Gorilla Warfare

..nternational
BY SHARON BEGLEY
N THE LUSH PLAINS OF CONGO'S VIRUNGA NATIONAL PARK LAST WEEK,
the convoy ofporters rounded the final hill and trooped into camp.
Theygently set down the wooden frame they had carried for miles,
and with itthe very symbol oftheMricanjungle: a 600-pound silverback
mountain gorilla. A leader ofa troop often visited by
tourists, his arms and legs were lashed to the wood, his head hanging low and
spots ofblood speckling his fur. The barefoot porters, shirts torn and pants
caked with dustfrom their trek, lay him beside three smaller gorillas, all females,
who had also been killed, then silently formed a semicircle around the
bodies. As the stench ofdeath wafted across the camp in the waning afternoon
light, a parkwarden stepped forward. "What man would do this?" he thundered.
He answered himself: "Not even a beastwould do this:'
Park rangers don't know who killed the four mountain gorillas
found shot to death in Virunga, but it was the seventh killing of
the critically endangered primates in two months. Authorities
doubt the killers are poachers, since the gorillas' bodies were left
behind and an infant-who could bring thousands ofdollars from
a collector-was found clinging to its dead mother in one ofthe
earlier murders. The brutality and senselessness ofthe crime had
conservation experts concerned that the most dangerous animal
in the world had found yet another excuse to slaughter the creatures
with whom we share the planet. "This area mustbe immediately
secured:' said Deo Kujirakwinja of the Wildlife Conservation
Society's Congo Program, "or we stand to lose an entire
population ofthese endangered animals."
Back when the Amazon was aflame and the forests ofSoutheast
Asia were being systematically clear-cut, biologists were
clear about what posed the greatest threat to the world's wildlife,
and it wasn't men with guns. For decades, the chief threat was
habitat destruction. Whether it was from impoverished locals
burning a forest to raise cattle or a multinational denuding a
tree-covered Malaysian hillside, wildlife was dying because
species were being driven from their homes. Yes, poachers
killed tigers and other trophy animals-as they had since
before Theodore Roosevelt-and subsistence hunters
took monkeys for bushmeat to put on their tables, butthey
were not a primary danger.
That has changed. "Hunting, especially in Central and West
Africa, is much more serious than we imagined:' says Russell Mitte~eier,
president of Conservation International. "It's huge:'
with the result that hunting now constitutes the pre-eminent
threat to some species. That threat has been escalating over the
past decade largely because the opening offorests to logging and
mining means that roads connect once impenetrable places to
towns. "It's easier to get to where the wildlife is and then to have
access to markets:' says conservation biologist Elizabeth Bennett
ofthe Wll.dlife Conservation Society. Economic forces are also at
play. Thanks to globalization, meat, fur, skins and other animal
parts "are sold on an increasingly massive scale across the world:'
she says. Smoked monkey carcasses travel from Ghana to New
York and London, while gourmets in Hanoi and Guangzhou feast
on turtles and pangolins (scaly anteaters) from Indonesia. There
is a thriving market for bushmeat among immigrants in Paris,
New York, Montreal, Chicago and other points in the African di-
22 NEWSWEEK AUGUST 6, 2007

