A Report on the Four World Heritage Sites In Danger in Eastern Congo : 
Biodiversity Conservation in the Vortex of Civil War
by Alex Shoumatoff     

On August 20 of the year 2000, on assignment from the United Nations Foundation,  I set outon  a 25-day tour of  three national parks (Virunga, Garamba, and Kahuzi Biega) and one faunalreserve (Okapi) in the rebel-held  eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.  These four magicalpreserves are UNESCO World Heritage sites, and UNF is contributing $ 2.8 million, with another$1.2 million in matching funds verbally comitted from the European Union, to the heroic effort tokeep them going during the two civil wars that have ravaged the DRC (see glossary of acronyms) since l996. UNF had asked me to make an independent site report as the funds are about to bedisbursed.
       The magnificent primeval rainforests and savannas in these preserves are among  the last,  insome cases the last redoubts of some of the most extraordinary animals on the planet,  crownjewels of the animal kingdom like   the mountain gorilla,    the okapi (the secretive forest giraffewhich eluded scientists until l902), the northern white rhino (of which  only around 30 are left),and the  Congo peafowl (Africa's only pheasant, whose closest relatives are in Asia and whosediscovery in  l938  was one of the ornithological events of the century). They are also havens for aspectrum of rebels and renegades collectively known as "the negative forces," for whom theyprovide both cover and meat.  These include  ex-FAR, FAZ, and ADFL deserters (see Glossaryof Acronyms at the end of the piece); Interhamwe (the extremist Hutu youth militiamen who carriedout much of the l994 genocide in neighboringRwanda); Mayi Mayi (who are dedicated to driving out the Ugandan and Rwandan foreignersfrom Congo);  Ugandan NALU and ADF rebels from the  Ruwenzori Mountains (who predate thecurrent hostilities); and assorted non-alligned bandits. Joining them in the decimation the wildlifeare local poachers, miners of a rare mineral called coltan that is in great demand in the modern world,RCD, UPDF, and RPA regulars, SPLA deserters and regulars. 
        The guards in these embattled parks, having been disarmed and their radios, vehicles,and other equipment looted by the various armies that have swept through, are barely able to stem a smallpart of the poaching. Poaching is uncontrolled in most of  PNV, PNKB, both of whom have hadguards killed in recent attacks by negative forces, and a UPDF-RCD military operation has just gotten underway  to clean up the brazen poaching in RFO. The surveys of the animal populationsthat have managed to be conducted are extremely distressing : the hippo herd of Virunga Park,thirty-five thousand strong in l983, the largest in the world, now numbers 700-800. The elephantsand buffalo in Garamba have been cut in half, as have the lowland gorillas in the highland part ofPNKB (no one knows how many of the four to eight thousand gorillas in the Interahamwe-infested lowland part remain). Early this year the elephants were poached out of the highland partof PNKB.
       The UNF project, which PNG's Kes Frazer and RFO's Terese Hart spent more than a yeardesigning, unites the four parks under the prestigious political and diplomatic umbrella of theUNESCO World Heritage Convention, and  gives desperately needed teeth to their well-deservedclassification as places  of "outstanding universal value... for whose protection it is the duty of theinternational community as a whole to co-operate." It imposes a uniform conservation strategy foreach of these very different biotopes, so that the conservationists involved in their protection willbe able to compare notes, and the hope  is that it wil eventually serve as a model for biodiversityconservation in all zones of armed conflict. The highest priority being to stop the slaughter of thewildlife, most of the funding is going directly to the anti-poaching effort, to paying,  equipping,and giving paramilitary training to the embattled park  guards and rewarding them with bonusesfor work well done.  It provides a uniform   law enforcement and biodiversity monitoring systemfor inventorying the animal populations and mapping, with sophisticated computer graphics, themovements of the poachers, so the patrols can be   most effectively deployed.  There is somemoney for local community-based "participatory" conservation programs : investing the peoplewho live on the borders of the park in its continued existence and simply improving their lot, sothey can have alternatives to exploiting its resources. Finally, a sustainable funding mechanism willbe  sought to keep these initiatives going after the four-year project ends. The money will flowthrough the American and European ngo's who have been supporting the parks during this criticalperiod. The carefully thought out details are laid out in the 41-page document, with its threeannexes of charts maps.  

THE POLITICAL CONTEXT

          The parks have been in rebel territory since the outbreak of the second civil war in August,1998 split the country in two. Cut off from their administrative headquarters, the ICCN inKinshasa, they have been on their own except for the support of  international ngo's like WCS,GIC, WWF, GTZ, IRF, ICGP, and DFGF (do I have them all ?).  The rebels had belonged to theAFDL which overthrew the long-time dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in May, l997 (concluding thefirst civil war, known as the war of liberation).  Zaire became the DRC, and  Laurent Kabilainstalled himself as  president.   The following summer,  Kabila fell out with his former allies,particularly those of Rwandan or Congolese Tutsi ethnicity, against whom he declared a pogrom,and they launched the second civil war whose goal is to remove him. The RCD, consisting ofCongolese Tutsi and other Congolese opposed to Kabila and supported by Rwanda and Uganda,quickly took control of the eastern half of the country, but by the end of l998 they  had split intothree  factions  : RCD- Goma, which is backed by Rwanda; RCD-Kisangani and the MLC, both ofwhich which are backed by Uganda. RFO, PNG, and the northern part of PNV are in the RCD-ML, Uganda-controlled zone. The southern part of Virunga and Kahuzi Biega are in the RCD-Goma, Rwanda-controlled zone.
     In June a diplomatic mission consisting of Drs. Jean-Pierre d'Huarte and Terese Hartpresented the UNF's four-year project to the powers-that-be in Kinshasa, Kampala, Kigali, Bunia,Goma, and Bukavu. My mission was a follow-up : to guage how supportive the local authoritieswere to the project, and to the notions of   biodiversity conservation and protecting  worldheritage in general. I was also to ascertain the morale of the guards and the rest of the park staffand how effectively that were able  to do their job; to learn what I could about who was doing thepoaching, how much was going on,   how many animals are killed, and about civil war's and otherimpacts on the parks.  The subtext was, as UNF's Nicholas Lapham put it, we want to know ifwhat we're doing is  a good idea.  Other environmental foundations bale out when civil war breakouts in the areas they have been supporting.  Is our project going to work ?

