CONGO - massacre of gorillas

[Guest guest]

Mass Gorilla " Execution " Discovered in Congo

Stefan Lovgren

for National Geographic News

 

July 23, 2007

Three female mountain gorillas were found shot dead this morning in

the Democratic Republic of Congo's Virunga National Park.

 

Another three gorillas are missing, and park rangers fear they may

have also been killed.

 

The slaughter deeply shocked the rangers and conservationists who

work to protect the endangered gorillas in a park that has been

ravaged by civil strife for years.

 

" This is a disaster, " said Emmanuel de Merode, director of

WildlifeDirect, a conservation group based in the Democratic Republic

of Congo (DRC) and Kenya that supports the rangers working in Virunga.

 

Park staff and WildlifeDirect officials stationed in Virunga's Bukima

camp said they heard gunshots coming from inside the dense forest

around 8 p.m. on Saturday night.

 

" We conducted a search this morning, " de Merode said.

 

" The rangers went up first and located the gorillas. Then we went up

about mid-day with a team of rangers.

 

" The gorillas were all quite close together. They had all been shot, " he said.

 

One of the dead females was the mother of a three-month-old baby

gorilla, while another victim was the mother of a two-year-old animal.

The third gorilla killed was pregnant.

 

Rebel Militias

 

The gorillas killed all came from the so-called Rugendo family of 12

individuals, headed by a silverback gorilla named Rugendo.

 

The family is one of several groups of gorillas that live on the

Congo side of the sprawling Virunga National Park, which straddles the

border of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda, and are visited from the Bukima

camp (see Africa map).

More than half of the gorillas' population, estimated at about 700, is

found in Virunga. The rest live in forests in Rwanda and Uganda.

 

The park lies in the heart of one of the most troubled regions of Africa.

 

The DRC is struggling to emerge from a civil war that has left an

estimated 4 million people dead and dates back to the genocide in

Rwanda in 1994.

 

Today the area is home to a vast array of rebel militias, government

soldiers, foreign troops, and villagers who are unsympathetic to the

rangers protecting the park. Poaching remains a major problem.

 

Early this year two silverback gorillas were killed within the span of

two days in the same area as where the latest killings occurred. The

incident sparked an international outcry of support for the embattled

gorillas.

 

Those apes appeared to have been butchered for their meat. One of them

had had his dismembered body dumped in a latrine.

 

(Read: " Mountain Gorillas Eaten by Congolese Rebels " [January 19, 2007].)

 

Act of Sabotage

 

Last month a female gorilla from the Kabirizi family was found shot to

death in the park.

 

Another female from that family has been missing ever since and is

presumed to have been killed too.

 

The " execution-style " killing of the gorillas last night was identical

to the killing last month, de Merode said.

 

He believes the slaughter was meant to send a chilling message to the

rangers to get out of the park.

 

" We don't think it was the villagers who did it, " he said. " This was

deliberate … an act of sabotage. "

 

De Merode said there is evidence from the site of the killings linking

the incident to the area's lucrative charcoal trade.

 

Virtually all of the charcoal that is supplied to the nearby city of

Goma—worth an estimated U.S. $30 million a year—is made from wood

harvested illegally inside Virunga National Park, he said.

 

" Last year Rwanda put a ban on any charcoal production within Rwanda, "

de Merode said.

 

" This means that whole country's charcoal is largely supplied from

Congo, " he added. " This has put a lot of pressure on the park. "