aspora, with an estimated 13,000 pounds ofbushmeat-much of
it primates-arriving every month in seven European and North
American cities alone. "Hunting and trade have already resulted
in widespread local extinctions in Asia and West Africa;' says
Bennett. "Theworld's wild places are falling silent:'
When a company wins a logging or mining concession, it immediately
builds roads wide enough for massive trucks where the
principal access routes had been dirt paths no wider than a jaguar.
"Almost no tropical forests remain across Africa and Asia which
are not penetrated by logging or other roads;' says Bennett.
Hunters and weapons follow, she notes, "and wildlife flows cheaply
and rapidly down to distant towns where it is either sold directly
or links in to global markets." How quickly can opening a forest
ravage the resident wildlife? Three weeks after a logging company
opened up one Congo forest, the density ofanimals fell more than
25 percent; a year after a logging road went into forest areas in
Sarawak, Malaysia, in 2001, not a single large mammal remained.
A big reason why hunting used to pale next to habitat destruction
is that as recently as the 1990s animals were killed mostly for
subsistence, with locals taking orily what they needed to live.
Governments and conservation groups helped reduce even that
through innovative programs giving locals an economic stake in
the preservation of forests and the survival of wildlife. In the
mountains ofRwanda, for instance, tourists pay $500 to spend
an hour with the majestic mountain gorillas, bolstering the economy
ofthe surrounding region. But recent years have brought a
more dangerous kind of hunter, and not only because they use
AK-47s and even land mines to hunt.
The problem now is that hunting, even ofsupposedly protected
animals, is a global, multimillion-dollar business. Eating
bushmeat "is now a status symbol;' says Thomas Brooks ofConservation
International. "It's not a subsistence issue. It's not a
poverty issue. It's considered supersexy to eat bushmeat." Exact
figures are hard to come by, but what conservation groups know
about is sobering. Every year a single province in Laos exports
$3.6 million worth of wildlife, including pangolins, cats, bears
and primates. In Sumatra, about 51 tigers were killed each year
between 1998 and 2002; there are currently an estimated 350
tigers left on the island (down from 1,000 or so in the 1980s) and
fewer than 5,000 in the world.
Ifa wild population is large enough, it can withstand hunting.
Butfor many species that "if" has not existed for decades. As a result,
hunting in Kilum-Ijim, Cameroon, has pushed local elephants,
buffalo, bushbuck, chimpanzees, leopards and lions to
the brink of extinction. The common hippopotamus, which in
1996 was classified as of "least concern" because its numbers
seemed to be healthy, is now "vulnerable": over the past 10 years
its numbers have fallen as much as 20 percent, largely because the
hippos are illegally hunted for meat and ivory. Pygmy hippos,
classified as "vulnerable" in 2000, by lastyear had become endangered,
at risk of going extinct. Logging has allowed bushmeat
hunters to reach the West African forests where the hippos live;
fewer than 3,000 remain.
Setting aside parks and other conservation areas is only as
good as local enforcement. "Halfofthe major protected areas in
Southeast Asia have lost at least one species of large mammal
due to hunting, and most have lost many more;' says Bennett.
In Thailand's Doi Inthanon and Doi Suthep National Parks, for
instance, elephants, tigers and wild cattle have been hunted
into oblivion, as has been every primate and hornbill in
Sarawak's Kubah National Park. The world-famous Project
Tiger site in India's Sariska National Park has no tigers, biologists
announced in 2005. Governments cannot afford to pay as
many rangers as are needed to patrol huge regions, and corruption
is rife. The result is "empty-forest syndrome": majestic
landscapes where flora and small fauna thrive, butwhere larger
wildlife has been hunted out.
Which is not to say the situation is hopeless. With governments
and conservationists recognizing the extinction threat
posed by logging and mining, they are taking steps to ensure that
animals do not come out along with the wood and minerals. In
one collaboration, the government ofCongo and the WCS work
with a Swiss company, Congolaise Industrielle des
Bois-which has a logging concession near Nouabale­
Ndoki National Park-to ensure that employees and
their families hunt only for their own food needs; the
company also makes sure that bushmeat does not get
stowed away on logging trucks as illegal hunters try to take
their haul to market. Despite the logging, gorillas, chimps,
forest elephants and bongos are thriving in the park.
Anyone who thrills at the sight ofman'S distant cousins
staring silently through the bush can only hope thatthe executions
ofVirunga's gorillas is an aberration. At the end of the
week, UNESCO announced that it was sending a team to investigate
the slaughter.
With SCOTT JOHNSON in Virunga Park and JULIE SCElFO in New York
AUGUST 6. 2007 NEWSWEEK 23

BY SCOTT JOHNSON
THE MEN HUDDLED UNDER
billowinggreen ponchos
and shouldered their
AK-47s nervously. Summer
rains drenched the plains
and canopiedjungle ofVirunga
National Park, a vast preserve
along the eastern borderofthe
Democratic Republic ofCongo
thatis home to an estimated 60
percentoftheworld's surviving
mountain gorillas. The men allowed
the rain to douse their
cigarettes. Then, in single file,
theybegan to move into the
forest. Through the din ofthe
storm, a shout quickly rose up.
The rangers found the first corpse less than a hundred
yards away, in a grove ofvines and crooked
thicket The mammoth gorilla lay on her side, a
small pink tongue protruding slightly from her
lips. She was pregnant and her breasts were engorged
with milk for the baby that now lay dead inside
her womb.
The rangers crowded around and caressed the
gorilla's singed fur. They shook their heads and
clicked their tongues with disapproval. One
grabbed her hand and held it for a long time, his
head bowed in grief This gorilla-whom the
rangers knew as intimately as they do all those who
live in their sector of the park-was named Mburanumwe.
Her killers had set her alight after executing
her. Now her eyes were closed, as ifin deep
concentration. "My God;' one ranger said in disgust,
"they even burned her." Nearby the rangers
found the bodies of two other adult females, all
from the same 12-member family. 1\vo infants had
been orphaned. A male would be found dead the
next day. The massacre, first discovered onJuly 23,
could be the worst slaughter of mountain gorillas
in the last quarter century.
Even the rangers-who live in a country where
more than 4 million people may have been killed in

have traditionally begun, the fighting continues
to rage.
Hutu extremists who retreated to the
park after their massacre of Rwandan
Thtsis back in 1994 have settled along its
edges; three years ago some 8,000 Rwandans
crossed the border into Virunga
looking for pastoral land, and mowed
down more than 3,000 acres ofprime gorilla
habitat in less than three weeks. Earlier
this year Thtsi forces loyal to a renegade
Congolese general also moved into
the park, which houses not only one of
the world's most remarkable collections
of biodiversity but gold, coltan, zinc and
valuable timber. According to local human-rights
workers and renowned palen.n:t:,-,,]n~c.*:
n;~:ho.:t"A T-A.a.'kA:U ft"Iont:r nt:ho....