SUMMARY 

      My conclusion is that this is probably the most useful and important money the UNF will ever
spend.  Eastern Congo is one of the flashpoints of the global struggle to maintain biodiversity.
According to a recent survey of mortality in eastern Congo by the International Red Cross, 1.8
million people have died in the last two years,  either directly or indirectly due to the second civil
war.  There are about the same number of idp's (internally displaced people) in the country at
large. The American Ambassador to Kenya, John Carson, told me in Nairobi, "the situation in
eastern Congo in the last two years is as bad as or worse than Sierra Leone. But no one is able to
get in, so the level of human-rights violations and sheer atrocity and human abuse of other human
beings is largely invisible. People are not systematically having their hands chopped off, but they
are being systematically killed with bullets and machetes." 
       No one knows how many animals have been killed in this anarchic situation. Like the humans,
there are animal refugees (elephants fleeing fleeing the mayhem in Congo to Uganda's Queen
Elizabeth Park), genocides of elephants and other species by former g‚nocidaires, and animal
marauders (elephants fleeing poachers to the safety of the villages have been  raiding the shambas
of Epulu, where RFO is headquartered).  The situation at PNKB is beyond critical : the day before
I got there a team that was mapping the park's boundaries was attacked by  Interahamwe. 9  were
killed and four taken hostage. PNV is if possible even more menaced by local and negative force
poaching and invasion by farmers and cattlekeepers. One guard was killed and another kidnaped a
few weeks before my visit in the relatively secure southern sector where the mountain gorillas are. 
The elephants in the RFO are being decimated by poachers armed by  RCD-ML and Ugandan
officers and by hunters for the coltan mining camps.  The RFO guards don't have the arms or
training  to confront  the poachers, and haven't had any alternative but to turn tail when they meet
on a jungle path. But the early results of the military operation are promising.  Perhaps they will
be able to turn the situation around. PNG, with the least local population pressure and no resident
negative forces and an organized and motivated anti-poaching program, is in the best shape.  As
we flew over its savanna,  Kes and Fraser Smith spotted four new rhinos, and the indexes of
poaching activity  fresh carcasses,  shootouts  are down in the last few months.   But this
could change at any moment, if  the civil war in DRC or the long-standing one in neighboring
Sudan takes a turn for the worse, and the next army sweeps through.
        The bad news is that Congo is probably going to keep disintegrating. It won't be sorting
itself out anytime soon,  because neither Kabila nor any the three rebel factions have the military
strength, popular support, or  leadership  to unite its 450 ethnic groups. The civil  war will drag
on,  anarchy will prevail, and in the absence of any rule of law or unified military control, the
negative forces, not to mention the relatively positive ones   the local people with little access to
other sources of  protein or income   will slaughter many more animals. . 
        The good news  is that in each of these parks a dedicated team of guards,  conservators, and
expatriate scientists and wildlife managers (known as the coop‚rants) is  putting their lives on the
line for these irrepleaceable species, and they deserve and desperately need all the support UNF
and anybody else can give them, not to mention the gratitude of mankind. They are genuine
heroes.   Which is not to say that they do not have their differences in ideology, personality, and
expertise. Congolais-Congolais, Congolais-coop‚rant, and coop‚rant-coop‚rant lines of tension
were in evidence at each of the sites,   accentuated by the stress of ominipresent personal danger..
There are those who believe that the animals come first, and that  the limited resources available
from international sources should be devoted to keeping them from being exterminated. And
those who believe that the people come first, and that the animals will never be safe  unless you
improve the conditions of the people who live around the parks. Some are focused on anti-
poaching, some on social programs, some on long-term baseline scientific research and training a
new generation of Congolais conservationists, some on immediate, practical conservation
measures. But all these approaches are equally valid and important and ultimately complementary,
and the remarkable people who struggling to protect these priceless sites  have a great deal  to
offer and learn from each other. The beauty of the UNF project is that it provides a framework for
them to do so. 
       The most impressive quality of the project's collaborators to me was their courage and their
commitment.  "If I have a run in with the negative forces, c'est l'horoscope," one told me.
"Chacun a sa chance,"  said another, while a third mused about a life-threatening undertaking,
"And if I die, just bury me somewhere in the forest." High risk is part of this job description. You
can expect  to be wiped out, to have everything you have worked for completely destroyed and to
have to start again at zero, and to have to flee for your life at least once if you're contemplating a
career in conservation in this part of the world.  I think there is an unwritten code among this very
special breed of conservationists, a sort of Hippocratic oath that they all take to themselves : no
matter how bad it gets, you don't give up. 

GOMA

       The Congolais collaborators call RFO's Terese Hart, PNKB's Kes Frazer, and PNV's
Annette Langouw les femmes de fer,  and before I crossed the border into the RCD at Gisenyi,
Rwanda, I stopped to pay my respects to Ross Carr, one of the prototypic courageous white
women in central Africa. (See my book, African Madness, pp. 32-33) A radiant soul now in her
eighties, Mme. Carr was a close friend of and undoubtedly a role model for Dian Fossey. She
came to Rwanda in l949 and has lived there ever since except for when she had to leave during
the genocide.  She still has her flower farm in the hills of above Lake Kivu, she told me, but now
she is devoting herself to her orphanage on the shore of the lake, where she takes care of 100
children whose parents were killed during the madness. She knows them all by name, and each of
their stories. 
       That evening in Goma I met with Dr. Vizima Karaha, the chief of security and intelligence for
RCD-Goma. After Mobutu's overthrow by the AFDL, Karaha became Kabila's foreign minister, 
the youngest foreign minister in the world, he told me. (We met in Kinshasa in May, l997, as the
ADFL came in. See my article, "Mobutu's Final Days," Vanity Fair August l997). But he is a
Munyamulenge. The Banyamulenge are Tutsi pastoralists who came from Rwanda, in the case of
Karaha's family eight generations ago, and settled on the high plateau above Uvira, on the
western shore of LakeTanganyika, and on the plains between Masisi and Rutshuru. But they and
the other Congolais tribes of Rwandese "expression," collectively known as Banyawranda, are
permanent foreigners, of "dubious nationality," and have never been accepted by the rest of the
Congo as one of them. Karaha was poisoned and barely survived, and after Kabila turned against
the Banyawranda, he joined the RCD. Saving the animals and protecting the parks is clearly not a
priority of any of the three rebel factions, who are focused on winning the war, but Karaha
realizes the importance of these populations and their habitats to the international community, and
he pledged to help the project in any way he could, starting with an offer to provide me with a
military escort when I returned to visit PNV in two weeks. 
          Since the second war began, Karaha told me, 30,000 Rwandese Hutu have been
repatriated from North Kivu, and 8,000 from South Kivu, but there are still many Interahamwe
and their hostages in the region, thousands more in PNV and PNKB. His position, like that of
many Congolais I spoke to, is that the United Nations and the Americans created the problem by
failing to separate and disarm the Interahamwe and the ex-FAR in the refugee camps, so it was
their responsibility to solve it. In the fall of l994, hundreds of thousands of Hutu, fearing reprisal
for the genocide they had just committed from the advancing Tutsi-dominated RPA, poured over
the border at Goma, and were settled in 4 refugee camps that were kept going for two years by
the UNHCR and humanitarian ngos. The Interahamwe and ex-FAR ran the camps and launched
attacks from them in Rwanda and on the local Banyawranda, until October l996, when the
Banyamulenge with the help of the RPA broke up the camps. Most of refugees poured back into
Rwanda, but the hard-core g‚nocidaires fled west with hostages, and the RPA pursued them,
bent on revenge. Tens of thousands were massacred around Kisangani, but thousands installed
themselves in and around the parks and have still not been captured and are wreaking havoc on
the animals and the local people. As the RPA pursued the g‚nociadires, they slaughtered many
innocent Congolais. In August, l998 Kabila's troops had a retaliatory pogrom of all the Tutsi they
could get their hands on, which was followed by more massacres of Congolais by the RCD as it
retook the eastern half of the country. So the hatred of Rwandans in eastern Congo, the
humiliation many citizens feel at being occupied by "Nilotics," (most of Congo's 450 ethnic
groups are Bantu) at this point is unbounded. One the project's Congolais collaborators has a
theory that the UN and the Americans are so guilty about having done nothing to stop the
genocide or to disarm the refugees that they have given Rwanda the Congo in retribution.
      The outcome of the civil war depends on whether Kabila and his allies are able to keep the
rebels from taking Mbandaka. If Mbandaka falls, Kinshasa is next. Southeast of Mbandake is the
36,000 square-mile Salonga National Park, the largest protected tropical forest on earth, home to
the pygmy chimanzee or bonobo, the Congo peafowl, the forest elephant, and the slender-snouted
or false crococile. Salonga is also a beneficiary of the UNF project, but being in the government-
held part of Congo and so far relatively unscathed by the war and very difficult to get to, it is not
in the purview of this report. But when the fight for Salonga begins in earnest, Salonga could be
in serious danger. 
 
