Kes explained the evolution of the project : "We had been discussing the problems of doing
surveys in combat areas with the Harts, of practical punctual intervention, guard training and
immediate support for world heritage sites in danger, of expediting getting funds to the field,   and
talking about joint projects for years." John had published a paper in April 1996 with Jefferson
Hall called "Conservation in the Declining National State : A View from Eastern Zaire;" with
Terese a year later "Conservation and Civil Strife : Two Perspectives from Central Africa;" and in
November l997 "Conservation in Crisis." Alan Root had put the Smiths in touch with Nick
Lapham, who was looking for projects the UNF could take on,  in l998, and in April of l999, the
ngo partners from all five sites met in Naivasha. Kes and Terry wrote up the concept and
presented it to UNESCO in July, then another meeting in Lenana generated the project document,
and at last November's UNF board meeting the funding was approved. With Kes as the project
coordinator, I'm sure it will have all the success that can be hoped for.

        We spent a lot of time in the air, looking for rhinos, and the Smiths spotted four new ones 
great news except that two were in one of domaines. They must have crossed the Nagera during
the dry season, before it rose, as rhinos can't swim, their inability to raise their heads making them
vulnerable to drowning. The adult males have a fixed home range of 30 to 100 km2 while the
subadult male and the females roam over a larger area. They live naturally from 30-40 years, the
males become dominant at 15-20. The northern subspecies differs from the southern, of which
there are still several thousand, in the following ways : it doesn't lose its hair as an adult, it has
more dorsal concavity, it holds its head higher, and is somewhat smaller and less heavy. It has
been an Appendix One species (total ban on international trade) since IUCN started in the thirties.
Kes said the market for rhino horn, prized in the Arab world as an aphrodisiac, appears to be
shrinking. One researcher reported that a high-priced horn in Cairo wasn't moving at all. But this
doesn't make the rhinos of Garamba any less vulnerable. Most of the poaching these days is for
bushmeat, and the poachers and their customers are omnivorous. Buffalo are the first choice, then
ellies, hippos, and the various horned ruminants. The giraffes (Griffa camelopardis congensis,
closest geographically to the Nubian giraffre which it resembles except for its very white legs) are
somewhat protected by a local belief that their meat will give you leprosy. 

      We flew back and forth over the 2600 km2 rhino sector in the southern center of the park.
Looking for 26 rhinos in the tall grass was like looking for a needle in a haystack. We saw ellies in
the hundreds, buffalo and Lewell's hartebeest by the thousands. Kes had on her lap her hard won
chart of the  individual rhino's profiles  with their distinctive horn shapes and sizes and facial
wrinkles or the distinctive chunks snipped from their ears while they were darted. The population
is in its third generation since she began to study it in l984. Her methods became progressively
more refined. She gave up radio collars, which the rhinos eventually shook or rubbed off,  for
transmitters inserted in their drilled horns, which she no longer does as to justify the risk of
anesthetizing them she would have to be here all the time, and in l996 the Smiths, after eleven
years and bringing up their children in this incomparable natural setting,  moved to Nairobi and
now only come every few months. Kes must be content with monitoring the rhinos from the air.
"You can see twenty in a day, while on foot it takes two days to spot one. There's Millenium, the
first rhino to be born this year, Julu's daughter, and a male  Kengo or Mobolifui  who is not
necessarily Millenium's father."

     I tried to imagine what it was like for someone like Kes,  Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey
 to have started such a field study of an animal in the wild entirely on her own, the courage,
character and perseverance that it took. "We're loners," Kes explained."You have to believe
totally in yourself and what you're doing and to be willing to fight for it.

       Kes explained that her focus over the last decade of necessity has been more on anti-poaching
than research. In l991 the SPLA took the city of Merida. At that point there were only 18 rhinos. 
 7000 refugees poured into the park. A year later there were 80,000 refugees in Dungu and Aba.
"Ever since then the poaching has been getting worse and worse," Kes told me. "The peak bad
was in l997, when the guards had their weapons taken by the AFDL. The poachers seized the
opportunity and there was a big spike of accrochages [shootouts], almost 40 in l997. Then it
subsided, and shot up again  in the second war  A lot of the poachers were SPLA, and some were
from Congo. We flew over 11 active camps in the rhino sector. For 18 months, from August, l998
to April of this year,  we couldn't find out what was happening because we weren't allowed to
have an airplane. We found that the  population had risen to 26. Some had been poached, but we
found 7 new calves, and the number was still 26." 