a corrupt mafia of charcoal merchants
has recently begun harvesting Virunga's
forests to fuel a $30 million-a-year industry.
"These are their oil wells," Leakey
says ofVirunga's trees. Ifunchecked, the
loggers' activities could decimate the gorilla
habitat in a few years.
The mountain gorillas, partofa worldwide
population that numbers around
700, have become more-direct targets as
well. Seven have been killed, some would
say murdered, since January. They have
not been killed for their meat or their pelts
or their internal organs. In fact, no one is
quite sure why they've been killed. InJanuary
two of them died amid fighting between
the renegade general, Laurent
Nkunda, and government forces. But others,
like the family found last week, have
been shot at close range and in some cases
mutilated.
One of the rangers, Paulin Ngobobo,
43, has been intimately involved in trying
to stop the charcoal trade from spreading
across Vrrunga. A devout Christian, with a
wry sense of humor, Ngobobo is fiercely
protective of the gorillas in his sector of
the park. Six months ago he was lecturing
villagers about the threat the charcoal industry
posed to Vuunga when men in military
uniforms showed up, stripped him of
his shirt and flogged him in front of the
audience. Last month he posted a blog
item in which he accused the charcoal
merchants of being complicit in the destruction
ofthe gorillas' habitat. Two days
later unknown gunmen killed a female gorilla
under his care.
Ngobobo says he has received death
threats and warnings to stop criticizing
the charcoal industry. Then came last
week's killings, which many in his unit
have interpreted as political assassinations-a
message from the powerful interests
that operate in the area. "There are
people who are feeding off this conflict:'
Ngobobo warns darkly. Last week authorities
arrested Ngobobo and accused
him of negligence because the recent
killings all happened on his watch; his
supporters claim that that was part ofthe
assassins' plan all along. Ngobobo denies
any wrongdoing.
Rangers like Ngobobo are certainly not
the ones profiting in Vrrunga. Some 600 of
them patrol the vast park, the oldest in
28 NEWSWEEK AUGUST 6. 2007

Africa. Yet most have not received their
government salaries in years. Instead
many are now paid by a European Unionfunded
conservation group called Wildlife
Direct, cofounded in January by Leakey.
The group solicits funds from donors with
the guarantee that 100 percent ofthe money
goes straight to the rangers.
Those officers are devoted to their imposing
charges. They have their favorites,
whom they follow closely and write about
on a blog that Wildlife Direct has set up.
Leakey's partner, Emmanuel de Merode,
says thatas recently as 2001 "therewasn't a
single vehicle in the whole sector; none of
the rangers had uniforms or rifles!' Since
1994, about 120 rangers have been killed
in the line of duty. Even now they are
hopelessly outgunned: Nkunda alone has
almost 8,000 highly trained men under his
command. Last week the United Nations,
which has several thousand peacekeepers
stationed in the area, declared Nkunda's
forces "the single most serious threat" to
Congolese stability. "It's almost impossible
to be sanguine about the gorillas' future,"
says Leakey. "They are hugely vulnerable
in part because they're living in areas that
are hugely unsettled ... The security ofthis
species is not guaranteed."
The morning after last week's massacre,
whenthe rains hadstopped, rangers
returned to the forests to search for survivors.
That's when they discovered the
hulking mass ofSenkekwe, a 600-pound
silverback shot execution style in a copse
oflush vegetation. One massive arm was
outstretched, the other held close to his
heart, perhaps a sign that he died while
thumpinghis chest. With Senkekwegone,
the unity of the family was immediately
cast in doubt.
As the sun cleared the valley walls and
rose into the sky, nearly a hundredvillagers
from nearby settlements gathered on the
slopes below the forest. They carried the
powerful bodies out and laid them reverently
on the ground. They carefully
wrapped the great apes' faces with leaves to
keep flies away. Using trees and stalks of
cut bamboo, they lashed the dead gorillas
to makeshift stretchers. And then, with a
mighty surge and a great clattering of
voices, they hoisted the gorillas onto their
shoulders and marched down the hills, toward
the setting sun.
•
AUGUST 6, 2007 NEWSWEEK 29