BENI

       The next morning, August 21, I flew over PNV to Beni, which is in the RCD-ML zone,
overland travel from Rutshuru to Kanyabayanga not recommended. There had been several recent
incidents of  Interhamwe burning vehicles and killing their passengers. Anti-Rwandese sentiment 
was running high in Beni and expressed more openly than in Rwanda-controlled Goma.  I asked
local agent of TMK, the airline I had flown in on,  what happened to the 33,000 hippos in the
park and he answered wryly, "We have replaced them with Tutsis, the species that you support." 
      The slaughter of the hippos began when Mobutu's unpaid soldiers mutinied at the end of l991
and turned their weapons on the huge herd and forced the dried  meat on the local people, making
them buy it at gunpoint. "Before that our people had never had a taste for game," I learned from 
Kambale Kisuki, the RCD-ML's Adjunct Commissar of Infrastructures. (All the high officials are
commissars because as the vice-commissar of defense Thomas Luhaka later explained to me in
Bunia, "We are still in the struggle. If we get the country we will become ministers.".) 
Kisuki is a very good man, and a very important one for the future of the parks. Having worked
for WWF for eight years at RFO, he is a dedicated conservationist. But he is also a savvy
politician who knows how to navigate the unstable politics in this zone and get things done.
Kisuke had just repaved the main street of Beni and built a beautiful new wooden bridge across
the Epulu, a photograph of which he had reproduced on his calling card.
      At the moment, he told me, there were 13,000 refugees in Beni who were fleeing NALU and
ADF rebels who had swept down from the Ruwenzori, the fabled Mountains of the Moon. 
The negative forces around Kanyabayonga, on the western edge of the park,  had driven 110,000
i.d.p's  toward Lubero, and a major humanitarian crisis was looming as it was impossible to get
food aid to them. Poaching, encroachment, and banditry are unchecked in northern sector of the
park, which extends above Lake Edward, and the central sector down to Rutshuru, as the guards
are not armed or paid and have no vehicles and it is impossible for them to make patrols. Only the
guards guarding the mountain gorillas in southern sector are paid by IGCP, the ones in north
haven't seen a paycheck since the wars began and "morale is very low. They are in la misŠre
totale and pas motiv‚."  The Shango-Kaviniango section of the park on the western side of the
lake is completely destroyed by Nande who have planted shambas. Several thousand  Hema 
cattlekeepers from Uganda, and escorted by UPDF, have invaded north of the lake at Karuruma.
(I would learn more about conditions in PNV on my return to Goma, see page 26 ff..)
      I also spoke with  an assistant conservateur from Maiko National Park named Valentin
Kambale-Kipiri Dilere, which has been completely abandoned. Maiko is the southern extension of
the Ituri Forest, and it has okapi, too, as well as thousands of  lowland gorillas and how many ?
Congo peafowl. It was proposed as World Heritage Site but kind of fell through the cracks,
because there was no in situ coop‚rant like the Harts or the Smiths to push it through.  The Harts
are trying to rectify this situation. Dilere told me that there is "no morale in Maiko. The guards
have scattered." There is a relict population of several hundred Simbas in the forest. The Simbas
were the nativist-primordialist Maoist rebels who during the Mulele rebellion of l963-5 killed
whites and anybody with glasses, or a pen in their shirt pocket who was therefore tagged a
westernized ‚volu‚. The young Laurent Kabila was one of their commanders. The Mayi Mayi are
their idealogical decendants. The rebellion was put down by equally horrible European
mercenaries. In the early 90s a Congolais collaborator of the Harts who was trying to find out the
density and distribution of the okapi, elephants, and gorillas in Maiko, was kidnaped by some
Simbas. He was traded for a sewing machine. Dilere told me that most of the Simbas had just
surrendered to the RCD and were in Beni, being rehabilitated and recruited into the army. "We
wait along the Simbas' paths for them to come out of the jungle for food," Dilere went on. "I
killed many of them with my Uzi."

THE HAIRY TRIP TO EPULU

      Kisuke said I better get going if I wanted to make Epulu by nightfall so I hopped on the back
of a motambusi a motorcycle taxi, also known as a pici pici, which was actually a flashy red
dirtbike,  driven by a 20-year-old named Patrique. We took off for Epulu down a slick red mud
track speeding through villages, that was all that was left of the old Belgian colonial road. The
road was, as Patrique put it,  impracticable. We passed a truck that had been mired in mud for
two days. A team of shirtless barefoot men digging it out. The driver was sitting in his cab in a
spanking white outfit. It is specified in his contract that he doesn't have to dig. Women had
materialized with food. It ws a whole little scene.
       In the days of the Belgians Congo's roads were so smooth that the Belgian road
superintendent would speed down them with a glass of water on his dashboard, and if a drop
spilled, the local sous-chef in charge of keeping up that section would get a beating. When I
passed through here 19 years ago, the roads were already in a state of advanced deterioriation.
Now they were completely abim‚es. Mobutu hadn't kept them up because he wanted to make it
as difficult as he could for anybody to get to Kinshasa and overthrow him. This had its positive
side.  From the point of view of keeping down poaching and lumbering, Mobutu was a great
friend of the conservation effort. 
      Patrique expertly skirted gaping holes and threaded knife-edged ridges between pools of
water, flailing away with his black rubber booted feet at the passing ground, not wasting a second
or making a wrong move, as if he were in a race. The villages became fewer and farther between
the walls of trees and scrub. By 3:30, south of Tetuye,  we topped a rise and had a view of a vast
magnificent virgin rainforest spreading for miles to the west, huge trees well over a hundred feet
tall. The Samboko forest. It was filled with poachers, and several vintages of deserter, ex-FAZ,
ex-FAC, and ex-RCD, who preyed on the villagers at night and on the rare motambusi that passed
through. I didn't know this, but few days earlier Innocent, one of RPO's employees, had been
stripped and cleaned out. And GTZ's Karl Ruf would be relieved of some of his goods along here
a few weeks later. But our horoscope was propitious. We reached the Ituri River, passed pygmy
women, black and white colobus monkeys streaming through trees, little zones of deafening full
throated birdsong and insect din, fifty-yard stretches of delicious aroma. I began to feel the magic
of one of the most cut off and inaccessible places on the planet. 
     After seven hours we reached Mambasa. It was too dark to continue. Fireflies were glancing
off the vizor of my helmet, and the sky was blazing with stars. We stopped at the Italian mission.
A good meal and a soft bed would be good about now, but it was not to be. The padre came out
and said he had visitors from Italy and was full up. He suggested the Hotel Des Pygmies, which
was beyond ratty. There was  one single bed on a concrete floor which Patrique and I shared. In
the morning I had to deal with the local immigration official, a man named Fredu who had been
there since Mobutu. "Vous ˆtes dans ma domaine migratoire," he declared, and tried to hit me up
for a $40 permis de s‚jour." I talked him down to twenty. He didn't have a pen to enter my name
in his little ledger and tried to pocket the one I lent him. The old cleptocratic ways die hard. "The
first to break the law are les responsables," one of RFO's administrators told me. "Fredu is one
of the old Mobutu people and it's not a touch of a magic wand that's going to change them. From
May 97 to August 98 the state functionaries were paid by Kabila. There was security and the
maintenance of the roads. People were starting to respect the authority of the state. Now there is
nostalgia even for Mobutu." Those contemplating giving aid to the Congo should bear in mind
that officials like Fredu are not the exception, but the rule. To understand how Congo got that
way, Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost is required reading. It has been since its creation
as the Congo Free State by the king of Belgium for the plunder of its ivory, rubber, and other
resources,  a shell state, a "half-made country," as V.S. Naipaul has called it, whose purpose is to
enrich whoever is in power, or as in the present moment, whatever neighbors are occupying it,
and their backers. 
     "You'll like Epulu. The okapi meat is delicious," Fredu told me, and one of his associates
offered me an ivory statuette of a nude that he said he had carved himself. 

