Groups Struggle to Aid Gorillas Victimized by Rwanda’s Civil War

Umogome sits atop a volcano on the Rwanda-Zaire border, watching his family eat and play near a fallen tree and a bamboo grove.

Two of his offspring sit quietly on the forest floor, though. Both have lost limbs, victims of Rwanda’s civil war and its upheaval.

Umogome, whose name means “serious” in Kinyarwanda, is a 38-year-old silverback gorilla, one of the world’s oldest. Sitting around him in the moist tropical mountain forest are two adult females and seven young gorillas, all oblivious to the man-made dangers of their habitat.

The gorillas are also victims of Rwanda’s civil war and genocidal slaughter that ravaged this tiny central African country in 1994. After the fighting was done, more than 500,000 people were dead and the country looted.

Two years later, international environmental organizations struggle to care for the gorillas, paying guides and soldiers to protect them because the new government is busy recovering from the war.

“We have a problem getting the message through to people. If these mountain gorillas are wiped out, that’s it,” said Katie Frohardt, director of the International Gorilla Conservation Program in Rwanda.

Only 620 mountain gorillas remain in the world, and half of them live on the rugged volcanoes that mark the borders between Rwanda, Zaire and Uganda. Two have died violently in Rwanda since 1990, four in Zaire.

“The government does not have the money for these projects, so we must depend on environmental organizations and encourage foreign investment,” said environment minister Jean Nayinzira. “Right now, we do not have the necessary infrastructure to host the tourists we once did, which reduces available funds.”

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Tourism was once an important source of income for Rwanda. Thousands of people flocked to the mountain forests, wildlife reserves and green volcanoes that give Rwanda its spectacular beauty.

Now only about 150 people a month make the two-hour hike to visit the gorillas, and most of them are United Nations staff members or aid workers, tourism officials said. Volcanoes National Park, where the gorillas live, is the only tourist attraction earning money for Rwanda’s parks.

In May, the Rwandan Park Service was awarded the prestigious J. Paul Getty Wildlife Preservation Prize for outstanding efforts to protect the gorillas.

During Rwanda’s civil war, soldiers ransacked the park’s offices, destroying records and books, and throwing computers out of windows. Despite the chaos and danger, the rangers stayed at their posts until mid-1994, when park staffers and their families fled to refugee camps in Zaire.

The $50,000 Getty award will be split between park workers and the park service to replace equipment and materials lost in the war.

The award will bring attention to the plight of the gorillas, but more than $4 million is needed to restore Rwanda’s parks to prewar conditions.

Tourist dollars, Nayinzira said, are badly needed.

But with more than 1.8 million Rwandans living as refugees in surrounding countries and frequent rebel attacks by former government forces, Rwanda is not on most people’s vacation lists, Nayinzira said.

Tourism, chiefly gorilla watching, a few years ago ranked third as a foreign exchange earner after tea and coffee.

The tourist boom followed the 1988 Hollywood film “Gorillas in the Mist,” which depicted the struggles of American Dian Fossey to save the animals from poachers. Fossey was mysteriously murdered in 1985 after spending 13 years studying the gorillas.

Dr. Dieter Steklis, chief scientific director for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, said that protecting the gorilla habitat is a big challenge and the destruction caused by intermittent war since October 1990 makes the work difficult.

“The Karisoke Research Center, established by Dian Fossey, has been dismantled to the point we cannot live there anymore,” Steklis said. “Armed incursions from Zaire are highly frequent in the forest and make work there dangerous.”

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Steklis said the Rwandan army is helping to protect the gorillas and the research staff, but they have not been able to stop the armed raids, which make a permanent presence in the forest impossible.

Desperate conditions during and after the war also forced villagers to resume poaching antelope for food, Steklis said. The gorillas, though not the target of the snares, sometimes get caught in them.

Umogome’s 2-year-old daughter lost her left hand in such a trap in December. Another daughter lost her foot in a snare last year. They were lucky, since often the wounds become infected, and the gorillas die.

The war also resulted in massive population shifts in Rwanda, with thousands of square miles of wildlife refuge being appropriated for human use, Nayinzira said.

Efforts to educate Rwandans on the value of wildlife and the importance of preservation are slowly restarting.

“We are trying to resurrect large-scale conservation-education programs where we train teachers in the biology of conservation,” Steklis said. “We need to teach the biological and economic value of conservation if the gorillas are to survive.”