The thin frontline of conservation in eastern DR Congo
By Doug Cress, Coordinator of the Great Apes Survival Partnership
Virunga National Park warden Emmanuel de Merode seems almost apologetic when describing the ambush last April that left him hit by two bullets, including one that tore through his liver and broke four ribs. He returned the gunfire from the side of the road, then flagged down a motorcycle and later a vehicle as he straggled towards treatment. “After a few hours, you really start to stiffen up,” he said.
De Merode was standing outside the park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo he has protected since 2008 as he told this story, kicking at the dirt with his boot and laughing at the ordeal’s more extreme details. He even resisted being airlifted out to Nairobi, he said — fearful that it might signal defeat to poachers and darker forces — but his wife eventually overruled him.
Today, de Merode shows little outward effect from the attack that made headlines around the world. “I used to be chubbier,” he said, laughing.
The Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP) recently joined with United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director Achim Steiner and Canadian High Commissioner to Kenya David Angell to visit the Virunga National Park, and get a first-hand look at the community engagement and resource mobilization projects that are beginning to tap the park’s ecosystem services. A recent World Wildlife Fund report estimated that the Virunga National Park could be worth more than $1.1 billion USD in tourism and economic growth, but de Merode admits those sorts of returns will only come with certain peace and stability.
Just across the border in Rwanda, that elusive calm is paying big dividends. Gorilla-related tourism earned $304 million USD in 2014, while Uganda’s 400-plus Mountain gorillas are estimated to be worth $1 million USD each in terms of annual tourism revenues.
It was less than a year ago that de Merode found himself bleeding heavily from an armed attack along the road to Goma, and fishing in his pockets to find money to buy petrol for the vehicles that were carrying him to safety. At the hospital, he had to translate for the doctors that were about to operate on him, and a friend was dispatched to a nearby pharmacy to purchase the medicine and supplies necessary for surgery. He relates each detail with grace, humility and humor.
But there’s nothing funny about the stakes in play as de Merode and his elite team of paramilitary park guards from the Congolese wildlife authority (ICCN) battle to keep Africa’s oldest national park intact. While poachers, charcoal raiders and armed bandits pose an ever-present threat, it’s the ominous presence of multinational corporations seeking to tap the oil and gas deposits under the park that could redraw park boundaries and have a disastrous impact on one of the most biologically diverse places on earth.
The Virunga National Park was established in 1925 as a 3,000-square mile haven that stretches from the Rwenzori Mountains in the north to the Virunga Mountains in the south, bordering both Rwanda and Uganda in the process. It is home to over 3,000 animal and plant species — including half of the world’s 880 remaining critically endangered Mountain gorilla population — and was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 and a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance in 1996.
But years of civil war and political instability have taken a deep toll on the nearly 4 million people living within a day’s walk of the Virunga National Park, a population de Merode characterizes as “traumatized.” And with new national elections looming, there are fears that the fragile stability and hope for economic recovery in the region could be swept away.
A week or so before we arrived, a park ranger, Sebinyenzi Bavukirahe Yacinthe, was shot and killed while rescuing two kidnapping victims who had been hustled into the park. A few days later, a fierce firefight broke out with armed groups — an ICCN airplane was damaged as a result — and we had barely crossed the border back into Rwanda before news accounts of a rebel action in the northern region near the park that resulted in six dead and 14 more kidnappings began to roll across the newswires.
Yet against such a violent and uncertain backdrop, de Merode and the Virunga Alliance he has established to spur economic investment and community empowerment in the region are offering the first signs of real hope. The Virunga Alliance focuses its efforts in key areas such as agro-industry, tourism, sustainable energy and sustainable fisheries, relying on the belief that successful development in those areas will lessen pressure to exploit the park, even as it rebuilds the social infrastructure of the Congolese.
There are coffee plantations and tea plantations and an oil palm operation that aims to crank out certified sustainable soap products for the region. A business school in collaboration with Stanford University is under construction, and there are plans for a hotel school too.
An ambitious hydropower programme built by ICCN and the Virunga Alliance will use three run-of-river turbines to provide electricity to the local economy, eventually supplying 100 megawatts to a 20-kilometer buffer zone of communities around the park. De Merode and his team once thought they’d have to battle the charcoal cartels head-on to save the park, but now they realize that offering electricity might offer the same result — without bloodshed.
Yet there are unintended consequences. The interaction of making, selling and using charcoal among communities near the park formed a vital piece of their daily routine, and served as an important part of the region’s social fabric. With electricity, however, power may be a light switch away, but the human touch was lost. So the Virunga Alliance is now employing communications specialists to work with the communities and ensure the price of progress is not too high.
The very real threat that oil development posed to the Virunga National Park a year ago was detailed in the award-winning Netflix documentary, “Virunga,” which premiered in the days before de Merode’s attack and went on to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary. Many believe de Merode’s attackers were sent by the oil company to remove a key opponent, and he allows this is possible, but admits there is no proof.
Instead, he focuses on the signs of hope as our vehicles rattle towards the base of the Virunga National Park one sunny morning, a rare opportunity for him to see the Mountain gorillas he used to track almost daily. Now, the demands of progress win out, but he happily notes the water pipelines and electric poles and encouraging sense of normalcy among the communities along the way. “These people have been fearful for too long,” he said. “It’s time they got their lives back.”
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Doug Cress is the Coordinator of the Great Apes Survival Partnership, a unique alliance of 104 national governments, research institutions, conservation organizations, U.N. agencies and private companies committed to the long-term survival of great apes and their habitat in Africa and Asia.
