PNKB, Maiko, and the intervening area ( Mount Tchaberimu with its 13-18 grauerii)  contain
the largest concentration of lowland gorillas on the planet. In l995 Jefferson Hall estimated the
population in and adjacent to the lowland part of  PNKB at 14,000. Now there are probably less
than half that number, if  the elephant poaching rate (they have gone from 107 in l996 in the
highland part to zero this year) and the decline by almost half of the gorilla population in the 
highland part are any indication. In l990 there were 258 in the highland part, in l996 245-86, and
this August Omari Ilangu found evidence 130-143. And this is in the "controlled" five percent of
the park. The lowland part is uncontrolled, unpatrolled, and infested with negative forces. There
are an estimated 20 bands of 2-3000 Interahamwe in and around the park, two factions of  Mayi
Mayi, 2500 coltan miners, for all of whom bushmeat is a major source of food. There are a
airstrips at Punia, Walikale, Nzovu, Isangi, and Lulingu among others places. Coltan is picked up
at Punia by planes or helicopters by RPA officers and flown directly to Kigali. The highest grade
coltan is from Lulinga, according to Christine, and it may be picked up by Zimbabweans. The
RCD and the RPA are in theory in control of these strips, but don't have a permanent presence
except it seems at Punia, and when they are not around, they may be used by the other side.
Terese Hart thinks the whole situation in the lowland part is fishy and suspects that there could be
an agreement, a division of spoils among the warring parties, that the Interhamwe or Mayi Mayi
could even be selling coltan to the RPA. There are certainly strong links between the Interahamwe
and the ex-FAR in the forest and the Bukavu business community. There are a lot of unanswered
questions about these strips : who uses them, who controls them, why hasn't the RCD/RPA got
them under their control ? 

       To get further insight into the coltan trade I went to see Kotecha, a rich Indian trader who
buys and sells the stuff, but he was abroad. His representative, K. Krishna Kumra, told me, "We
are a pretty big coltan buyer. We move 3-4 tons a month. The biggest buyers are the Rwandese
military. They buy directly from the miners, pay maybe $10 a kilo and move 100 tons. There are
15 more buying counters like us in Bukavu [in the quartier populaire  of Essence, I found three
small comptoirs with signs that said Achat Coltan Caciterite], and others in Goma and Bunia [But
my impression is that most of the coltan in eastern Congo comes from South Kivu and goes out
through Bukavu.] The best quality is from Kakelo and Mobi also has good quality. What the
soldiers don't get is brought to us by middlemen, 'commission agents,' 10-12-20 of whom will
charter a plane and fly out to one of the strips in the forest and bring it to Bukavu and see who
will give them the best price. We powder the coltan and test it for quality. Top grade is 45% pure.
We pay $45 a kilo. We crush it but don't refine it (there are others in Bukavu who refine it and
sell it separately; we don't buy from them)  and sell it to other middlemen who take it to London
and sell it for about $110 a kilo to the best international bidder  Germany, Belgium, the United
States, Canada. The soldiers who take it to Kigali sell to buyers there who sell to Europe. Even if
it's stolen it's very organized and done with the blessing of the topmost level of government.
They have some front companies in Kigali. There are rumors Kagame gets a share. He must get
some reward or it could not be operating on such a large scale. People say the coltan is used to
finance the war. 

       "We started buying in the last quarter of l998 but others have been buying for 5-6 years,"
continued Kumra. "In those days no one knew the value of the stuff so it sold for peanuts. It has
no daily quote on the stock exchange. It is used in armaments and microchips, and it is a motive
for the Rwandans and the Ugandans to not be in a hurry. The Americans are happy to get the
stuff. Nobody wants out of the war. Everyone is getting his piece of cake. 

        "Walikali is on the edge of the park, but there is mining in the park itself. Coltan is found
associated with tin, which also known as caciterite. There is also plenty of wolfram around here.
It is part of the impurities of coltan. But the market for wolfram is not good [during the second
world war, wolfram was in hot demand for bombs, and secret agents of  the Allies and the Axis
competed for Congo wolfram in Lisbon.]

