Masisi, on the southern edge of the park,  has been a cauldron of Interahamwe resistance
since the genocide. Tens of thousands of Congolais Banywranda i.d.p.'s, mostly Hutu,  from 
Masis   had been flooding into Sake, which was not much more secure, and from there to Goma,
and the area around Rutshuru was volatile. You could not drive through the forest west of
Rutshuru to Beni without risking attack by negative forces. A few weeks earlier a convoy
including trucks of TMK, the local airline, was ambushed, all the vehicles were torched and 4
were killed.

      Annette thought there should eventually be  an international UN peacekeeper-type force to
protect the World Heritage sites. But Kabila is not well disposed to the U.N., I pointed out,
although he is to conservation, according to Kes who was impressed by Kabila's enthusiastic
endorsement of her initiatives to protect the parks when she met him when and in connection with
the project or what ?  While RCD-Goma, according to Mafuko, "is only concerned with
conservation in terms of international criticism. Its priority ‡'est la guerre."

     "If the RCD is only interested in conservation for political reasons, that's fine," Annette
argued. "It wants international good will and recognizes that if it takes clear environmental
precautions it will look very well for them." 

***

    I flew to Kigali and from there drove to Goma, where I dropped in on the WWF project. IGCP
is a coalition of WWF, the African Wildlife Federation, and Flora and Fauna International, so
WWF is involved in supporting the guards. But it also has  education, reforestation, seed-
distribution  and mushroom-growing  programs. The UNF funds for PNV will be flowing through
WWF. I found the staff turned on by what they were doing, and eager to explain their work to an
unannounced visitor. (Annette having just returned from vacation and Anecto Kayitare, the
IGCP's liaison, having just lost his mother and taken emergency leave, nothing had been set
up)."We're a success story. We're at war and still succeed at protecting the  the park," Rosie
Kabeya, IGCP's assistant administrator, told me. Jeanne Masika Sa-inne gave me issue number 4
of Kacheche, the nature and conservation magazine that WWF prints 70,000 copies of and
distributes them to local schoolchildren. Kacheche is the African pied wagtail, as common and
brazen as blue jays in these parts and locally believed to be the bearer of good news. This was the
first issue since publication was suspended by the genocide and its devastating aftermath in Goma
six years ago.

      Yowa Winder, whom I called on at ORCHA, belongs to the humanitarian subspecies of the
courageous white woman in Africa (as opposed to the conservationist subspecies of which Terese
and Kes are outstanding examples.). She writes many of the IRIN bulletins and is on top of the
day to day conditions, the agonizing birthpains of this country. There are half a million i.d.p.:s in
North Kivu, one sixth of the population, she told me : Masisi has 50,000, mainly Hunde and
Congolese Hutu, Rutshuru another 15-20,000. 20,000 mostly Nande are spread out between
Kanyabayongo and Beni, another 100,000 on the Lubero road, 120,000 mostly Lendu by the
Hema-Lendu conflict.

        Kate Farnsworth of USAID Disaster Relief  is as gutsy Yowa and as plugged in, a very
sharp and caring woman who lives out of a suitcase, as she put it, shuttling from one trouble spot
to the next. . Kate was trying to get to Kanyabayonga, then she was going to see Bemba in
Gbadolite, then she was going down to Uvira, where a new  slaughter of the Banyamulenge had
begun. "I've been telling the RCD you will be judged by how you deal with conservation and
humanitarian issues. These are big-button issues in the international community," she told me.

       "Most of the people in Bukavu would call themselves Mayi Mayi, i.e. against the RCD and
the Rwandans. [In Goma the opposition to the occupation is less vociferous.] There are many
Mayi Mayi barriers between Beni and Kanyabayongo. We're trying to create humanitarian space,
getting the message to the chefs coutoumiers who personally have to connect with the Mayi Mayi
there so we can get in."