EPULU
 
     We set off for Epulu.     The beginning of the rains had brought out butterflies galore. Big
tailless papilios with blue wing bars (Papilio nireus ?) were puddling in the moist sand. The last
lepidopterist to work here, John Douglas of the Field Museum, for a few month in l989 , found
three new species. The lepidofauna of the Ituri Forest was no less spectacular than it was when I
passed through here in l981 and is waiting for some ballsy lepidopterist to take up where Douglas
left off.  After three hours we crossed Kambale Kisuki's beautiful new bridge over the huge,
swollen Epulu River gushing through the forest. 
      On the other side of the bridge is the RFO headquarters, the old Okapi Capture Station of the
Belgians. It is a hauntingly beautiful spot, a version of the Garden of Eden or the Emerald Forest.
The old colonial buildings were trashed by Mobutu's retreating soldiers in l996, then by the
armies of both civil wars. They have been rehabilitated and added to by GIC and WCS and the
compound is very shipshape and impressive, an island of order and sanity in a sea of chaos.
Young Congolais intellectuels looked up and beamed from computers, a talented artist showed
me his cartoons of okapi, elephants, and soybeans for educational comic books. An old guard
named Abedi Morishu recognized me immediately from 19 years ago, remembered that I was the
one who walked through the forest from Nduye to Epini for tens days, and had spent a few days
at the station with the Harts. (My book In Southern Light, pp. 116-181, relates my trek through
the heart of the Ituri Forest and lays out a lot of the natural history and ethnography).
          I met the conservateur en chef, Jean Joseph Mapilanga, an extremely competent and
intelligent man who is "something we can work with," Terese Hart told me, and a great
improvement over some of his precedessors. Mapilanga has been at Epulu since l995. He told me
grimly, "In the 14 years I have worked for ICCN, the last year has had the worst conditions. Ivory
is being poached and coltan is being mined in our face. There is no authority. We have only ten
guns  eight Kalashnikov AK 47 and 2 Mozed 30's and 40 guards, ten of whom are too old to go
on patrol, and we need 250 guards and many more arms. We are having a major elephant
poaching crisis and there's nothing we can do about it."

      One of the old guards led me through an allee of 100ft Terminalia trees to the stone house
where Karl Ruf was staying, and where I would be quartered for the next four days. The Harts
had left in early August. It was a great shame that we didn't overlap, but I had visited them in
Booneville, on the other side of the Adirondacks from where I live, in July and we have been in
close touch since my return, and I was delighted to make the acquaintance of. Karl. He grew up in
Adelboden, in Switzerland's Berner Oberland. I spent many summer of my childhood in
Kandersteg, in the next valley. We had climbed many of the same peaks and passes so I knew
exactly where he was coming from. He has the humility, simplicity, and generosity of the
oberlander, and is a very special human being,  in my book, a fantastic guy. 
      Karl trained to be a zookeeper in Basel and was hired by Mobutu to put together his zoo in
Gabdolite, which he spent four years doing. In l983 he and his wife Rosie, traveling around Zaire
on their vacation, drove past the derelect Okapi station. Grass was growing through the floors.
      The history of Epulu  is very interesting and I suggested to Mapilanga that someone should
collect it while the last people who remember Putnam and Turnbull are still alive. A booklet like
the superb one WCS did for Rwanda's Nyungwe could be put together, laying out the natural and
human history and the ethnology of the Ituri Forest, and sold to tourists, once tourism resumes. 
In l991 8,000 tourists came to Epulu. Since then there has been barely a trickle.
 
     Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam, 1903-53, was of old Brahman stock and according to Helen
Winternitz  "a great eccentric.... beset by bouts of genius and madness. He was also an
anthropologist ruined by dilettantism who never published any substantial work on the pygmies,
although he eventually gathered a vast store of knowledge about them." Arriving in the 30s,
Putnam founded a scientific research camp and hotel. He had a clinic where he vaccinated the
Mambuti pygmies and the local Bantu Babira farmers with whom they live in symbiosis. He
captured an okapi to show his guests. Putnam's Bambuti were inherited by the American
anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who wrote the classic "The Forest People" and visited Epulu on
off through the early seventies. In l979 came the Harts, a great young American couple, he to
study pygmies and okapis, she a botanist. John has boundless energy and infectious enthusiasm
and a deep love and understanding of the pygmies and the African mindset.  Terese has a sharp,
sophisticated scientific mind and an good overall picture of the multiple interacting forces
impacting the parks. Administrative, diplomatic, and political skills not  found in many natural
scientists have blossomed in her  decades of struggling for the RFO.  The prospect of working
with the Harts was one of the reasons I took this assignment.  The Harts lived in Putnam's old
house, on the other side of Epulu   and raised their children there. When I visited them 19 years
ago, we all took a swim in the river, right where in l994?  their daughter's tudor had  her arm
bitten off by a Nile crocodile, which have grown in size and number, perhaps migrating down
from the Nduye, in the l990s so that swimming in the Epulu is not such a good idea any more. 
       The Okapi Capture Station was founded in l952 by a man named Medina , to provide okapis
to zoos, and there was some effort to domesticate elephants and farm Nile crocodiles. Nearby was 
an elegant hotel  that expatriates in Kisangani thought nothing of driving to for the weekend. The
same trip today takes weeks. The Okapi Station was abandoned during the 64-66 rebellion. The
Simbas ate all 28 of the okapis. When Karl and Rosie Ruf passed through in l983, they thought
what a great idea it would be to fix the place up and get it going again. "We knew all the zoos
were interested in fresh okapis  there were only 70 in a captivity   so we got them to invest in
a conservation project where in situ and ex situ you protect the animal in the wild," Karl
explained. "12 zoos in the U.S. and 8 in Europe are contributing $5000 each a year which is used
to breed okapis here and to provide infrastructure like new guard posts. Three of the okapis are at
GIC's White Oak Plantation in Florida. San Diego and Brookfield and Cincinatti zoos have sent
their females to breed with them, and the whole consortium decides where the babies go.
Wupperdal in Germany, for instance, has too inbred males so we are sending them  a fresh one."
       GIC has been paying the guards $50 a month, with bonuses, $42 of which will now be paid
for by UNF, freeing up the GIC to fund pensions for the retired guards, to recruit new guards,
and to improve conditions for the people in Epulu, of whom 1500, the dependents and extended
families of RFO's employees, local merchants, etc.,  Karl estimates already benefit from the
$26,000 a month that GIC has been bringing in. Until his death a few years ago, the 60 pygmies
on GIC's payroll would send paper baron turned conservationist John Gilman their thumbprints in
gratitude  at Christmas.
       In 1996 Mobutu's retreating soldiers looted $300,000 of vehicles, radios, and other
equipment at the station. Karl stayed till the last moment and barely escaped, jumping into a
friend's plane in Mombasa with a jeep full of FAZ in hot pursuit. Things calmed down, and Karl
returned to pick up the pieces. In August 98 he had to bale out again. This time he was picked up
by Frazer Smith. 
       "In the last five  months," Karl told me, "the elephant poaching has gotten completely out of
hand. Congolais deserters and regulars in league with the local chefs coutoumiers are doing most
of it, but Ugandan officers are also involved. The soldiers keep the ivory, and the chefs keep the
meat, so everybody is against the park.  Some of the poachers are given arms and shells by the
Congolese military to hunt for them. Shabani, a good hunter, is known to buy his shells from
soldiers. There is a big secret trade in guns and ammunition in the territory."
       Elephants have always been hunted in the Ituri Forest. Traditionally pygmies ran up under the
elephant and plunged  spears into its belly. With the advent of the Kalashnikov, during the Mulele
rebellion, it became possible to mow down an entire herd with the squeeze of a trigger and the
carnage escalated exponentially. When I flew into Isiro in l981 there was a huge stack of tusks
lying on the runway, waiting to be loaded. They belonged to one of Mobutu's officers. One of the
local Balese men who took me into the forest for eleven days was planning to start a little store in
his village with the proceeds of the tusks he had paid some pygmies to get for him. Killing an
elephant was then, and still is, one of the few ways to get ahead. Then with the IUCN's ban on
international trade ivory in l988, the poaching fell way off.  But in the early 90s there was a gold
rush, and  huge mining camps sprang up that were provisioned with elephant meat. Now the gold
was just about gone, and everyone was digging for coltan. There was a camp with several
thousand miners at Badendaido, 60 kilometers to the west. Soldiers were selling them elephant
meat.  10 of the top RCD command in Mambasa were instigating a lot of the poaching. 
      Mapilanga showed me the latest report on poaching in and around the park from March to
August, illustrated with maps that displayed a high order of computer-graphics expertise. 16 stars
marked the hot spots : where there were reports of signs of poachers or contact between them
and the guards. Two were elephant carcasses found within ten km of Epulu. Elephants fleeing the
poaching were coming out of the forest and raiding the shambas, and someone had shot them.
Who was "not yet elucidated," Mapilanga told me.   Diagonal slashes marking intense poaching
activity etched the roads along the southern and eastern borders of the park,  and part of western,
halfway up to Wamba; scored most of the center of the park and spread southeast three quarters
of the way down along the Mambasa-Beni road that I had come up on. 
      The only solution, it was becoming increasingly clear, was a full-scale military operation to
clean up the poaching. It would have to be headed by Ugandans, because it if was only RCD it
would be too tempting for them not to join in on the braconnage. To this end, the UPDF
commandant in Bunia, Colonel Angina, had been approached, and he was receptive to the idea. 
While I was there, the RF0 management met in an emergency session and had their final debate on
whether to go ahead with the operation. The protectors of the park were already none too
popular in certain quarters, and if they started to come down on the chefs coutoumiers and the
guys with the guns it could be very dangerous for them. But it was either that or lose the
elephants, and what were they there for ? In the end everyone at the meeting  voted uninamously
and without hesitation to go ahead with the operation. 
       The plan was to hire 40 soldiers, both UPDF and RCD, for three months.. GIC would foot
the $15,000 bill. The ten corrupt RCD commanders in Mombasa would be replaced, and the thirty
soldiers under them, who brought them the ivory from the poachers, would be recruited into the
anti-poaching force. If necessary the soldiers could be kept going with rations for a year.  The
ultimate goal was to establish the permanent presence of an authority with the threat of deadly
force. The first targets were the hot spots, the 16 stars. Mapalinga had the names of the most
notorious poachers. They would be arrested, and their guns would be given to the guards. "We
need 30 automatic weapons and 3000 shells," Mapilanga told me. "The northern part of the park
has never been controlled. We need stations at Wamba and Digbo, and to get five guards,
working 15-day shifts, back to Moto Moto, as they did before the debut of the second war."
Moto Moto is a village in the heart of the forest whose main raison d'etre, when I visited it 19
years ago, was to sell bushmeat to Wamba, and still is.
      The latest news from Karl Ruf, who is back at White Oaks,   is good (I phoned him on
October 20) : 30 soldiers reached Mambasa, the corrupt ten commanders were out of there, and
in two days two guns, 150 kilos of ivory, and two of the big poachers had been captured. 
***
      At 5 a.m. on Monday the 23rd I went into the forest  with Robert Mwinyihali, the
administrator of CEPRECOF,  partner of WCS, and Terese Hart's right-hand man, an extremely
intelligent and dynamic young Congolese intellectuel. Robert is coordinating the zoning of the
villages around the park, a vital but massive task, with the help of a $65,000 grant from USAID.
With us was  a forester named FidŠle, who knew the scientific names of many of the plants and
obviously loved his work. We passed some huge thickets of native bamboo that had been
trampled flat by elephants who eat the young shoots.   14" high white mushrooms that were not
edible. "They'd make your tongue hang out," FidŠle told me.  Others equally tall with brown stars
on their caps. The mushrooms are as unstudied as the butterflies. The pygmies eat many species,
including a species of chantrelle  which they call kebekebe and eat raw, especially when they have
no store salt because it has a salty taste. We found masses of kebebeke under some
Gilbertiodendron  trees. They looked indistinguishable from the orange chantrelles of the
Adirondacks and the steinpils of the Alps. How what appeared to be the same mushroom could
be growing here is one of the many mysteries of the Ituri Forest.  I gathered some and cooked
them up for dinner and they were scrumptious. Some edible species from the Ituri Forest are sold
in Beni and Butembo. I suggested to Karl that with a small investment in a dehydrator you could
sell little jars of dried mushrooms labeled picked by the pgymies in the Ituri, proceeds going to the
World Heritage Site in danger, for ten dollars apiece easy, and he said, "Maybe by the time
stability comes we can think of such things." 
    We passed some chimp nests. There are 13 species of primate in the RFO, and eleven species
of duiker, the dimunitive forest antelope, some noctural, some diurnal. FidŠle pointed out the knee
prints of a  elephant, a solitary old male,  that had slept there, then slid ten feet down the path. 
In l995 John Hart estimated that there were 5688 elephants in RFO's 7200 km2, or .79 per km2,
greater than the density of Maiko or PNKB. But he wouldn't hazard a guess as to how many
there are now. He has been contracted to monitor the elephant populations and illegal killing in
Cameroun, Gabon, and Congo for CITES. RFO, PNG, and PNKB are also on CITES's official
danger list, and Hart will be working closely with UNF's biodiversity and law-enforcement
monitoring programs, and will soon have a better idea of the impact of the poaching in RFO. 
About a hundred elephants are known to have been poached, but the actual number is probably
much greater. This part of the forest was a maze of fresh elehphant trails. The okapis, of
which Hart estimated there were 3456, are more elusive and are probably faring better.
     This "ellie," as a delightful Englishman I met in Garamba calls them, had come to eat the
young saplings of saplings of Gilbertiodendron dewevrei, which the pygmies, for whom it is  an
important honey tree, call mbau.  The mbaus, in the Caesalpiniaceae family of the legumes,  are
among the grandest and most ubiquitous trees in the forest and are also an important source of
timber. Their eight-inch pods, which supposedly kept Henry Morton Stanley's Emin Pasha Rescue
Expedition from starving when it passed through the Ituri Forest in l887, and broad brown leaves
littered the forest floor. 
     We reached the research camp at Lenda from which CEFREKOF's botanical team has been
studying two ten-hectare plots, in which Gilbertiodendron is dominant, since l994. (Two other
ten-hectare plots of mixed forest elsewhere are also under study.)  The research is funded mostly
by WCS and is shared with the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Tropical Forest Science,
which has plots around the world. "We census everything that's woody from one centimeter in
diameter up," Robert explained. "We were the first to include stranglers and lianas. We have
found 689 species in all four plots, of which 242 are lianas  more than in Panama and India, but
fewer than in the Amazon and some parts of Malaysia." Recently a tree in the Sapotaceae family
and in a genus previously found only in South America was discovered. The girths of 1000 trees
in a 20 by 100 meter transect are regularly measured to get an idea of their carbon intake rate, and
the flowering and fruiting times of 434 individual trees  in both plots are being recorded with the
help of the pygmies, who have their own names for all the 40 species to which they belong. 
This basic information will enable the researchers to understand the movement of the ellies and
other animals in the forest, and in the process of gathering it a new generation of Congolais 
conservationist is being trained. 
      The researchers had already left for the study plots, and rather than try to hook up with them,
we decided to return via one of the coltan mines in the forest, which was several hours'
bushwack. Terese has been gathering information on the coltan mining and its impact on the
wildlife in RFO and PNKB and suggested I pay a visit to one of the carri‚res. We are both
interested in learning the extent to which what is going on in Congo is a resource war in the guise
of a civil war. A pygmy named Asani, whose father Kenge was immortalized by Turnbull, led us
through the maze of elephant trails (many of them culs-de-sac) and pygmy honey trails. We
surprised a troop of Colobus badius monkeys at a salt deposit. There ae about 10,000 pygmies in
the Ituri Forest, one of the largest populations in the world, and to me they are as great a treasure
as the wildlife. The Bambuti are allowed to  hunt duikers and facochŠres (which are what Terese
?) in the park with traditional methods, nets and snares, to feed their families. Asani had helped
John Hart pit-trap and radio-collar 20 okapis in l988-90, which provided the first scientific
information about their range and habits. Like what ? 
      We announced our arrival at the mining camp by whooping and  banging a stake against the
thin, flaring buttress of an Eko julbernardia tree. The camp was called Bomalibala, Lingala for the
camp that causes divorce, because "any woman who comes here puts her hearth in danger," one
of the miners told me. There was a  barrier manned the camp's militia, teenagers with carved
wooden machineguns. It was a colorful scene, a village of thatched-mangungu-leaf shanties and
smokey fires, on which women, many of them young and pretty, were cooking dried fish and
beans. Most of the men were off mining coltan. The chief was passed out from drink and unable
to see us, but his porte-parole, his spokesman, told us that there were about 150  residents in the
camp. The miners were mostly autochthonous Babira, but there were some from Bafwasende.
The girls came from all over  Banande, Babudu, Babale, Balese, Bandaka. Some stayed a day or
two, some stayed longer.  They came with sacks of food and cooked for the men and danced and
drank and slept with them and departed with little plastic bags of coltan. The miners made little or
nothing for their labor, which is also the case with the people who kill the elephants.  The
spokesmen showed me a bagful of  heavy, irrisdescent-black flakes and nuggets of the metal,
which was worth $25 to $30 a kilo. The Harts had found buyers from South Kivu in this camp.
This was top dollar, I later learned, so the coltan must have been pretty pure. Once it reaches
Epulu, it is taken by the kumba kumba, the small traders who push bicycles laden with produce
and pedal and coast down the muddy tracks for several days  to Beni and Bunia. Some of it goes
to Kampala, some to Kigali. Where it ends up, and how much it is worth when it gets there, was
something that Terese and I were eager to learn. "We don't know what it is for or where it goes,"
the spokesman told me. "We are mining it because gold is scarce. This is not a village of family
ties, but of mutual interest. We have an established order, a commandant and our own police.
Thieves and sorcerers are rejected. We don't accept the killing of okapis or elephants, but
sometimes soldiers come with elephant meat, and we are obliged to accept it. The people at the
station want us to leave, but to go where and do what ? We can't support ourselves by growing
food or fishing because the roads are abim‚es. More and more of us are leaving our villages and
going into the forest in the quest to survive."
      There are about 50 such camps in the RFO. As we walked back out to Epulu, we came across
half a dozen men who were digging up a streambed and shoveling the alluvium into halved-log
sluices. The destruction was appalling but confined to 50 yards of the streambed which would
probably recover after several rainy seasons.  A hard-working miner could make $15 a day at this
even he didn't give his coltan to the women  big bucks in this part of the world. 
***
     Karl Ruf gave me a tour of the station's well-stocked and manned dispensary, the experimental
plots of nitrogen-fixing legumes with which the villagers will eventually be able to prolong the life
of their shambas and thus reduce the pressure on the forest, the cane-rat breeding program,  the
beautiful new school GCI had built, the springs that provided water to the villages that GCI is
cleaning up, the overgrown airstrip that he had cleared in l995 and was applying to the authorities
in Bunia for a permit to reopen. One of Epulu's chief, whose name was Bakotila, gave me a
different tour. He took me to the village's empty dispensary, at one time but no longer supported
by an Italian ngo,  where a young man, down with malaria,  was trying to ride out his splitting
headache. "The people demand care, but there is no medicine, no pay for the nurses or the
teachers, because the state has no means," said Bakotila.. We called on Kenge, who was prostrate
with grief because his wife had been killed a few weeks earlier by a falling tree in the shambas, and
visit the pygmy camp of Mayanimingi. The women had acquired a taste for pots and metal
cooking ware since my last visit, but otherwise their happy-go-lucky way of life seemed little
changed. They danced for me, and all too soon it was time to leave Epulu.
       Considering the pressures on RFO, morale among its protectors is remarkably high, although
the collaboration of certain individuals could be better.. The only complaint I heard is that funds
are not getting to the site in an expeditious manner. The emergency funds promised by UNESCO
in January, l999 have yet to arrive. 
 