      I returned to Guy's villa, which GTZ rents from Kotecha, and there was a letter from
Kasereka.  He had managed to flee the attackers and walked barefoot  for six hours through the
forest,  skirting villages lest he be taken for a thief or discovered to be the conservateur en chef of
the park, which would have been just as dangerous for him. At last he reached the RCD
guardpost at Mulumemunene. 
 

    A Monsieur Shoumatoff, en mission … Bukavu

    Monsieur :
    Bonjour and welcome to Bukavu.

    As you have heard, our mission of materilization of the limits of the park which had already
worked 13 days was attacked on its last day, 05/09/2000.

     I returned to Bukavu last night. Although I am still suffering, on Friday,  8 September 2000,
[tomorrow] I am making myself available for you. The rest of the program, we can determine
together.

     Meanwhile, I am chez moi at home. My driver who is bringing you this letter is instructed to
bring you here in case you are able to come. It is an ambience of friends who have come to follow
the unfolding of these macabres events which we have lived through.

       The consensus of all of Kasereka's colleagues is that he is un homme intŠgre, a straight-up
guy. I found him to be a remarkable person, a genuinely valorous individual. Shortly after I
arrived we were joined by the son of the mwami of Nindja, the local Shi chef coutoumier, whose
father had accompanied the mapping commission and was still missing. (He was dead.) Kasereka
and  the mwami's son touched foreheads three times, in the traditional greeting. Two important
chefs coutoumiers were killed in the attack, which goes against the theory that they put the
Interahamwe up to it. But Kasareka's told me later that "the chefs were members of the
commission but were not really helping us. Each was arguing for his own interest and was looking
for a way to grignoter, to bend the law,  and we were trying to respect it." Now he told the two
of us what happened : 

      "We had mapped 14.5 km from Kasirusiru [in the corridor] to Lushanga [on its southern
border]. Then we traveled to Fendula with the intention of advancing the limite another 7.8 km. 
We camped at Jhembe, just outside the park. It was the last day of the mission, and we had been
out for thirteen days and everything had gone well. We were in a celebratory mood and maybe a
little off guard."

       At 5:30 in the morning the attack began. 5 were shot dead right in their tent, including the
surveyor and the freelance video filmmaker who had been hired by the provincial government to
document the mission. The 32 RCD soldiers who were supposed to be protecting the mission fled
into the forest. Their commandant had been thrown into the brig because he could not control his
men. The shots were accompanied by women and children chanting in Rwandese and ululating
and rattling calabashes and dancing the same sort of dance, known as mujegereze, that I would
see  a procession of hefty Congolais women doing, boogeying and clapping their hands as they
came up the road from a church, where one of their neighbors had gotten married.  Whenever a
shot was fired the women and children would shout in a collective cri de joie. Kasereke said the
mapping commission was assaulted by four types of warfare at once 1) guns 2) psychological, the
women and children chanting and shouting 3) intifada  some of the attackers threw stones 4) 
classic, with massues or clubs. One of the victims had his genitals cut off, which Rwandans are
into as are Somalis and Ethiopians.

      Bakongo and Aime and the governor's political counselor were taken hostages. They were
forced to roll up their mattresses and carry them on their heads with the other loot, blindfolded,
and led off into the forest. The loot included almost all the park's bush equipment, $2180 in cash,
1 Kalashnikov, I Mauser 50 cal., 295 shells, I gsm locator, 6 radio phones (known as motorolas),
16 tents, 3 mattresses.  The attackers told the hostages they belonged to the Army for the
Liberation of Rwanda.  Their commander was a well-spoken and obviously educated ex-FAR
officer who had been inform‚ dans les belles ‚coles d'Europe.  There was a big debate between
him and his associates whether to kill the hostages. After being led in circles for several hours,
their blindfolds were removed and the hostage were released. The commander told them they
were the ones who killed the tourists in Rwindi, Uganda (which Carlos and Christine thought was
"90 % bluff."). He showed them how much better armed they were than the park guards. He had
the same demands as the Interhamwe who killed abducted the 6 tourists in PNV did   blanket
amnesty, peace in Congo and Rwanda, and a country. On top of everything, the attackers were
Born Again. They called themselves Ngabo za Yezu, People of Jesus and gave each of their
hostages a bible. 