        Last summer   SPLA was persuaded to mount a mixed operation with the guards against its
own deserters, which took place this January, with great success except that some of the soldiers
stayed on and lived off the villagers, which caused ill will, food stress and more impetus to poach.
We met the SPLA's political counseler, a very black, bearded Sudanese man named Hassan (did
you get his last name Kes ?), who was in charge of the "oppression," which was I think his way of
pronouncing  operation. We were all very curious to find out how the SPLA had been persuaded
to cooperate with the park. "The park is international," he explained. "It is in  Congo, but it
borders Sudan. The Congolese authorities in Aba complained to the commissioner of Yei [a
county of Sudan that border the park] that too many of our deserters were disturbing their people.
The commissioner sent me to confirm that this was true. I confirmed it, and the commissioner
referred the matter to the high command of the 2nd front, including Colonel Garang [John
Garang, the SPLA leader], and we were told to go ahead and signed an agreement with Aba to carry out a
joint oppression. So after I spent 105 days in Aba collecting information, 653 soldiers were
deployed, and we got 73 deserters and 27 rifles" which I believe were given to the guards  All this
took place on the southern and eastern periphery of the park. As a result the evidence of poaching
was way down. Last month there had been no gunshots or contacts. A second, smaller
oppression, which had been talked about since January, with 50 SPLA and 21 guards, an 82-
member force in all, was about to get underway in the same area.  Kes was eager for a similar
oppression to happen on the western and southwestern periphery, where most of the poaching is
now happening. But we flew to Dungu and spoke with the commissaire de zone, Sangbalenze,
and he was very against any SPLA "oppression" in his zone. In October, l998 the SPLA came
down and forcibly repatriated about 20,000 of the refugees and in the process committed terrible
d‚gats on the local Azande people. "The population is gen‚e," Sangbalenze told us. "The
systematic pillage of Dungu by the SPLA was the worst thing Dungu has ever experienced. No
one accepts them as liberators."

       "The PNG guards have better surveillance capacity than the RFO ones,"  Kes told me.
They're better armed (100 functional arms  confiscated from poachers and used in shifts) and
better trained  and there are more of them (180). They get into shootouts once a month.  Being
able to use deadly force after firing three warning shots into the air is Kes believes a real
deterrent.  Frazer had arranged several of the best guards from each of the parks to go to South
Africa in October for training by African  Ranger Field Services in how to train the other guards
in the conservation ethic and in bush tactics that would enable them to operate in very small units.
An ARFS mobile training unit will also visit each park.   "The Congolese military only attacks
when they outnumber the enemy," Frazer explained. Mbayma was sending his guards out in
patrols of 30, which Frazer felt was larger than was needed, as the poachers operated in groups of
8-25-40, but only a few had guns. The rest were porters or butchered and smoked the meat. With
many smaller units Frazer argues that you would get better coverage. He had brought several
models  of small camouflage tent custom-made  for the guards in Nairobi for them to try out 

       I interviewed the chefs de section of the guards, and they had real esprit de corps, real
dedication to la lutte anti-braconnage, as Mbayma called it, although their loyalty must be
constantly reinforced with bonuses. Most of the guards had kept on through the chaos, without
conservateurs, pay, or arms. I suggested that a plaque be prepared, a roll of honor of all the
guards who had been killed or wounded in the course of duty, and placed perhaps on the park's
50th anniversary monument. IRF could send out a fundraising letter to raise money for the
project, pensions for the widows, perhaps even life insurance  for the guards. That afternoon one of the
conservateurs presented me with the honor roll, broken down into four categories, which he had
done on his computer. Since l987 6 guards have been killed and 13 wounded in accrochages and
6 killed and 6 wounded by animals. The list did not include Ali Rutarema, the Tutsi magasinier
who was a 20-year employee of ICCN and was killed during the pogrom by Kabila's soldiers in
August, l998, and I urged that he be added to it. 