      Kate thinks Rwanda would be "willing to pull out if conditions where right, while Uganda has
a far more economic interest. Which is not to say that individuals in the Rwandan army are not
making a shitload of money. But [Rwanda's president] Kagame does not sanction the rape of the
country. As his councilor Charles Murigande told the BBC recently, these are individuals who are
not implementing state policy." 

     What do you know about coltan ? asked I.

     "It's used for high tech electronics, microchips for computers, in addition to missile warheads.
Germany, not the States is the biggest purchaser. It used to be exported lumped in with the less
taxed caciterite and then be extracted."

     Kate confirmed what Murigande had told me, that most of the arms provided to the
Interahamwe in the Kivus come from Tanganyika, crossing Lake Tanganyika to Boma. The
brigadier general who is chief of staff of the Tanzanian army oversees this traffic, but he is not
implementing state policy either.  "Who is checking this out ? What is being done ?" she asked. "If
there's going to be peace in the Kivus, the Interahamwe must be gotten out." 

    "The second war is far more complicated and ugly," she went on. "The solutions are far more
complex because there are no many non-state actors and fewer carrots and sticks. A lot is going
on under the surface." She had just heard that the RPA was making overtures to the Mayi Mayi.
She had also heard that Kabila may have gotten biological weapons from North Korea. "Kabila
feels he now has the upper hand because of his recent inroads in Equateur. But if Zimbabwe pulls
out the rebels will go for the jugular." But the latest news is that Zimbabwe has reaffirmed its
support to Kabila in the defense of Mbandaka, support bought by giving Zimbabwe concessions 
the mineral riches of Shaba.

      Goma is the administrative headquarters for ICCN in eastern Congo. No longer controlled by
Kinshasa, ICCN's activities and presence in the east are overseen by Anicet Mburanumwe, whom
I met that evening with Stanislas Bahinake, ICCN's director for North Kivu province, and
Wathaut Wabubindja Miya Alexandre, the chef de station (Rutshuru) for PNV's central sector.
Mburanumwe is "the chief of conservation for all of eastern congo," one of his deputies told me.
Then come Bahinake and Norbert Mushenzi, the provincial director for South Kivu.
Mburanumwe has been in conservation for 40 years. He knew George Schaller (and produced an
affectionate letter Schaller sent him in l988) and Dian Fossey at Rumangabo, Kes when she was
just starting out at Garamba. "We called her teasingly Mama Faru. Kifaru is a rhino."  He
subscribed to the theory advanced in a new book, Murder In the Mist, that Fossey was killed by
the mayor of Ruhengeri "Zed" the brother of President Habyarimana's wife Agathe. "Zed had une
arrogance extraordinaire," Mburanumwe told me.  "Dian chewed him out publicly, an intolerant
affront for which he ordered her death."

        Dian's way of dealing with African authorities was to throw a hysterical shitfit. The new
generation of expatriate field biologists are more sensitive, socially adept, and people-oriented.
They realize that you have to deal with the guerillas before you can protect the gorillas.  It's a
Shakespearean situation, not a Thoreauvian one (which posits a false dichotomy between man and
nature   the world view of old-school conservationists). The gorillas and the guerillas are in
there together. 
 
 

        Both Mburanumwe and his late wife, an important d‚put‚e from Rutshuru, 
were "of Rwandese expression,"to use one of the terms for Congolais Banyawranda, and when
Kabila declared his pogrom on the Tutsi they were imprisoned in Kinshasa. But they managed to
escape, only for Mburanumwe's wife to die a few weeks later. He showed me a photograph of
her. 

       "Virunga is really four separate parks," he told me.  "Maiko is almost abandoned. It has a
pocket of precious materials, gold and diamonds, that were being exploited long before les
‚vŠnements.   We must learn to reconcile exploitation or our riches with protection. We are like a shipwreck. If we eat all the biscuits, we will die. There must be integrated conservation, tied to the development
of the population. 