       But the plot thickens. The attack took place in the same vicinity where an earlier
governmental commission in l995 came to map the park's boundaries and was stopped by armed
militia of the farmers. There are two or three families who have illegal farms in the park. Their
leader in Muhimwusi Ernest, a powerful civil magistrate in Bukavu who is also the main military
judge of the RCD. They were provided concessions in the park by the corrupt Conservateur des
Titres FonciŠres for South Kivu,  Katoto, who also deeded land in the park to his own son-in-law
and was removed  for unrelated d‚gats, but for some reasons is back in office. In the weeks
before the mapping commission set out, Muhimwisi had threatened  conservateurs of the park
with death if they tried to take his farm from him. So it is very possible that the attackers were put
up to it by Muhumwusi. Interhamwe are known to be living in huts on the back forty of  his farm.
The governor of the province, Norbert Basengezi Kantintima,  issued an eviction notice in
August, but several departments of the South Kivu justice system, in which the magistrat
obviously has some influence, needs to take action and to generate and exchange certain
documents,  and this isn't happening. Everybody is dragging his feet. Muhuwusi is a big man in
Bukavu. One wonders who is protecting him. 

     Omari Ilangu showed a slide of Muhimwusi's farm in his talk at NYZS in the Bronx in
October about his gorilla survey this summer. It is a forlorn clearcut landscape, with hardly a stick
of wood standing. The farm has completely eaten through a 500-hectare section of the corridor
and cut the park in two, making gene flow and transhumance migration between the 1800-3308-
meter montane forest of the highland part to the 600-1200-meter lowland part impossible.

       There was also, according to Guy Cirhuza of ORCHA in Bukavu, another attack by
presumed Interahamwe in the same localit‚ of Kalonge, which was followed by an oppression by
the RCD/RPA as a result of which    42,000 i.d.p.'s fled from the villages northwest of  the
corridor through the park by the road via Kasirusiru (where Muhimwisi's farm is, and where
Interahamwe and Mayi Mayi frequently prey on travelers), to the already densely populated
southeastern, Bukavu/Lake Kivu side of the park.

      Simon Kangeta, adjunct provincial director in charge of security for the RCD, told me that the
attackers were 150 Interahamwe who fled east to Isangi after an RCD/RPA oppression at
Shabunda the month before. Kasereka was dubious : "Isangi is on the northern edge of the park,
very far from where we attacked. If these were the people who attacked us, someone must have
fetched them."

     The governor, who Christine said is "the best governor we've ever worked with, he has given
us everything we asked for," has ordered a full investigation of the attack. It will be interesting to
see if Muhimwisi is implicated. A massive military operation had been seen to recover the bodies.
"Now there will be a big cleanup operation that will also wipe out innocent locals and all the
social initiatives of GTZ," Carlos feared. 
 

         The next afternoon Carlos took me and the German film crew up to the park headquarters
at Tshivanga, which is only half an hour drive above the city. Norbert has repaved the road to the
station which winds up into the volcanic highlands. The road, unrepaired and full of holes,
continues another ca.130km.  to Walikale and from there to Kisangani.  A macabre and
heartbreaking scene greeted us : the guards had laid out on the lawn all the skulls of poached
elephants and gorillas they had recovered while on patrol. According to the June, 2000 Gorilla
Journal,  the slaughter of large mammals in the controlled highland part  PNKB was down from
l999, when 13 of the 19-member family of Mugoli were killed. Signs had been found only 70 of
the 258 gorillas surveyed in l996 (which Omari's survey has upped to 130-143).. In January 2000
3 gorillas were killed and their heads or hands were cut off. A new family of 5 was discovered.
One of them, who was named Mugaraka, had lost one hand in a trap and had apparently treated
himself by eating medicinal plants, which chimpanzees are also known to do. Several babies were
reported in Bukavu. No one knew who was buying them, but it was certainly not locals. "Who
buys the gorillas, the coltan, the diamonds, the ivory ? Belgium says it will buy no more conflict
diamonds, but how can you know where the stones come from ? And this proliferation of arms ?
Where do you think they come from ? Capitalism means rape for Africans," Carlos said bitterly.

