by Hope Jahren
There is no nationally protected area in the world quite like Virunga, in ways both blessed and cursed. Its approximately 2 million acres include a web of glacier-fed rivers, one of Africa’s Great Lakes, sun-bleached savannas, impenetrable lowland rainforests, one of the highest peaks on the continent, and two of its most active volcanoes. Virunga hosts more than 700 bird species (among them the handsome francolin and Grauer’s swamp warbler) as well as more than 200 mammals (including the odd-looking okapi, with zebra-striped hind legs, and 480 of the world’s 880 remaining mountain gorillas). Standing where the Semliki River flows out of Lake Edward with the Rwenzori Mountains glowering in the distance, serenaded by a moaning Greek chorus of water-besotted hippos, and gazing down at a thoroughly uncontaminated tableau of swimming elephants and strutting saddle-billed storks backlit by a low morning sun, one becomes very small, very silent, and very aware that nature’s brave feint of indomitability has all but come to an end.
For Virunga has been, going on two decades, a war zone. In 1994 the horrific ethnic conflict in neighboring Rwanda that led to the genocide of Tutsis by Hutus spilled across the border into Congo. Hutu fighters and more than a million refugees fled Rwanda after their defeat, settling in nightmarishly overcrowded camps around the park. Some Hutus later formed the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda—known by its French acronym, FDLR—the militia that killed Kambale’s older brother. Congolese Tutsis eventually responded with the National Congress for the People’s Defense, or CNDP, which then spawned the March 23 movement, or M23. One bloody iteration after the next—fomented by these armed groups—has plowed into the park like a threshing machine.
Many of the fighters, along with Congolese Army soldiers purporting to defend the territory, lingered well after the cease-fires, expunging the park’s wildlife for personal consumption or for sale as bush meat. Thousands remain in the jungle to this day, and thousands more from a shifting array of locally formed militias called Mai-Mai have joined them. Attempts by rangers to drive them out have led to deadly reprisals. This past March two rangers were executed in Virunga’s central sector, driving up the death toll of park rangers to 152 since 1996.
A different kind of war also looms over Virunga. This one pits the park and its ecological well-being against the search for oil. London-based Soco International obtained a concession in 2010 that allowed it to explore about half of Virunga, including the area near Lake Edward. After a sustained outcry led by conservation groups, four years later Soco backed down and now says it no longer holds the concession. The Ugandan government, however, has shown an interest in exploring for oil on its side of the lake, a grim reminder that the park and its precious resources are anything but sacrosanct.
The park is also a volatile staging ground for Congo’s internal grievances. As it happens, Virunga’s terrain is among the most fecund in Africa. That it has been set aside for conservation since the park’s founding in 1925, thereby depriving one of the world’s most deeply impoverished populations of badly needed natural resources, stokes seething discontent among the area’s 4 million inhabitants. Many, in defiance or ignorance of the law, cut down the park’s trees for charcoal, plant crops in its forests, kill its wildlife. Some form Mai-Mai militias and take over sections of the bush, emerging in periodic sprees of violence. Others run for elective office essentially as park abolitionists, vowing to reverse the misdeeds of the Belgian colonizers who they say tricked the locals into selling their treasured farmland, or so goes their campaign narrative.
This pervasive climate of resentment is not a small misfortune. Rather, it represents an existential challenge for Virunga. “The truth is that we’re not going to succeed unless we mobilize a critical mass of funding,” the park’s director, Emmanuel de Merode, said, noting that the land, if it were developed, would bring the communities about $1 billion a year. “Unless we equal that, this park won’t survive.”
Owing to the region’s chronic instability, a mere one-tenth of Virunga is accessible to visitors—and really only half of that could be described as tourist-friendly. The park’s VIPs—the 250 to 300 mountain gorillas that are habituated to humans—are kept under daily watch by a security team of 80 humans, as would befit a president or a pope. Virunga is national property, but the government in Kinshasa contributes only 5 percent of the park’s $8 million annual operating budget. Most comes from the European Union, the U.S. government, and international nonprofits. Though a first-class hotel, the Mikeno Lodge, opened in 2012 near the gorilla sector, and the sumptuous tent camp on Tchegera Island in Lake Kivu began receiving guests in 2015, the number of visitors has not come close to matching that of the park’s prewar heyday. Indeed, the lodge was empty throughout much of 2012 and 2013 as Virunga hosted the latest season of bloodshed, the M23 rebellion.