        Bahinake did not advise going to see the gorillas. It would take several days, and the road
from Rumangabo to Jomba was terrible and the security impr‚visible. Since Guy de Bonnet and
Christine had told me there would be no problem seeing the gorillas in PNKB, and since I had
already sat en famille with mountain gorillas on the Rwanda side in l986, I didn't insist.
But the road to Rumangabo, according to the latest reports, was safe. I could go there in the
morning and see Laurent Muhindo, the conservateur en chef.  So the next morning, the 5th, I set
out with Wathaut and four young RCD soldiers, courtesy of Vizima Karaha,  in Mburanumwe's
Land Cruiser. We passed the desolate site of  Kibumba, one of the refugee camps where 250,000
Rwandans were kept going for two years by the UNHCR and humanitarians without any attempt
to disarm the Interhamwe or Ex-Fax in them, even though to qualify for refugee status according
to the U.N.'s definition you have to have surrendered your arms. But the UNHCR was
overwhelemed. It didn't have the moyens to deal with a crisis of such magnitude.
Many people in the Kivus fault the UN for the nightmare that the breaking up of the camps
unleashed  in eastern Congo. 

       "The Interahamwe is not a person,"Wathaut told me. "In my secteur, in the forest 23 km
from Ruthshuru, they put up a barrier and burned a truck last month, killing all four passengers.
We have 173 guards but no bonuses, and they are making a big contribution, working without
motivation. Some are quitting because of famine [i.e. not having money to buy food]." 

      The refugees had devastated 10 km of the forest on the slopes of Nyiragongo volcano for
firewood. "We had a police that was supposed to prevent them. The refugees told us   UNHCR
gives us food and shelter but pas de bois. On va manger ‡a comment ?"  Wathaut went on.  "We
explained to the refugees that we were not here not here to persecute them but our job to was
protect the resources and prevent braconnage. We shot in the air to scare the refugees and they
just giggled and kept on devastating." The scalped forest was coming back fast in the rich
volcanic soil. Nyiragongo erupted in l979. Several elephants were overcome by the lava and when
I passed through two years later, I was shown where their relative would come and commune
with them and defecate on their bones locked in the now hardened magma.

      Behind Nyiragongo was Nyamulagira, which erupted for three months this year, beginning on
the 27th of February, and was still smoking.  To the right was steep-sided. Mikeno volcano where
Karl Akeley collected the gorillas for the diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in
the 20s and where Schaller did most of his gorilla research. Rumangabo is about 40km from
Goma. Mburanumwe had radio-telephoned the conservateur en chef, Laurent Muhindo,  and he
sent one of his assistant conservateurs to meet us at Rugari and escort us the rest of the way to
the station, the old mother station of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, the once-grand but
still solid buildings clustered on a knoll with views  of  spectacular rainforest and volcanos in
every direction. 

      Laurent greeted me, and several dozen of the guards snapped to attention and paraded smartly
for us. "You see how organized the guards are when they get a little support," Wathaut said. 
The shelves of the large library were empty, all the books having been used for fires by the various
occupying forces, and the seismological station was trashed. There was no power so computers
can't be used. (If this situation is to be rectified, solar would seem the way to go.) 

        Muhindo is regarded by the expatriate partners as one of the best conservateurs. "That is
because he is paid," Mburanumwe claims. (There seemed to be some tension between
Mburanumwe and Muhindo, at least on Mburanumwe's part. The tension may be ethnic. At one
point Mburanumwe told me, "Muhindois lying and that is because he is a Nande.")  Muhindo's
magasinier opened his storeroom where there were some recently seized tusks and a rack of old
American 30.30's that lacked ammunition. 