         Part of the reason for the decline in poaching from the year before is that there were no
more elephants to be poached in the highlands. The last elephant was shot in January. Loxondonta
africana cyclotis was became locally extinct, as it did, I learned a few weeks earlier, across the
lake  in Rwanda's Nyungwe National Park. Two independent events that were part of the same
tragic trend. The vegetation around the station was thickening noticeably in the elephant's
absence. 

     The guards now had 100 complete uniforms from UNESCO with the distinctive ICCN logo so
they wouldn't be confused with fighters. 64 of them and 5 leading staff had been trained in
paramilitary techniques, and they were participating in Frazer Smith's AFLS program this fall. On
May 19,  the RCD authorites gave 19 functional arms to the guards,  promised that all arms
confiscated from poachers in the future would be given to them, and authorized a barrier on the
road at Tshivanga. This makes it more difficult to run arms and loot and contraband back and
forth from Kisangani to Bukavu. . The guards were carrying on heroically. Kasereka made a point
of telling me (twice) that his magasinier, who was in charge of the arms, was a Tutsi.  "We are all
one family of conservationists," as Carlos put it. 

          Vested interests make it difficult to demilitarize the park and close airstrips, Gorilla Journal
continues. The ready availability of automatic weapons is causing widespread human destruction
and dramatically changing the course and magnitude of wildlife extermination. Disintegration of
these national parks and the loss of the magnificent wildlife and plants harbored within will be an
irreparable loss for the world as a whole.

         Everything had been going so well before this d‚bacle. A international coalition of
conservations calling itself the DRC Parks Relief Mission consisting of Michael Hasson's 
Nouvelles Approaches Belgium, Ian Redmond's Ape Aliances UK, and Joe Thompson's Lukinu
Wildlife Research Protection USA, had provided everything from rubber boots to 100 backpacks
to a computer scanner and 5 new gps's. 42 poachers had been caught and were being integrated
into the park staff. 26 of them were pygmies, and of the pisteurs, the park's l8 trackers, 14 were
pygmies, and another 30 kept up the trails. "If you want a baby gorilla or another animal,"
Kasereka told me, "you go through the pygmies." 

        Carlos is not a sophisticated scientific mind like Terese or Kes or Guy and he has a very
different style, which works.. He was a ski and windsurf instructor who came to Bukavu to study
French and met the gorgeous Christine. He's a  handsome, emotional emotive impulsive guy with
a certain animal magnetism  not your typical Swiss.  His body language communicates his
sincerity and that wins over the Africans. He is also fearless. "People say it is he who has my
father's blood," Christine said. He checks up on the gorillas several times a week and never takes
an armed guard, only a pygmy pisteur.

         We drove up to a small peak above the station where the radio tower, stripped of its wire
and transmitter, stood. The 5 km power line to the station had also been stripped and would cost
$50,000 to replace, which Carlos said is an urgent priority. From the radio tower we could see
Kahuzi and Biega, the two volcanos for which the park is named, rising out of frothing montane
forest. The attack had taken about 15 km. to the south, toward Biega, only three hours walk..
Somewhere below a gunshot rang out, and Carlos hurried us into the car and we drove back to
the  station.

       That night we met at the Hotel des Orchides, a lovely establishment on the lake. Its owner, a
Belgian named Marc Moreay, had  born in Bukavu and had spent two days in October, l996
negotiating with Mobutu's soldiers what they could take and what they couldn't and had thus
saved the place, said if I were you I wouldn't go to see the gorillas tomorrow, which is what we
were planning to do. The Interhamwe  could have found out that you were coming and be waiting
for you. They have agents in the city who could radio them. They would love to capture some
bazungu [whites] not only for the money but for the attention it would attract."