In the years since, the park has experienced a renaissance thanks to projects such as the Bukima road-building effort, which aim to show Virunga’s neighbors that respect for the park will be rewarded. In particular, de Merode, with substantial support from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, has embarked on an ambitious $166 million hydroelectric scheme utilizing the park’s rivers, with the aim of electrifying one-fourth of the area’s households by 2020 and creating 60,000 to 100,000 jobs along the way. The outcome, de Merode hopes, will be peace—and with that, more tourism, and thus more income for the region’s people, spurring an altogether different cycle from the one that is still bedeviling eastern Congo.
Meanwhile, slowly, the wildlife has begun to rebound. Since the massacre of seven mountain gorillas by charcoal traffickers in 2007, their population has been rising. In the central-sector preserve known as Lulimbi, hippos have mounted a surprising recovery, while elephants are wading back across the Ishasha River from the safe haven of Uganda. Aggressive antipoaching operations by rangers have sent an unambiguous message to ivory and bush-meat traffickers: Virunga is no longer an anything-goes playground.
“It was a beautiful place,” Kambale said one afternoon as he stepped carefully through the weed-choked ruins of the Rwindi Hotel in the central sector. “The hotel was always over capacity. Everyone came to see the wildlife and take pictures. There were so many animals. Even the parking lot was full of antelopes and wild pigs and all types of monkeys.”
Today only baboons clamber through the brush. The cylindrical bungalows, the restaurant, the ballroom, the pool where mzungu ladies sunned themselves on hot days like this—all vacant and caked with two decades’ worth of neglect. The ranger wore a doleful smile, and his eyes were lost in the past. He was born and raised near the Rwindi patrol station. During the year of Kambale’s birth, 1960, Congo won its independence from Belgium. Its population, 15 million, was a fifth of what it is now. There was plenty of land to go around, for farmer and animal alike. As a young ranger in the 1980s, Kambale sometimes had to climb a tree to avoid being trampled by a buffalo. When the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko came to visit—to entertain guests, to plot a course for the country he had renamed Zaire, but most of all to fish on the Rwindi River—it was Kambale’s job to hook a live worm onto Mobutu’s line. “Mobutu had great respect for the park,” said Matthieu Cingoro, a lawyer for the Congolese national park system. “No one could farm in it or cut down trees. No one would even dare trespass.”
Then came the refugees from Rwanda. The Rwindi Hotel abruptly locked its doors. The patrol station now saw a desperate new breed of visitor. “There were many of them, and some had guns and ammunition,” Kambale remembered. “Like that, the population increased, and these people had no food and had to look for charcoal, wood for fire, even meat in the park.” One armed group begat another. The distinctions blurred. Congolese soldiers deserted their posts and disappeared into the bush. Some joined Mai-Mai militias, which at times confederated with the Hutu-based FDLR against all comers, including the rangers who sought to deny them a livelihood inside the park.
As the Mobutu regime collapsed in 1997, so did any semblance of governmental structure. Virunga’
s rangers saw their salaries slashed. They had to fend for themselves. Many did so by taking money from poachers, who would brazenly call a compromised ranger and direct him to come pick up a slaughtered buffalo. Other rangers distributed tickets to locals, allowing them to harvest wood for charcoal with the understanding that a generous slice of the profits would be handed over to Virunga’s uniformed men—and make its way up the food chain.
Even in this moment of relative calm, ghosts have claimed far more of the central sector than its decaying hotel. The former ground zero for park tourists, Rwindi station, is still a no-go zone. The walls of the sector commander’s office are pocked with bullet holes. A UN military base lies nearby. Signs posted throughout Rwindi urge the locals to report any signs of a ranger’s suspicious activity.
