Thursday, June 26, 2008

Gorillas and Guerillas


Mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) live in two separate populations in Northeastern Africa, one in a group of national parks including Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This park is nearly as big as Yellowstone at two million acres, and this oldest national park in Africa (founded in 1925) is home to everything to okapis to birds that spend their summers in Siberia, as well as the gorillas and two other types of great ape. The other population lives in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, which some people say could be a separate species entirely. If this is the case, the highly endangered Virunga gorillas are in even more danger.
Although they are protected under international and national law and also under the orders of Laurent Nkunda, the military leader who controls many of the people in the park, the gorillas are still threatened. Much of the Hutu and Tutsi dissidents who fought in Rwanda in the last decade have now shifted their fighting to take place in the park and around it, displacing thousands if not millions of people and forcing them to treat the environment in ways that are not historically fitting to their culture. Since they are so poor, they seek employment in any way they can; because 98% of the people in the area rely on coal for heat, cooking, and water purification, this is the main industry.

However, when the people have employment, minimal as it is this has an even worse impact on the inhabitants of the park, including the gorillas, than the conflict alone would have. Because the most efficient coal comes from old growth forest found only in the park, and as a result there is significant logging in the oldest part of the park, and the fast-growing trees planted and maintained by the U.N. are not used nearly as much. The corrupt park workers who allow the loggers to come in are the ones making the huge profit, while the laborers, often youth or women who have no other work, are paid about the equivalent of a dollar for each 150-lb. bag of charcoal that they carry out of the park.

While the few brave park rangers who remain try to raid as many of the trucks transporting the charcoal or stop the laborers, but the trucks are often heavily guarded by the guerillas and rangers can’t fine people who are living day to day with no money to spare. As a result, most of the time the charcoal smugglers go by with a warning—or a few shots fired at the rangers. The habitat destruction and pollution that inevitably come with the intrusion of people into animals’ land is only part of the problem, though. Last year almost an entire family of gorillas was murdered—shot with a machine gun and left to rot—while the infants were left clinging to their mothers’ bodies. Why? At first there were no leads but the man who was the manager of the park is now the prime suspect after records were found by the man in charge of the gorillas in Virunga showing that the manager had been making thousands of dollars a year from the charcoal trade—profiting from the destruction of the park. The mad who uncovered the ruse was framed for the gorilla murders, but he has since gotten off.

Hopefully, more gorillas will not be murdered. But ending the destruction of habitat will not be so easy. All told, the only way to really get the charcoal trade to stop is to get the internally-displaced peoples back to their homes, and the only way to do that is to end the conflict. The only way to do that? That will be harder to figure out even then figuring out who killed the gorillas.

Kelsey

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