    A few guards decided to take advantage of the rare opportunity to help themselves the absence
of conservators provided  and made off with the radio and solar panels at the relay station, and a
few turned to poaching. I interviewed one of these, whose name was Mortimer. When he was
caught in June,  Mbayma had to restrain the guards from beating him to death. Why did you do it
? I asked, after assuring him that he would not be punished for what he said. I just need to know
the truth so I can find out how to help the anti-poaching effort. "Because the ADFL took our
arms and we were getting no salaries of bonuses and the conditions of life were not good,"
Mortimer said. "I saw how much better off  my brothers in the village who were poaching were.
Finally we got our arms back and I used mine to patrol during the day and poach at night. I killed
one warthog and two baboons here, later a hippo and two buffalo in complicity with the guards of
Dodo, and on June 22 I was arrested with six others." Mortimer for the first time confessed that
his main partner in crime was his brother Minye, who was still a guard. The chefs had been trying
to get this out of him for two months. I wouldn't want to be in Minye's shoes. Mortimer was
obviously trying to cut a deal. He was begging for his job back because he couldn't go back to the
villages where everybody knew he must have talked and he would be killed.

     I spoke with  20 other poachers who were working in Mbayma's six hectare field, for which he
had big plans. One of them showed me how his fetish, a little carved figurine with a separate
dorsal lid, worked. You rubbed the lid back and forth on the figurine's back, and if it slid
smoothly, that meant everything would go well, but if you encountered resistance, the hunting
would go badly or you would run into a patrol. Many of the old animistic beliefs persist among
the nominally Christian or Muslim local people. Like the belief that certain witchdoctors known as
Bugulu, who are not unlike the Navajo shape-shifters, become lions after they die or even before.
You can't tell the difference between a Bugulu and a real lion, one of the chefs de section assured
me. "I knew this young Bugulu named Dusa who turned into a lion." How did you know the lion
was Dusa, I asked. "Because four days after he died  his grave was dug up and then this lion
appeared in the vicinity."

      Mbayma showed me where he was shot in the hand during an accrochage, and the three
places on his torso where he was hit by shrapnel from a grenade. Mbayma makes a strong first
impression, but the coop‚rants, not only those in situ, have serious reservations about him.  His
Congolais colleagues, however,  PNV's Laurent Muhindo, who is his father-in-law and is 
regarded by the coop‚rants as one of the best conservateurs, and Mburanumwe, the ICCN
coordinator, spoke highly of him.  Mbayma is a people-come-first conservationist.  50 of the
guards were on the verge of retiring, and his plan was to settle them around the six-hectare
shamba where they could grow their own food with enough surplus to raise money for a school so
the children of the guards wouldn't have to be sent away to "relatives who could abuse them." He
was also planting the same shamba-rejuvenating legumes that are in the experimental stage at
Epulu. He felt strongly that it was important to take good care of the retired guards, because the
guards will see what awaits them when they reach that age. At the moment they are given a
bicycle and $300 by WWF and the promise of  medical care at the station and turned loose.
Mbayma said they couldn't go back to their villages, after all the poachers they had put away.
Plus the strong ones could become very effective poachers themselves. Frazer argued that they go
to their villages all the time and wasn't in favor of their staying at the station with all their
dependents because that could cause problems, including poaching. He thought they could be
settled along one of the roads outside the park and given a house and a small consideration in
return for keeping it up.. I wondered whether they might not be useful in sensibilizing the local
population to have greater respect for the park and its wildlife. Mbayma told me about one retired
guard who returned to his village on the Sudan border and was so appalled by the blatant
poaching that was going on that he started to speak out against it. On day a delegation of
poachers came to silence him but he wasn't there. They were told to return that night and in the
meantime a militia of the village's youth was recruited to ambush them and take their weapons.
Now the militia, led by the retired guard, is cleaning up the poaching in the vicinity.

       Kes acknowledged the need for "more realistic community-based conservation programs,"
which are in vogue with funders these days. Having devoted so many years to assuring the
survival of the rhinos, she now views the animal as a "flagship" species that attracts funding and
attention to a much broader spectrum of problems which she is now, as the driving force and
coordinator of  the UNF project, trying to tackle.  She told me about a plan that   Emmanuel de
Merode, a social anthropologist or what, Kes ? had worked out with Sangzbalenze  for
reinforcing authority of the the local chefs coutoumiers and investing them in the park by letting
them issue the permits for traditional hunting and fishing in the domaines de chasse. Mbayma was
against this, because the chefs coutoumiers are a big part of the problem, as they are in the RFO,
PNG, and PNKB, and giving them control of the domaines would open the domaines to all kinds
of abuse. But he was in favor of the controlled sale of game hunted by traditional means. "We
need to integrate the people into the park," he argued. "The only thing we are doing is policing,
we are never giving the people advantages." Kes is not in favor of any sale of bushmeat. "When
you start to put monetary value on wildlife, it encourages exploitation. Subsistence hunting is
sustainable, but sale accelerates the destruction. All the evidence in Africa is that once you start
selling bushmeat the animal populations are reduced to the point of extinction."

