Congo Turmoil Devastates Lowland Gorillas

Beneath a pair of extinct volcanic peaks in eastern Congo, on the edge of a verdant tropical rain forest, an enormous silverback gorilla named Chimenuka lounges on his back, two feet propped against a tree.

The burly animal shows little interest in a small team of machete-wielding Pygmy trackers, park rangers and armed guards who’ve come to check on him -- until they take one step too close.

In a second, the 400-pound gorilla springs upright, beating his chest, grunting and charging forward, forcing his visitors to cower before slipping away on all fours into thick underbrush.

Encounters like these once lured tourists to the misty highlands of Kahuzi-Biega National Park, where gorilla tourism was born in the 1970s. But a decade of turmoil, a 1998-2002 civil war and fresh fighting this summer have decimated the region’s eastern lowland gorillas and driven tourists away.

Today, not even the experts really know how many gorillas are left. “It’s tragic. Nobody has been able to conduct a full survey in a decade,” said Innocent Liengola of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “Most areas are too insecure to visit.”

In late October, the New York-based organization resumed a head-counting operation in Kahuzi-Biega that was called off in April when Liengola and his colleagues were forced to flee amid volleys of automatic weapons fire -- a firefight, authorities said, between rebels from neighboring Rwanda and a local pro-government militia called the Mayi Mayi.

Eastern lowland gorillas, the tallest apes on Earth, live only in Congo and inhabit a broad band of forests from Lake Albert near the Ugandan border to the northern tip of Lake Tanganyika on the frontier with Burundi.

Conservationists say a deadly combination of poachers, refugees, miners and combat have devastated the gorillas’ habitat and population, but they can only speculate by how much.

The Atlanta-based Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International believes that the apes’ numbers have plummeted 70% in the last decade -- to 5,000 from around 17,000 in 1994.

Patrick Melman, a Dian Fossey researcher in the eastern Congolese city of Goma, acknowledges that the figures are only an estimate, but says they are based on data available, including that from Kahuzi-Biega, where park rangers and researchers visit dozens of gorillas daily.

Founded in 1970 and declared a U.N. World Heritage Site a decade later, Kahuzi-Biega was supposed to be a protected sanctuary. In practice, the park “hasn’t had more of a chance than anywhere else” in eastern Congo, Melman said.

Speaking at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s offices in Bukavu, Liengola waves a finger across a digital map of Kahuzi-Biega on his laptop computer, indicating dangerous areas that he and park rangers avoid. The screen is splattered with red -- no-go zones where militiamen or guerrilla fighters are active.

Bukavu, the starting point for tours of Kahuzi-Biega, was itself ravaged by fighting between rebels and government loyalists this summer.

Despite Kahuzi-Biega’s status as a park, Pygmies regularly trooped in illegally to hunt for bush meat to feed their families.

But things took a dramatic turn for the worse after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when millions of refugees, soldiers and militiamen fled across the border and cut down huge swathes of forest to survive.

The crisis deepened with Congo’s own wars -- first in 1996-97 and again in 1998-2002. The fighting led to a severe breakdown of authority and opened the gorillas’ habitat to the Mayi Mayi, as well as miners in search of gold and other precious minerals. Miners and militiamen cut down trees to put up makeshift houses for their families. They also hunted game, including great apes, for food.

The effect has been devastating.

In 1996, the Kahuzi-Biega’s highlands boasted 258 lowland gorillas. Today, about 130 are thought to survive, park director Iyomi Iyatshi says.

Although closed from 1998 to 2000, the park’s highlands have remained open throughout most of the region’s troubles -- for whoever is willing to pay the $250 fee.

At full capacity, eight tourists a day could visit each of the three separate gorilla families habituated to human visits. But the dusty visitor books at Tshivanga, the park’s headquarters, show an average of five visitors a month -- mostly U.N. peacekeepers, aid workers and missionaries from Bukavu.

“We can’t really talk of tourism now,” Iyatshi said. “People aren’t coming. They’re afraid of the war.”

In the short run at least, that might be better for the park’s inhabitants -- particularly the 50 or so habituated gorillas.

“It has always been the habituated gorillas that were most at risk of being killed,” said Liengola, the Wildlife Conservation Society official. He says apes cannot easily differentiate between armed park guards and armed fighters or poachers, who can sell baby gorillas for as much as $30,000 on the black market.

“The strategy now is to habituate less to tourists, so they learn to avoid contact with human beings,” Liengola said.

The Wildlife Conservation Society hopes to expand its census next year into the rest of eastern Congo -- if the security situation permits.

The first stop will be Kahuzi-Biega’s forested lowlands, a vast, lawless area that makes up 90% of the park. For years, park rangers were afraid to enter the area because of militia activity, but in February, 30 rangers were posted at two stations on the lowlands’ outskirts for the first time.

Up in the highlands, ranger Robert Mulimbi, 40, pulls back branches to get a better look at Chimenuka’s group, which he checks on every day.

Relaxing on a bed of leaves, a mother cradled a 4-month-old baby -- a black ball of fur with large dark eyes -- Chimenuka’s only son. Two other babies were born in July.

“We’re not tracking gorillas outside the park,” Mulimbi said. “We have no idea about the rest.”