- guardian.co.uk, Sunday March 4 2001 05.02 GMT
But disturbing evidence has emerged from the vast Kahuzi-Biéga park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that thousands of its most precious inhabitants have been slaughtered.
Undercover game rangers who have spent the past few months surveying the park have found that the country's civil war - financed by international trade - has now brought one of mankind's closest cousins to the brink of extinction.
Their reports point an accusing finger at the West, and particularly America, over its voracious appetite for coltan - a mineral, unique to the area, used in nuclear reactors, the aviation industry and electronics manufacture. It is this $1 billion export that has funded the country's civil war and has led to the near annihilation of its gorillas, say analysts.
As the head of the Kahuzi-Biéga park, Kasereka Bishikwabo, told The Observer last week: 'This is a coltan war now.'
The trade, and its resulting devastation, has infuriated conservation agencies, which last week called for an international boycott of the country's coltan, as well as gold and other minerals mined in the park.
'The civil war in the DRC has been driven by armies fighting for the country's mineral wealth, but there is no point in the West pointing a finger at the slaughter there when we are buying up the proceeds,' said Greg Cummings, executive director of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, the conservation group set up by the late primatologist. 'We have got to stop buying this stuff, and end the flow of money to these people.'
This point was backed by Ian Redmund of the international group Ape Alliance. 'What is the point of declaring the Kahuzi-Biéga park a world heritage site, as Unesco has done, when we do nothing to stop the destruction of its most precious component. Indeed, we are actually encouraging it by buying up the park's minerals.'
Of the world's three main types of gorilla, there are about 100,000 western lowland gorillas; a few hundred endangered mountain gorillas in Rwanda; and until recently about 8,000 eastern lowland gorillas, the largest of the sub-species. Typically, a male of the eastern lowland gorilla - or Gorilla gorilla graueri - has an average standing height of up to 5ft 9in and can weigh as much as 25 stone.
Until the mid-1990s, the eastern lowland lived in relative tranquillity in the Kahuzi-Biéga. Then the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia fighters responsible for the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda, fled their native land and took refuge in the park's uninhabited forests. They were promptly pursued there by their Rwandan enemies: the Tutsis, and the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD). A nationalist militia, the Mai Mai, has also joined battle with both sides. Initially, this three-way conflict wreaked mayhem. But now signs are emerging that all three groups have begun to collude with each other to pillage the park's vast mineral wealth.
According to Kasereka Bishikwabo, his undercover game rangers found that 'where there used to be gorillas, elephants, chimpanzees, they now found villagers. These people said they'd eaten elephant for two years but hadn't seen a track for six months. They also said they'd eaten a lot of gorillas and couldn't find any more, but they thought there might be a few left.'
Bishikwabo's agents spent two months in the park, fearful of being identified by the soldiers of the three different armies. They reported that more than 10,000 villagers had moved into the park to mine its lands but had brought no livestock with them and had planted almost no crops. Instead, they had relied almost entirely on bushmeat, the flesh of the local wildlife.
'They were hunting further and further from their villages every day until they stopped finding trails,' said one ranger. 'The villagers were mostly shooting the animals with Kalashnikovs provided by the park's armies.'
Bishikwabo concludes that all the park's 3,700 elephants must now have been slaughtered, and is not much more hopeful about the fate of the gorillas - a pessimism that is shared by Ape Alliance. 'There is a small area of Kahuzi-Biéga - about 10 per cent of the whole park - that is still controlled by wardens,' said Ian Redmund.
'Of the 258 gorillas that used to live there five years ago, only 110 are now left alive. In other words, more than half have been killed by the conflict - and that is in an area that is guarded by rangers. In the rest of the park, which is utterly lawless, we can only conclude there has been an uncontrolled massacre. Thousands of gorillas have been killed, I am sure of that.'
As a result, conservationists fear the eastern lowland gorilla has now been reduced to a rump of a few hundred animals, a number so low as to leave the species vulnerable to any outbreak of disease or slight climate change.
Nor is there any sign that the protagonists who have initiated this carnage show any signs of leaving. Coltan - or colombo-tantalite, as it is also known - is a precious hardening agent for metals used in a host of hi-tech industries. Africa has 80 per cent of the world's supplies, and of these, three-quarters are found in the Kahuzi-Biéga park and neighbouring land.
Dozens of dealers have clustered in the area, and are controlling exports sent out on Russian-built Antonov planes. These buzz the skies above the once tranquil park as they take off for Rwanda. From there, the coltan is bought by dealers in Europe and the United States.
'The people that deal in coltan, they're buying cars, building houses. It can make you rich,' said one dealer. 'It's abundant and easy to sell and here it is worth more than gold.'
Great news for dealers - but a tragedy for the eastern lowland gorilla.