        Below  the virgin forest of Nyamulagira spread for miles, which Muhindo was full of poches
de r‚sistance incivique that sometimes attacked vehicles on the Rumangabo-Goma road. He
estimated that there could be as many as 40,000 Interahamwe and other forces n‚gatives in the
park. "It is hard to tell who was who because they all wear the same uniforms, the forces
n‚gatives wear the ones they have stolen from the RPA and the RCD, and the RPA whenever
they want to commit gaffes, they use short guys." To the local people they are all the same. They
are Rwandans.  Probably a thousand Interahamwe etc. are enconsced in the forest in the secteur
of Mikeno, where there are five guard posts from which 78  guards make daily reports on the
movements of 73 habituated gorillas and encounters with poachers of insurgents or other wildlife.
I was shown an impressively detailed handwritten report on the August patrols, with maps and
stars for accrochages. A conscientious guard in secteur Mikeno can make $70 a month with
primes. 

     Muhindo asked why the conservateurs didn't get bonuses too, a point also raised by
Mburanumwe. "How can the shepherd lead his flock if he is starving ?" He also said that at
Rwindi the RPA had a training camp for local self-defense militia to drive out the Interahamwe in
their area, and that it is was being supplied by 5 buffalo and 15 antelopes a day. "We have
complained to RCD-Goma," he said, but so far to no effect.

      There were definitely air drops to the Interahamwe, he said. Later I heard from Patrick
Mazimhaka that planes from Khartoum were doing most of it. 

       Muhindo thanked me "for having to come and see the realities and the difficulties," and I
returned to Goma.

 CATASTROPHE IN PNKB

       That night Mburanumwe told me that yesterday at 5 in the morning a mapping commission
with an escort of 32 RCD soldiers was attacked  by presumed Interhamwe while surveying
PNKB's borders. 9 were killed, four taken hostage including three conservateurs. The
conservateur en chef, Kasereka, was missing. I was looking forward to decompressing at PNKB,
my last stop, which seemed the safest of the parks, at least the 5% of the original, highland part
that was "controlled." But all of Sith Kivu was a powderkeg at the moment, and PNKB, being so
close to Bukavu, was extremely vulnerable and in fact under assault by the negative forces and
their rich and powerful local collaborators.  The week before, a grenade had gone off in the
central market of Bukavu, killing several shoppers and wounding many more.  Suspects were
rounded up from  the opposition to the RCD and were tortured into confessing. Hatred of the
Banyawaranda and the RCD were reaching the boiling point. The talk was beginning to sound
ominously genocidal.  Most of the population were secretly supporters of Kabila, and were
looking forward to the day when the Interahamwe left the Kivus and returned to Rwanda and
finished the genocide and took vengeance on the Nilotics for what they had done in Congo for
them. 

      And now this catastrophe. 

      I flew down to Bukavu the following morning, the 26th. The airport is an hour from town 
the nearest flat spot, where the hills don't come right down to the lake.  Carlos Schuler had sent
one of GTZ's land cruisers, and we drove through allees of tall eucalyptus, a  postvolcanic
landscape reminiscent of Michoacan, Mexico. The population density here, between Lake Kivu
and the park, is 750 per km2, one of the highest in the RCD and the hills were dry and dusty,
having been completely denuded of trees. 

      GTZ is headquartered in a lush quartier of old Belgian villas right on the lake. I found Carlos
in his office in a charming brick and timber chalet. The administrator and financial officer of the
GTZ's project with PNKB, he  was beside himself. "This is the worst thing that has happened in
15 years," he told me. "Things have been going so well. 9 are dead and many have disappeared,
including Kasereka Bishikwabo, the chef de parque and two other conservateurs, Aim‚ and
Bakongo. These are people we worked with very well." We were interupted by a call from
Carlos's superiors.

   Noyn tot und leuteren nicht gefunden, he reported in Swiss-accented German. GTZ is an 
agency of the German government, the Germany's counterpart USAID. This
means that the flow of funds is steadier than at PNG, say, where Kes has to hustle for grants, but
the GTZ has to be more careful about what it gets involved in, and Carlos's hands are perhaps a
bit more tied than he would like.

        Carlos sounded like he was ready to throw in the towel. 15 years of carefully building human
resources may have just gone down the tubes.  "It is impossible to work here in this complete
absence of human rights and degradation of human values. All this  is caused by the international
community. Ils s'en foutent.  They nourished the Interahamwe in the camps and now the
Interahamwe are everywhere killing people and looting.  UNHCR said it would help us and
instead it brought us war. €'est la poubelle. We are neutral and our collaborators are not being
respected." 