Late one morning Kambale and two other armed rangers drove me to Vitshumbi, a village on the south bank of Lake Edward, inside the park’s boundaries. Conceptually Vitshumbi is a fishery with 400 boats licensed to fish on the lake, supporting about 5,000 people. In reality Vitshumbi is a squalid town with thousands of boats and perhaps 40,000 residents with no electricity or running water.
What it does have are Mai-Mai militias, which have offered protection to Vitshumbi’s fishermen and farmers in exchange for a surcharge. Behind the militias, Kambale and other rangers say, are politicians who supply the outlaws with boats and weapons. “It used to be that the Mai-Mais just fought with spears and machetes,” a young ranger stationed in Vitshumbi told me. “Now the politicians have given them guns.” The ranger pointed to a bullet scar on his left biceps, a souvenir from a recent encounter with Mai-Mais on Lake Edward. One ranger and seven Congolese soldiers had been killed.
Elsewhere during my three weeks in the park, unrest flickered ominously like a rogue torch in the night. From Vitshumbi a ranger boat was waiting to take me north to the hippo enclave of Lulimbi. Minutes before embarking I learned that my trip was canceled by the park’s director of security, who called to say the lake was not considered safe from attack. Three days before that, in the southern sector where the mountain gorillas reside, an angry phalanx of at least 300 villagers had blocked the road outside the Mikeno Lodge for hours, saying that the park had failed to compensate them for cutting down some of their trees that would have interfered with newly installed electrical lines. Adding to the villagers’ disquiet was the fact that a thousand or more Rwandan Army soldiers had quietly crossed the border to hunt down FDLR fighters. A week later, upon arriving in the northern sector, I watched as a squadron of rangers and Congolese soldiers made out for Mayangose, northeast of the city of Beni, where they forced out an encampment of 800 squatters who had been egged on by politicians to seize parkland.
A few hours after Kambale had escorted me from Rwindi to Vitshumbi in a park jeep, the central sector’s accountant left Rwindi for the day and drove home on his motorbike along the very same road—only to be waylaid by three men who jumped into his path and pointed Kalashnikovs at his chest. They tied his hands and dragged him off into the bush. Later that evening the accountant’s family received a call demanding a $5,000 ransom.
Word reached park headquarters. More than a hundred rangers and Congolese soldiers were dispatched to the central sector, along with aerial reconnaissance and tracking bloodhounds and spaniels. The dogs located the accountant’s scent. The pursuers set up a perimeter and began firing shots into the air. The kidnappers fled. Ambling through the bush, the accountant came upon the welcome sight of his fellow park employees. It was, for him, a harrowing ordeal—but also a show of swift action by de Merode, the man Kambale refers to as “our only hope.”
As heroic figures go, the 46-year-old Emmanuel de Merode seems somewhat miscast. Milky-faced, thin, and mild in manner, the Virunga director and chief warden does not exactly fill a room; he does not even fill his uniform. When I first met him, at a National Geographic Society event in Washington, D.C., I was sure he must be someone else, waiting alongside me for the actual de Merode to materialize. By ancestry he’s a Belgian prince, a title bestowed on his family because a forefather helped the country gain independence from the Netherlands. From this limited appraisal, one could imagine de Merode best suited to a life beside a fireplace with a glass of burgundy, sweater-clad, rather than in one of the world’s most notorious conflict zones. But de Merode was born in Africa, spent his youth in Kenya, trained as an anthropologist, and has worked his adult years in conservation, much of it in Congo.
Beneath de Merode’s baggy ranger shirt are two sets of entry and exit wounds; one bullet went through his left lung and the other his stomach. He acquired these injuries in April 2014, while driving from Goma back to the park on a deserted and poorly paved stretch of marshy road about three miles south of Rugari. The would-be assassins were never found. (The investigation, his associates note with fatalistic eye rolls, is ongoing.) News of the shooting descended upon eastern Congo “like a thunderclap,” recalled Kambale. Today de Merode’s friends notice the occasional cough—the only utterance of lingering discomfort.
