tourism has yet to rebound.
Second, many of the gorillas killed recently -- 12 of the 20 in the
last three months -- had been conditioned to human contact and were,
in fact, the gorillas that tourists came to see. Before the war, five
families of gorillas had undergone what is called "habituation," a
process that takes two years or more. While some conservationists
object, tourists could actually touch the park's gorillas.
"You could swim among them," said John Kahekwa, 35, a gorilla tracker
who has worked in the park since 1983.
Since then, four out of the five habituated silverbacks, the male
gorillas who lead the families, have been killed.
And so now gorillas are much harder to find, which may make the
revival of the park, apart from the war, that much more difficult. On
a recent day, Mr. Kahekwa and other trackers followed a group of
gorillas once led by a silverback named Nindja.
In October 1997 Nindja was shot to death by poachers while crossing a
road. The head female of the group, Mugoli -- the name means Queen in
the local Mashi dialect -- took over but has since been afraid of
human beings.
"She doesn't want to see people because they fired on them," Mr.
Kahekwa said.
He led a group of visitors though the forest, stopping at one point
over the ashes of a campfire left by poachers and by a tree where
elephants had once scratched their heads.
"I walk in here every day and I haven't seen any elephants for the
past three months," he said.
Of the 24 gorillas in Nindja's original group, only 6 remain -- among
them a young male, the only gorilla Mr. Kahekwa found after three
hours of looking. He is not used to human beings, and with a loud
growl, he charged at Mr. Kahekwa twice. Mr. Kahekwa dropped down but
stood his ground. The gorilla backed off.
"He charged just to intimidate," he said. "But I talked to him. I
said, 'Calm down.' "
The local authorities are praying for the war to end and for the
tourists to return. Although a peace accord was drafted in Zambia
this month, the three rebel groups have yet to sign and the fighting
goes on, a bad sign for people and wildlife alike.
"If we cannot respect man," Mr. Oyisenzee asked, "how can we respect
the animals in the forest?"