         I had come at the worst time. "Everything was set for your visit," Carlos told me. "Now-- I
hope you understand   this is not the priority. I have to find out what happened before I can
decide what to do about it and what to say  and write about it."  In addition, a German t.v. crew
was coming from Nairobi that day for a long-scheduled visit to the gorillas.

        So Carlos sent me to Guy de Bonnet's villa on the lake, where I would be staying, while he
sorted things out. It was a heavenly spot, an African version of Cap Ferat. Birds chorused and
breezes off the water rustled in the bougainvillea, all night long fishermen sang and shouted as
they cast nets from dugouts several miles out for two kinds of glittering 3" sardines. 

         Kahuzi Biega was created in l969 by Carlos's late father-in-law, Adrian de Schryver, a
legendary figure in South Kivu. His daughter Christine, Carlos's wife, is the chef de bureau for all
of GTZ's projects in South Kivu. Besides supporting the guards, GTZ has built 38 schools and 3
dispensaries around the park, which as a means of buying conservation with infrastructure are of
limited success as the parents still have to go into the forest to get money for pay for the services.
"The local ‚conomie sociale still has to be developed," Carlos told me. GTZ also has a water-
purification program for Bukavu and a social development in Kabare, between the Bukavu and
the park. 

       Christine is tall, striking woman, a  tropical beauty in her gawdy Congolais pagnes,  who is
kind of like a mother hen, making sure that all the people in her charge are taken care of.
Christine's mother is a Shi, one of the local tribes to which young women of the Rwandese
aristocracy who got pregnant out of wedlock were traditionally sent and she looks sufficiently like
a Tutsi that it is dangerous for her. "I've had a grenade held against my chin twice, once in each
war," she told me. Now she doesn't leave town, even to go to the park's headquarters at
Tshivanga. She and Carlos have three children whom they home-school with 11 other expat
children in a French correspondance course. The Schulers have deep roots in Bukavu and aren't
going anywhere, no matter what. As Carlos told me,  "We don't live in Nairobi or come from the
States or Europe every few months. We live this every day."

      "Father came here at the age of 9," Christine told me. "His parents were colons. He didn't like
to study and never went further than high school. He was an adventurer. He became a self-taught
primatologist and habituated the family of Kasimir and learned to fly so he could survey the park.
My brother runs the air freight company he started. He could tell you a lot about coltan. He flies
it. I would check with the dispatche du coltan at Kigali airport. Some of it goes to Belgium with
Sabina. Some of it leaves with South African Airlines. 

      "Schaller came here a lot when I was a child, and I knew Dian Fossey well. She didn't like us
kids. She didn't like people period." (In my September, l986, Vanity Fair article on her murder, I
learned that she  would whip with stinging nettles the testicles of pygmies she caught laying
antelope snares in the Parque des Volcans,  because the gorillas would sometimes get caught in
them, and that she may have been raped by Zairian soldiers, which would explain her intense
dislike of Africans, whom she called "woggipoos.")

      "Father's parents had a tea and coffee plantation near what is now the park and he always
worked with the pygmies. They are our best pisteurs. He did a lot for the pygmies. If  elephants
were trampling their shambas, once or twice he shot the bull. He went native. He refused to go to
Europe or to be treated with Western medicine. He always went to the pygmies." But he also saw
the need for the gorillas to be protected. The pygmies needed gorilla blood for the protective
scars they cut on their newborn children, and zoos were buying baby gorillas, which meant that
the adults protecting them were killed, and the poaching was uncontrolled. So he persuaded
Mobutu to set aside the 600 km.2 of the highland part. In l972 the lowland part was added and
PNKB was expanded to 6000km2. The two parts were  connected by a narrow 40-kilometer-long
corridor which has recently been breached by illegal farms.
 
 

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