De Merode became Virunga’s director in 2008, at the park’s precise nadir. The previous director had been arrested earlier that year and accused of participating in a charcoal-trafficking ring and planning the gorilla massacre. (He was not convicted, for lack of evidence.) About six months earlier, the park’s new occupier had become the CNDP, a militia backed by Rwanda to take on the FDLR. De Merode’s first order of business was an audacious act—to show up unarmed at CNDP headquarters to ask that his rangers be permitted to return to the park. The militia’s leader, Laurent Nkunda, granted the request. De Merode then set to work cleaning up the ranger force. He slashed its ranks from 1,000 to 230 (later bringing the number back up to 480, including 14 women) and hiked monthly salaries from a pitiable $5 to a decent living wage of $200—“enough,” he said, “to justify a zero tolerance of corruption.”
De Merode then began trying to improve relations with the local population. He listened to the people’s complaints. For dec-ades the park had promised that half of each tourist dollar would go back to the community. Where was that money being spent? The roads, the schools, the hospitals were steadily deteriorating. Meanwhile elephants were destroying crops.
“Before de Merode started showing up, we didn’t even know the park had a director,” a fisherman in Vitshumbi told me. “Now you see the rangers have clean uniforms, good weapons. You see what a difference he’s making.” The director even sat down with Congolese militia groups—though with mixed results. “If we can have a constructive dialogue with militias that keeps people safe and keeps rangers from being killed, we’re willing to do that,” de Merode said. “But often it’s been disappointing, because it hasn’t been an honest dialogue.”
Regardless, his presence has registered with his adversaries. In 2012 a ranger major named Shadrack Bihamba was cornered by Mai-Mais on the shore of Lake Edward and led at gunpoint into the bush. Bihamba said the militia’s leader was worried, telling the others, “He’s an officer. If we kill him, de Merode will move heaven and earth to annihilate us.” He instructed his men to release Bihamba. “Even though they’re Mai-Mais and have their strength in the bush,” Bihamba said, “they still fear de Merode, because they know he has the entire population behind him.”
Still, de Merode knew something that some of his enemies did not—which was that his growing prominence alone could not sustain the park. It needed money to enforce the law and make permanent allies out of the park’s neighbors. The only way to achieve the latter, de Merode concluded, would be “to use the park as a basis for creating mass employment, but in a way that wouldn’t damage the park.” That goal led him to the park’s northern sector—and specifically to the Butahu River, which cascades from the glacial peaks of the Rwenzori Mountains into the outskirts of Mutwanga village, a typically meager community that lacked electricity. In 2010 the park began hiring villagers to dig canals and lay the foundation for what would become Virunga’s first hydroelectric pl
ant. For $110 the park would connect a Mutwanga household, which could then buy electricity on a modest pay-as-you-go basis. In 2013 the power came on, and de Merode held his breath.
I had not seen Mutwanga before it had electricity, and it hardly resembled a boomtown when I spent a day touring the mud-splattered village. Still, the residents spoke of the change as transformative. What it had cost in a single day to power their shops in generator fuel now bought an entire month’s worth of electricity. Students could do their homework in the evening. The hospital functioned at all hours. People were buying irons, televisions, and CD players. The owner of a computer-repair store was renting out DVDs and preparing to open the town’s first Internet café, so that villagers would no longer have to drive an hour to Beni to send an email. A couple from Beni actually moved to Mutwanga in 2014 to realize their dream of owning a small printing shop. All of this despite the fact that only 500 of the community’s 2,500 households have been hooked to the hydroelectric plant’s modest 400-kilowatt output. And while de Merode’s team makes plans to accommodate the long waiting list, in April a factory powered by the park began making soap. It employs about a hundred workers from the area. “Mutwanga became our laboratory test,” de Merode said.
A second, larger hydroelectric plant came on line in December, and by the end of 2018 two others should be running. Those four plants would bring de Merode halfway toward his goal of producing a hundred megawatts of power. Selling that electricity, he predicts, would “enable us to ensure that the park will be financially sustainable for the next one hundred years.” Enough additional revenue would be generated to invest millions a year in community projects and conservation efforts in other Congo parks.
