Mountain Gorillas Scrambling Amongst Congo Fighting

Mountain Gorillas Scrambling Amongst Congo Fighting



October 2007

 The fragile 
month-long truce between rebels and DR Congo government forces has broken 
down again, leaving some of the world's last mountain gorillas scrambling 
to get out of the cross-fire. 
On Friday and Saturday, rebel forces faithful to General Laurent Nkunda 
seized an area in Virunga National Park inhabited by the mountain 
gorillas, forcing wildlife rangers to flee for their lives again as they 
did in September. 
The rangers had been monitoring and tracking the gorillas for their 
protection. Now the 18 gorillas that were being tracked are once again 
unprotected and unmonitored. 

About 70 of these gorillas in 18 family groups have been habituated to 
human contact to allow visitors to enjoy a gorilla experience and local 
communities to benefit from tourism revenue. 
"We still have yet to account for 54 of our 72 habituated mountain 
gorillas," writes the international conservation organization 
WildlifeDirect after the most recent outbreak of fighting. 
The conflict is taking place about 20 of kilometers (12 miles) from Goma, 
a city of 160,000 people in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, 
on the northern shore of Lake Kivu. 
According to WildlifeDirect, on Saturday the rangers fled to Rumangabo, 
the headquarters for the southern sector of Virunga National Park where 
the organization's director, Norbert Mushenzi, is based. 
"At this precise moment they cannot hear shelling or gunfire in the 
Gorilla Sector," writes WildlifeDirect in a post on their website, "but 
the army are pushing back the rebels and strengthening their position and 
fighting is expected to start again shortly. The army has managed to 
retake the patrol post of Bukima." 
"Rangers are worried about potential attacks by rebels on the road north 
of Rumangabo, as this is what they have heard may happen. There are many 
military personnel at the army base near Rumangabo and they are getting 
supplies from Goma," says WildlifeDirect. 
On Sunday, Mushenzi and the rangers decided to evacuate all valuable 
equipment such as binoculars, generator, GPS and satellite dish from 
Rumangabo to Goma because they could again hear heavy shelling at Bukima.
       
The fighting broke out again when six government troops were abducted by 
Nkunda's men, according to the United Nations Mission in DR Congo, MONUC. 
But Nkunda denied this abduction in an interview with Radio France 
International on the weekend. 
On September 3, the same rebels took control of the gorilla sector, 
invading two ranger patrol posts, looting them of their weapons, mobile 
phones and rations and forcing the rangers to evacuate the national park. 
Following these attacks, rangers at Bukima were also evacuated, but within 
a few days the rangers returned to the Bukima post and confirmed the 
safety of all habituated gorilla groups in this area. 
Nine mountain gorillas have been killed in the park since the beginning of 
the year, and it is still unclear who is responsible and why they were 
killed. 
About 720 mountain gorillas survive today, all of them in the wild. 
The mountain gorillas live in two distinct populations. One population is 
found in the Virunga Volcano Region, which lies across the international 
borders of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. 
The second population lives in an area of around 330 square kilometers in 
Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. 
WildlifeDirect is a program of the Africa Conservation Fund, a charitable 
organization registered in Kenya, in the United States and the UK aimed at 
helping endangered animals in Eastern Africa. 

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