BUNIA

       I was not looking forward to the  next leg of my journey  getting to Bunia, the capital of
RCD-ML. Prior to my departure the UN's IRIN bulletins (an invaluably detailed source of day-to-
day conditions in the DRC) reported that  inciviques believed to be NALU rebels and/or ex-FAC
deserters were assaulting vehicles traveling from Beni to Bunia at Mufutabangi and abducting the
female passengers into the bush. And there was also heavy banditry by a band of mixed deserters
along the 60 km. stretch from Mambasa to Lolwa, which is particularly abim‚e. A kumba kumba
had had his dried fish and his bicycle stolen a few days earlier, and a woman had been abducted
from a motorcyle. Plus 400 UPDF soldiers coming west on the road from Bunia, perhaps to
reinforce Bemba in Equateur, and they would certainly not let such a windfall as a mundele
(lingala for white) on a motorbike pass without relieving him of at least some of his goods.
Mapilanga thought it would be safer  to return to Beni and fly to Bunia, and he didn't get any
argument from me. Getting in and out of RFO in one piece is a serious problem, and I am with
Karl that the airstrip should be reopened. But the strip has to be controlled by the park. If
undesirable parties like Kabila's soldiers are trying to land, empty oil barrels can be rolled out.
Terese is worried that the reopening of the airstrip would require the presence of RCD soldiers
who could cause problems,  that it could be used to get resources like coltan and ivory out like
the five strips in and around PNKB. The security on the ground from Beni and Bunia, she argues,
is a personal problem, not the park's. But sooner or later somebody is going to be not just robbed,
as Karl was a few weeks after I left, but killed, and that will not be huge loss. It was Karl who
said, "And if I die, just bury me somewhere in the forest." 
      Karl instructed me how to behave should I be waylaid : in one pocket, you have your first
offering. If the bandits are not happy with that, you produce your second offering. If they still
want more, you let them have it. Under no circumstances should you resist. They would have no
qualms about killing you on the spot.
      Passing back through  Mambasa, I called on the interim administrator of the territory, 
Nyamabaku-dudu Marc. After telling him that I did not appreciate being shaken down by his
colleague Fredu, I asked if he thought the existence of the  RFO was a positive thing.  "We can do
nothing," said Nyamabaku-dudu. "It is an organism that has been around for many years." As for
the UNF's project, he assured me, "We are here to cooperate. We are open." Are there any plans
to do something about the poaching ? (I was sworn to secrecy about the joint operation with the
Ugandans. Colonel Angina had said if word gets out that the RCD command in Mambasais going
to be removed it could backfire badly, and the deal is off.) "We hear some chefs coutoumiers are
involved and we are investigating," he told me.  "The population and the deserters of Mobutu,
Kabila, and Wamba are hard to control, because we don't have much of a unified strike force, but
we will send a report to our superiors and they will  tell us what to do. Why hasn't the
conservateur sent us a report on the coltan mining in the park ? It's been going on for six months.
The miners are possibly put up to it by les exterieurs." Who told them the stuff was valuable ?
"Maybe buyers in Mambasa, Bunia, and Beni. The miners say they have no alternative, and it's
true."
        On the trip back down to Beni we passed fifty pygmies dancing.  At Luemba the RCD
commandant for the region, or so he identified himself, flagged us down and commandeered two
litres of our gas for his motorcycle. He made me open my bag, hoping there was ivory in it that he
could confiscate, and instead found my small traveling guitar  which he took a fancy to. I said I
need that and you can't have it and it you bug me any more I'll tell Wamba, whom I'm on my way
to see." "Don't threaten me with Wamba," said the commandant. "He does nothing for us. Kabila
gave us $100 in the beginning, but Wamba has never given us anything. On se d‚brouille."
        In the end, he contented himself with the gas, and we sped on until we reached Kambale
Kisuki's house. A dozen women were sitting on the back porch, knitting silently, the Beni knitting
club.  Rosie Ruf had taught them. 
        Kisuki's gave me some hard-hitting questions to ask Wamba, and in the morning, just as he
was about to take me to the airport, some Ugandan soldiers came in a truck and took him away.
"It's good that you're seeing this how we are treated," he said as they drove off. His driver
explained,  "Wamba ordered all the ministers to Bunia where he can keep an eye on them and
Kisuki refused." Kisuki was in the camp of Mbusa Nyamwisa, Wamba's former prime minister
who was now trying to overthrow Wamba along with his former finance minister, John Tibasima. 
Mbusa controls Beni, Tibasima controls the Ituri district.  A few weeks earlier Tibasima had
fomented a mutiny of the Third Battalion, which is mostly Hema, a tribe of Nilotic pastoralists
whose 70-year-old land struggle with the Bantu agriculturalist Lendu has for the first time turned
genocidal, with 7,000 killed last year, perhaps in an aftershock of the big atomic genocide in
Rwanda six years ago. The battalion went to the forest demanding Wamba's removal, accusing
him of being tribalistic and anti-Tutsi. Wamba dia Wamba is a Mukongo from Bas Congo. Kisuki
spent a few days in jail and was released. A few days later Mbusa and Tibasema launched a putsch
against Wamba with some of the local Mayi Mayi, but were beaten back by the UPDF.
Subsequently they all appeared to have kissed and made up, but the latest (as per Oct. 25 IRIN
bulletin) is that the situation is spiraling "out of control" according to Wamba . Colonel Angina
has been transferred to Wamba's chagrin (and what does this means for the operation in RFO ?),
and Ugandan officers supporting his rivals and erstwhile deputies Mbusa and Tibasima have taken
the airport and the radio station. 