     "But bushmeat is already sold clandestinely in places like Aba and Durba, and openly in many
villages. The people are already selling more than they eat," Mbayma countered.

     "I propose that we get rid of the poaching," Kes suggested. "Then we can have controlled
sale."

     "If we clean up all the poaching, we will be out of work and the ngo's will stop funding us, so
we had better not do too good a job," was Mbayma's sardonic rejoinder.

***

     I was eager to see what this dreamy tableau with  processions of ellies and huge assemblages
of buffalo wandering through it, this bird's eye view of the Genesis chapter 1 which we had only
been seeing from the air, was like on the ground, and the opportunity came on Saturday the first
when  we flew to Camp Namibira, where Kes did her radio collaring and telemetry and Frazer hid
out for two months at one point during the chaos. The plane touched down, scattering  a vast
herd of short-eared kob, whose mass migrations in southern Sudan rival (or rivaled until a few
years ago when most of them were shot out ?) that of the wildebeest. There were some Lewell's
hartebeest mixed in. The dominant male kob has a harem, and the young males form what is
known as a lek, standing  guard on the periphery of the herd, in the dry season spacing themselves
out from each other and looking beautiful in the hopes of attracting a passing female. We
wandered through the tallgrass. The roll of the savanna was not unlike many of the flatter parts of
England; sans all the large mammals this could almost have been Buckinghamshire.  The camp
was on the edge of a spring-fed stream that we bathed in, little fish nibbling at our toes.  Frazer
cranked up his satellite phone and called John Lucas, IRF's chairman, at the board meeting he was
presiding over at White Oaks and gave him the good news : no shootouts or contacts last month. 

    "This is going to be one of the camps you will be able to ride an elephant to, once tourism gets
started again," Kes told me. "Now you see why we love this place."

PNV

      Then following day, September 2, we flew back to Bunia where unbenownst to us the putsch
against Wamba was in progress.  The airport authorities and the  customs and the immigration
authorities (two separate authorities) extorted $20 apiece from each of us for an exit visa, and
another $200 (? Frazer) for clearance of the plane, then we continued southwest nonstop for five
hours to Nairobi. The roofs went from all thatch in Congo, to some thatch some metal in Uganda,
to all metal in Kenya. It was like coming from the barbarian backlands of Gaul back to Rome. 

       In a nice restaurant in the bougainvillea-festooned suburb of Karen I met Mafuka Girineza,
the conservateur principal (number two after Mbayma, the conservateur en chef) of PNG and
Kes's co-coordinator for the UNF partner. He is a Congolese Hutu and thus a Munyawranda and
is scared to return to PNG and to meet the same fate as Ali Mutarama. "They will ask why I
stayed after the first war. You must be a collaborator of the Rwandans," he explained. 
"They're going to kill me and make it look like braconniers or something." 

       We were joined by Annette Langouw, a jolly beaming blonde Dutch woman, very up and
positive, the least ferrous of the femmes de fer. Annette is a great-ape primatologist with 16 years
experience in the Congo and runs the IGCP program in PNV. She started her career by
habituating  chimps at Tongo, in the park's southern sector, where there would be a refugee camp
of 100,000 Rwandans after the genocide of l994. Then she studied bonobos, the only pygmy
chimps in the world, in Equateur. She spent a few years ? at PNG and helped set up CEPRECOF
at RFO. 

       PNS is the biggest, she told me, but PNV is the longest and has the greatest diversity of
habitat, from Afro-alpine to lowland forest, from savanna to volcanic, very dry and sclerophyllous
to very moist and lush. There are huge swamps in the center and the northern part of the southern
area. The western arm of the Great Rift Valley, a large part of which is in the park,  is the water
catchment for the  mountains on both sides of it, and the water comes bubbling up through the
porous volcanic rock on the valley floor and forms swamps and lakes that eventually feed the
Nile.  PNV is the oldest park in Africa, created in l928, two years before Kruger. The original
Park Albert comprised what is now Rwanda's Parque des Volcans and was the headquarters of
the entire park system in the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi (including the once-magnificent
Kagera Park in Rwanda, two thirds of which has been given over to resettlement of Banyawranda
returning from exile.). PNV is also the most embattled, or at least it has the greatest diversity of
impact : negative forces (Interahamwe, Mayi Mayi, NALU, ADF, ex-FAZ, ex-FAR, ex-FAC),
invading agriculturalists, fishermen,  pastoralists, and i.d.p.'s  and refugees (Rwandan Hutu,
though most of them have been repatriated).