     In fact Mushenzi told us the news that we were going to see the gorillas tomorrow had been
on the radio and the t.v. station; Carlos had taken the t.v. crew  to see the governor and the
interview had been filmed by the governer's video man. This came out just as the crew as about to
sign a contract with ICCN saying that had been told of the risks of going into the park and
absolving ICCN of any responsibility or liability for what happened. The producer, a French
woman with two young children, said she wasn't going. The cameraman, a Kenyan who was used
to combat situations, was up for it. The reporter, a lovely, spiritual man who had been to many of
the same "garden spots," as they are known in the trade  it was surprising we hadn't met
sooner  was ambivalent. If they didn't get the footage, that was $7000 down the tubes, "the first
time that ever happened to me."  The sound man had gone to bed.  As for me, I had an American
passport which made me particularly desirable. What if I left my passport and said I was Russian
or something ? I asked Carlos. "They will know who you are. They know the nationality of every
muzungu who comes here," he told me.

       I decided in view of the fact that the Interhamwe had the means, motive, and intelligence to
trek for three hours and ambush us, that it would be foolish for me to go. It wouldn't have been a
relaxed visit, in any case. And we all agreed : the trip to the gorillas was canceled.

      What can be done about these Interahamwe ? I asked. They're holding the park hostage and
getting away with murder  of people and animals. Kasereke said that "the technical difficulties of
dislodging them are almost insurmountable. The forest is so dense you would have to have a
soldier every five feet." There were also political difficulties. GTZ, being an official government
agency, can't be involved in any military operation, especially with enemies of the state like the
RCD and the RPA, and the park has to be completely neutral. If the Interhamwe realized they
were being chass‚ because of the gorillas, they could kill them in revenge or to remove the
problem. "The thing that has kept the gorillas alive is that they are apolitical," Carlos argued.

      But early next morning Carlos got up and as he later told me, I said to myself I'm going. I'm
not going to be intimidated. They can kill me if they want, but it won't do them any good. We will 
resume the program.  So he woke up the  t.v. crew and took them to see the gorillas, except for
the producer, who said to me (I also have three little sons) "We know where our priorities are."
My feelings weren't hurt that I had been left behind. It was a crazy thing to do, une b‚tisse, as
Carlos himself admitted.  "Being with the gorillas was so beautiful that I forgot about the danger,"
the reporter told me. 

        Carlos is  "people first, then the animals. I am a natural conservationist, like any Swiss. As I
child I would go up in the mountains and sit still for hours watching the chamois and the
steinbach. If one little animal can be saved that will be useful later on, fine, but the people here
have nothing. They are desperate and are going crazy, and so are we. We need money badly. We
need everything. GTZ has been magnificent. They haven't cut off their support during all the war,
and they've had to scrap and redo budgets that they had worked out down to the last pfenig. But
I'm not going to fall to my knees and thank the UNF for this money. It's great, but by the time
you distribute it to everybody, it isn't going to making a different in their daily lives."

      How do you get rid of the Interhamwe, I asked. "First, you tell the truth about Operation
Turquoise,"  he said. Operation Turquoise was the mission launched by France to create a safe
haven in southwestern Rwanda during the summer of l994, when the genocide was mostly over.
But Tutsi continued to be slaughtered, even in the turquoise zone, and though French troops did
rescue some Tutsi, the real motive of the Elysee was to protect the ousted Habyarimana
governent whose chief ally it had been and to give the FAR time to regroup. It was only a two
month operation, and when hundreds of thousands of  Hutu poured into Zaire that fall, the French
waved through the high FAR command and the management of the genocide who were coming to
Bukavu from the turquoise zone  with trucks full of heavy artillery and all the money they had
cleaned out of the banks in Kigali, Carlos told me. "They only confiscated every tenth
Kalashnikov so it look like they were doing something. The UNHCR fattened these killers for two
years then unleashed them on us. In two generations the Congolais will realize that the U.N. has
been more evil and destructive to their country than King Leopold ever was." 
 
 

Go on to page7