NO GAS IN BUNIA
      I flew to Bunia that morning, the 27th. The taximan had no gas. We ran out after a quarter of
a
mile, then his battery gave out, and finally the whole vehicle started rattling violently and it took
an hour to get to Morgan's, the European-style guest house.  Morgan (a Congolais who was
adopted by a Belgian named Morgan) had had four Toyota 4/4's, with which he had taken tourists
to Epulu, but had been looted by Mobutu's soldiers, and the guest house was trashed. He was
rebuilding his life little by little. "We live dans un pays Western," he told me.
     Morgan is a useful contact and ready to be of help. He introduced me to his cousin, Thomas
Luhaka, the RCD's gentle young vice-commisar of defense, who  came from the diaspora like
most of Wamba's entourage. He was teaching law at the University of Paris II. Luhaka went to 
Wamba and returned with the news that "the professor will see you at 16:00."
      Luhaka had no gas, either, so we walked to the sparsely furnished mansion, out on a spur,
where Wamba stays. Wamba knew my work. "He says you are a grand journaliste who writes
things that are justes," Luhaka told me. I had given an enthusiastic blurb to his son Phillippe
Wamba's book, Kinship, about Afro-Americans' quest for their African roots, and had sent word
through Phillipe that I hope one day we would meet. I found Wamba to be much as Robert
Mwinyihali described him :  "calm and  very intelligent. He understands problems intellectually
and puts them in their theoretical context, but he is an academic, not a politician. He says he who
kills the environment is committing suicide, but  he has no means to intervene. Most of his
entourage thinks the forest is there for quick enrichment." Wamba struck me an ivory tower type
who is surrounded by warlords. He would make a great rector of the university but will never be
president any more than Ilunga, a weak puppet of the Rwandans, will. He spent from l981 to l998
as a professor at the University of Dar Es Salaam teaching African historiography and the history
of  imperialism worldwide, including colonialism and neocolonialism. He was the chairman of the
meeting that created the RCD in August 98, but by the following May he was eased out by a
putsch in Goma and created his own faction. We talked for four hours.
I left with the impression that he has no illusions about his presidentiality and is genuinely
interested in promoting an inter-Congolese dialogue in which everyone sits down at the table and
works out their differences and decides what the new state will be. "Congo's traditions are
democratic," he told me. "The Bakongo king was elected by a small college which chose one his
predecessors numerous nephew, so it's wasn't hereitary in a sense. Where there wasn't a king, the
villages had palavers. There wasn't a real chief with real power, it was more egalitarian. Everyone
sat in the baraza and had their say, and the elders empowered the chief to take action. But then
the Belgians made the chiefs the executors of their corv‚e and other exactions, and they became
petty tyrants." What Wamba wanted to see was two parliaments. One would be an ethnic
parliament, in which each of 450 ethnic groups, no matter how big or small, had the same vote,
which could decide on how to resolve ethnic questions like  the Hema-Lendu problem, for
instance, could rule who came first and who is entitled to what. Then there would be an elected 
chamber for matters of national scope.
       I observed that  the UNF project offered a golden opportunity for the three rebel factions to
collaborate on an issue of mutual concern, which might lead to greater cooperation and
reconciliation, and for their soldiers to channel their energies into something positive and
patriotic. Wamba agreed. I pointed out that the forests of Haut Congo are some of the last
relatively intact primeval rainforests on earth, and that it would be a mistake to exploit them
prematurely, because they were money in the bank. The trees would only keep growing and
become more valuable, and the next generation of reserachers would have much more
sophisticated means to decode the DNA of the plants, etc.; perhaps the cure for AIDS or cancer
was waiting to be discovered in some fungus. "We have to discover a way of living where we are
not disturbing much of the forest and at the same time are living allright," Wamba said.  What
practical modalities do you plan put in place to support the UNF project ? I asked. "We will give
guns and training to the guards and control the illegal arms circulating and reintegrate the
deserters. We need Uganda for a while. In Lusaka [the accord of August, l999, in which the
belligerents except for Kabila agreed on a plan for ceasing hostilities and in the case of the foreign
allies, withdrawing from the country],  they have responsibility for maintaining security until we
resolve they should go. Once a liberation movement takes power, if it doesn't change the politics
of armed struggle the tendency will be to resolve problems violently. Once you have soldiers
outside their country for a long time and no politicians on the terrain to keep them in line the
temptation to steal by force is very great. This very tempting area. There has  to be some political
element that emphasizes the duties of soldiers." 
       I praised  Kambale Kisuke to the skies and asked Wamba what he thought of him. "Kisuke is
one fellow we want to keep in the new circle," he said. "Usually we have somebody who deals
with the dossier. If need be we could appoint a specific person to liaise with UNF and the parks.
Kisuke is fine with me. We could appoint some high officer to investigate the d‚gats of the
soldiers. That we could do." I should point out that Kisuke was not angling for such a position,
nor did I suggest him. The idea just came out in conversation, but it may not be a bad one.
      I told Wamba about a recent discussion I had had with Al Gore about Africa. Gore told me
about a physicist called Prirogine who won the Nobel prize for a new law of thermodynamics
which pertains for open systems (in which the energy flows in and out). When the energy becomes
more than the system can handle, it breaks down, and simultanously  a new, more complex system
starts to develop. This process of "creative destruction" is what Gore thinks is happening in the
environment (excess co2 is wreaking havoc with existing climate regimes and weather patterns),
and in Africa, where the "state," an invention and an imposition of the Europeans, is breaking
back down into smaller, more meaningful ethnic and tribal groups. Wamba found this take
intriguing. "One has to consider what form this principle of themodynamics expresses itself  in
terms of society," he said. "If you look at the breakdown of Mobutuism : his notion of geopolitics
was that each group can gather its  fruits and nature, which gives the fruit, will deal with the
maintenance. But here an open system needs feedback and maintenance. In places where there is
not enough space or resources for everybody, the notion of who was here first becomes the ruling
principle, so the 'Banyawranda' have become the cause of everything, and the tribal units Gore
may be thinking of are not really there."
       Even Wamba's car had no gas, and another one had to be brought around to take me back to
Morgan's. 
***
     Lusaka came to see me in the morning. He, like Kisuki, is a very good guy, the most sensitive
African minister of defense I've ever met and someone the project can work with. Lusaka
remarked that the Congo's civil war was a relatively soft one, and were it not for foreign troops
intervening and in fact coming to blows themselves [viz the UPDF and RPA's embarrassing
firefights in Kisangani] it wouldn't be lasting so long. "The province of Ituri is unique because it
has all four ethnic groups, Bantu, Sudanic, Nilotic, and pygmy," he told me. "The Tutsi  can be
Congolais, Rwandais, Ugandan, Burundian, or Tanzanian. We call them all Banyawranda. The
Banyamulenge Tutsi were massacred by Mobutu and since the state didn't protect them they feel
they have to control the apparatus of state. But we say to them you should support the republican
Congolais who considers nationality a juridical, not a biological notion. All Bantu are not
Congolais just as all Tutsi are not Congolais. They are a bit everywhere. That is Wamba's notion.
The RPF should help us reestablish the authority of the state, the army, and the administration,
and at that point the Republicans can guarantee the rights of all Congolais. Fred Rwigema (the
founding leader of the RPF, who was killed on the first day of its invasion of Rwanda, in October, 
l990) was a republican. He was for le Rwanda pour tout le monde and he was killed by extremists
in his own movement.
     "The replacement of the corrupt RCD command in Mombasa must be accompanied by a big
campaign of sensibilization of the population, and this where we need your help," Lusaka
continued. "To sensibilize them about the importance of protecting nature and conservation. The
population doesn't understand that okapis constitute a great treasure for them. Kenya, Egypt, and 
Turkey exist in great part thanks to  money from tourism. If we have peace and the roads are
rehabilitated tourists will bring much money to Epulu.  I am privileged to be a Congolais because
I will leave to my children an inheritance that neither Rockefeller nor Onassis nor Picasso have left
to their heirs. Neither Rockefeller nor Picasso left them okapis, white rhinos, and mountain
gorillas. It's inestimable as a heritage. If I can make these animals multiply I will be proud of my
life."
      I called on Faustin Lola Lapi, the Commissar of Agriculture, Rural Development, Fishing and
Forests, which also deals with tourism and the environment. The Commisariat occupies the first
floor a former commercial building partitioned into small cubicles and is obviously sans moyens.
Then I met with the governor of the province, Ernest Uringi Pa-dolo. "We're behind UNF 100%
if you're coming to protect our richesses," he told me. "We will protect your security and the
biens you are bringing. We deplore the absence of a radio-phone at Epulu. It would be great if
some coop‚rant brought the means for us to communicate with them." I said it would be great if
the insecurity along the roads from Mambasa and Beni could be taken care of. "We have one
jeep," lamented the governor. "And our other vehicles can't leave the city, so there is not much
we can't do about it." The funds that could have purchased more 4x4's were absconded with by
Mbusa and Tibasima. The coffers of the RCD-ML are empty. 