         The park has 4 sectors : 1) the northern , north of Lake Edward; 2)the central, from the 
top of Lake Edward to Rutshuru and Rwindi; 3) the eastern, east of Lake Edward to the Uganda
border; and 4) the southern, from Rutshuru to Goma..  In 1) (see also the information from
Kambale Kisuki on p. 6) two thirds of the northern sector, including the Ruwenzori and the forest
o Watalinga, is conrolled by NALU and ADF rebels whose depredations have been going  on
since long before the wars. Since the first war local chef coutoumiers have been inciting the
population to reclaim their ancestral lands in the park. There have been no salaries since l996 and
many guards have quit. The UNF project will be paying 460 guards in all 4 sectors--- a huge
contribution.  Mount Tchaberimu west of Lake Edward has  13 or 18 lowland gorillas, depending
on who you talk to, supported by the DFGF under Katembo Vitale,  on its 45 remaining forested
hectares which shambas are eating away at. It is not a viable population because it can't expand.

    In  2) south of Lake Edward elephants have been fleeing the mayhem to Uganda's Queen
Elizabeth Park. The fishing villages on Lake Edward are mushrooming. There are now 18,000
fishermen at Kavinyonge and Vitshumbi, at the bottom of the lake, is similarly overpopulated.
3700 Hema pastoralists from Uganda (where they are known as Hima), escorted into the park
from Uganda by UPDF troops, have overrun secteur Kararuma and the domaine de chasse de
Rutshuru. The 150,000 i.d.p.'s between Kanyabayongo and Lubero include Congolais Hema from
Ituri District, but most of them are Nande  fleeing Interahamwe who have been terrorizing the
villages along the western edge of the park. The Interahamwe are armed and provisioned by
planes from Khartoum (according to the RPF's Patrick Mazimhaka), which is Kabila's ally. There
are also Mayi Mayi.  A horrendous humanitarian crisis is looming here because no one can get to
these i.d.p.'s with food aid. All these people increase the demand for bushmeat. Hippo meat is
sold openly in Kanyabayongo, Rutshuru, and Kavinyonge.

     3) has its headquarters at Lulumbi, on the eastern shore of Lake Edward. The conservateur
principal is Timpungi. of Lake Edward. This is where the Jean-Pierre d'Huart did his hippo
studies, and where U.S. maintains  a high resolution  satellite surveillance station like the one they
also have set up in the Brazilian Amazon to monitor fires and drug-smuggling) .

     4) is relatively stable, although security even along the road to park headquarters at
Rumangabo varies from day to day. In the international gorilla area where Congo, Rwanda, and
Uganda meet, 78 guards are being paid salaries and bonuses by IGCP to keep a close eye on the
gorillas.  But a few weeks earlier the station at Jomba was attacked, even though 32 guards and
their families were there. One guard was killed, another kidnaped, and some of the guns were
made off with. But since then it's been calm.  Now a 1000 RPA are said to be sweeping the area
for insurgents. The Virunga gorilla population was 320 in l989. No one has been able to get in
and census them since. It moves freely between PNV and Parques des Volcans. Karisoke, Dian
Fossey's research station in the saddle between Visoke and Karisimbi volcanos, is in ruins. On the
Rwanda side tourism has resumed. 16 tourists a day, escorted by gendarmes, go to see the
gorillas. This is the safest and most accessible way to see mountain gorillas. Tourism resumed in
April in Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, where the tourists were murdered in l999. The
Bwindi population was conservatively estimated in l997 at  292 by WCS's Alistair MacNeilage
(infants don't poop in their nests and are harder to pick up, and a few groups could have been
missed). That tallies with the WWF's rougher 280-300 estimate  in the early 90s. It is cut off from
the Virunga one by 25 km. of lowland agriculture. These two populations are the last mountain
gorillas in the wild. 
 
 
 
 
 

Go on to page 5