GARAMBA
     Morgan's son drove me to the airport at 3:00. Kes and Frazer Smith, who were coming from
Nairobi, were right on time in their single engine what kind of plane belonging to the Frankfurt
Zoo. With them were their children, Doungu and daughter's name ?, and their British friend
David Simpson, a freelance editor who works mostly for UNEP and couldn't have been nicer. (It
is Simpson who calls elephants "ellies" Frazer had brought along some mosquito canopies which
he distributed to the customs and immigration people in return for their not inspecting what else
was in the plane. Even so, it took 45 minutes of haggling and palavering before they let us out of
there. Frazer, a short, stocky South African in his forties wearing shorts and sandals and a khaki
shirt with epaulets, was obviously a pro at this.
     Just as we were becoming airborne, two tanks with  Ugandan soldiers in their cockpits,
looking ultra-cool with shades and with cigarettes dangling  from their mouths,  patched  out of a
hangar adjacent to the passenger building and took off at full tilt down the road into town, tearing
it to pieces. Looking back on it, the coup against Wamba may have already been starting. We got
out of Dodge none to soon. 
     Just of Bunia are the Blue Mountains, where serious inroads are already being made into the
valuable timber (Entandrophragma sp. and Khaya ), and there is I believe some extremely
interesting geology, and after them the landscape is almost undisturbed by humans. There are only
a few huts and shambas and purposeful tracks through the ecotone where the eastern edge of the
Ituri Forest gives way to savanna, and the more numerous, less purposeful tracks of ellies and
other large mammals, meandering through a jumble of granite knobs, koppis as South Africans
call them. We flew over pure rainforest of some stature frothing over a rangelet and along a
gleaming ribbon of water meandering beneath it I spotted a clearing with maybe half a dozen little
domes of thatched mangungu leaf and no shambas   a pygmy camp deep in the forest. Then
Watsa appeared off to the west, where there was recently an outbreak of Mahrberg virus at 
Dodo, the main gold mining camp. 
      "We're lucky we don't have the same kind of human pressure as Virunga or Kahuzi Biega
do," Kes said over the headphones. The tsetse fly is a large part of the reason why there is still a
lot of wildlife in the savannas of central Africa.  Kes is a reserved, intense, extremely capable and
focused and determined red-haired  Englishwoman without an ounce of body, a real-life Katherine
Hepburn, definitely a femme de fer, and the down-to-earth, supremely practical  Frazer is her
Spenser Tracy.  I could see why Frazer and Karl have a great friendship. Kes and Frazer met in
Botwsana, where Frazer was a ranger in one of the parks. 
      Kes started out in Africa as a zoologist examining slides of hippo flesh for parasites, then she
participitated in Ian Douglas-Hamilton's continent-wide elephant survey, in the course of which
she realized that the rhinos, being far less numerous, were  urgently in need of being located and
protected. She originally thought that she would work in the national parks of southern Sudan,
where there were several hundred northern white rhinos, Cerototherium simum cottoni 
 left. But by the time her grant money, from WWF Holland, was in place, the civil war between
the SPLA and Khartoum spread into the parks and all the rhino were completely wiped out, or
there could be one or two left. So Kes switched her field of study to PNKB, where the last viable
population of the subspecies is hanging on. 
      We crossed the Kibali River, which runs into the Nzoro, which is in the Congo drainage; the
Congo-Sudan border follows the divide between the Nile and Congo basins. North of the Kibali
begin PNG's domaines de chasse, where the local people-- Logo, Azande, Baka, Mondo, Kakwa,
and Lugwara   are allowed to do subsistence hunting with traditional methods  spears, snares,
nets. If they use a firearm, which not a few of them do, it becomes poaching. In the old days,
European and American trophyhunters paid big bucks to bag a buffalo or a hartebeest in the
domaines de chasse. There are some shambas in the domaines. They are technically not allowed,
but tolerated.  The three domaines of mixed savanna-woodland are zones tampon, buffer zones,
for the park itself, which begins  north of the Nagera River. A 4600-km2 island of long-grass
savanna dominated by the Loudetia arundinacea and Hyparrhenia species, with no trees except
the occasional Combretum or sausage-tree that has taken root in the bare circle of a washed-away
termitarium and the gallery forest that lines that crevices and fissures of the well-watered, spring-
rich open plain. This was the very geographical center of the continent, "the bright heart of
Africa," as Alan Root calls it in his splendid documentary of PNKB, to counter the negative
stereotypes (Conrad's "heart of darkness," Stanley's "darkest Africa") that have taken hold in the
Western imagination. Big herds of large animals roam in the grass which was now 6 feet tall. 
. The reason for the existence of this island of grass in a sea of trees is debated : is it natural, or
was it cleared by fires set by the local people in the past, or due to the high ellie density which
keeps  saplings from getting anywhere, or a combination of the three ? There are now roughly
6000 ellies, give or take a thousand. In l983, when Kes started working in PNKB, there were
7,500. There was a big wave of elephant and rhino poaching throughout Africa from 1973-84,
and by l985 the PNKB ellie population had hit an all-time low of 4,500. By l995 it had rebounded
to 11,000. Then the civil war came, and it was cut in half. Now it is growing again. Similarly the
buffalo, 25,000 strong in l995, were reduced to 8,000  in early l997, and are now back up to
13,000, (there wasn't as much poaching in the second war), and the hippos have gone from 3,500
to 800 to 1000, and the rhinos have gone from 29 to 26 to 30. The giraffes have gone steadily
down, however (from 178 to 144 to 118), as have the waterbuck (1700 to 1400 to 1100),