Photo: Ethan Baron

By Ethan Baron

Virunga National Park, Africa’s oldest, straddles a diverse region ofjungles, savannahs and mountains of up to 5,000 metres. It alsomakes up part of the troubled Democratic Republic of Congo, whereongoing wars have killed over five million people, the deadliestconflict since World War II. Yet life carries on. Ethan Baron reportson Earth’s most dangerous park ranger job.

Nyamulagira is roaring, exploding in fiery molten splashes and bone-shaking,

deep-bass thumps, blasting lava a half kilometre into the air. A new cone is rising

several hundred metres from the volcano’s main vent. Waves of heat and

sulphurous fumes from a huge rent in the cone pour across the hardened lava field

below. Crispy black cinders rain down. From within the eruption’s din comes a

slapping splatter of magma on the ever-growing cone: the sound of a mountain

Of Blood and Magma

More Stories

A man with a machete passes a UN military convoy on a road next to Virunga National Park. The UN’s force of20,000 in Democratic Republic of Congo, the largest peacekeeping operation in the world, has been unable to stopthe violence tearing apart the country’s east.

being born. It is January 2012.

Some day, maybe tomorrow, perhaps not for decades, Nyamulagira will fall silent.

Rain will erode the lava rock; soil will form. Grasses and shrubs will colonize the

cone’s steep flanks. Banana shoots will sprout from cracks, jungle trees and vines

will grow, then birds will appear, along with snakes, monkeys, chimpanzees and

even mountain gorillas, if the volcano grows sufficiently tall.

But this is eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and evil flows through this

beautiful land, horror distilled from genocide and war, from tyranny, greed, poverty

and hate, destroying nature, destroying people. In the villages, in the fields, along

the roadsides, trauma is written on nearly every face.

Some 200 of the world’s 720 remaining mountain gorillas live in Virunga.

IT IS 1982 and I’m lying in bed on a school day, burning with a mononucleosis fever,

while the outlandish, violent jungle scenes of the novel Congo are seething to a

hallucinatory intensity in my overheated teenaged brain: killer gorillas, laser-

sighted robo-guns, wicked plunderers of the earth, the burgeoning life force of the

jungle. I have no clue that in the country in which Michael Crichton’s tale takes

place, the US-backed colonel Joseph Mobutu has been busy transforming Congo’s

natural resources into a personal hoard worth billions and setting the stage for war.

I have no inkling that one day I will walk in the jungles where Crichton’s story is set,

in Africa’s oldest national park, the otherworldly and blood-soaked Virunga.

In eastern Congo, where the western arm of the Great African Rift cracks the

planet’s crust, equatorial life bursts riotously from the seam. More than 200 species

of mammal and 700 bird species dwell in the jungles, mountains and savannahs

within Virunga National Park, a wedge of land running 300 kilometres from north to

south within the rift, along the Uganda and Rwanda borders. Here, in one of the

largest and deepest biodiversity stores on earth, are mountain gorillas, lowland

gorillas, chimpanzees, lions, leopards, elephants and hippos. Here, too, is that other

ape, that species born along the very same rift, that bipedal hominid which

surpasses all creatures in the capacity to create and to destroy: Homo sapiens, the

beast called Man.

More than 200 species of mammal and 700 bird species dwell in thejungles, mountains and savannahs within Virunga National Park.Here, in one of the largest and deepest biodiversity stores on earth,are mountain gorillas, lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, lions, leopards,elephants and hippos.

Virunga National Park ranger Urbain Butsitsi is firing his Kalashnikov into the forest.

He hears long bursts of gunshots from the attacking mai mai militiamen concealed

among the trees and undergrowth, sees glimpses of human shapes. An arrow

whispers past, and another. A mai mai machine gunner opens up.

It is October 2011, and Butsitsi, 25, has been a full-fledged park ranger for three

weeks. Eight of his fourteen comrades now fighting six dozen militiamen are

equally green. But special-forces training for rangers is a key component of his

warden’s crusade to regain control of the park. While the mai mai spray wild salvos

from their assault rifles, Butsitsi’s is switched to single-shot, and he is firing with

care: “Bang, bang.” Slowly. “Bang, bang.” After five hours of fighting, three mai mai

are dead and the militia retreats.

Eleven Virunga rangers died in gunfights and ambushes in 2011 and another was

killed in May 2012; since 1995, nearly 150 have died. Along roads running through

and beside the park, militiamen murder several citizens a week during robberies.

But in a region infamous for brutal conflicts, a bright spot is spreading. Virunga

warden Emmanuel de Merode, a Belgian prince with a Ph.D. in biological

anthropology, is asserting control over broad swathes of the park, regions crawling

with militias either operating or protecting networks of poaching, illegal tree-

cutting and fishing, all while robbing, raping and killing at will. Against the armed

groups, de Merode has arrayed his new, slimmed-down, trained-up ranger army:

280 men, 84 of them aged 19 to 25 and hired in 2011. De Merode estimates he’s

taken back 80 per cent of the park, including large areas — and the park

headquarters — overrun by rebels in late 2008. Progress is bumpy. Until recently,

Virunga was at the epicentre of war for more than 15 years.

Under Mobutu, the park, founded in 1925, initially prospered. The dictator enjoyed

hosting heads of state amid Virunga’s beauty and wildlife. But Mobutu’s greed and

government corruption were drawing Congo toward collapse. Rebellions, then

wars, would devastate flora and fauna. Hippo populations plunged from 23,000 in

1989 to 11,000 in 1994. After the 1994 genocide by Hutus of Tutsis next door in

Rwanda, 700,000 Hutus fled a vengeful Tutsi army into Congo, spawning massive

refugee camps on the border of Virunga. Refugees cut up to a thousand tons of

timber daily in the park while poachers laid waste to wildlife for bush meat. The

animal biomass in the park’s savannah areas, once four times greater than in the

Serengeti, would plummet 90 per cent as conflicts continued. In the camps, the

Hutu génocidaires were reorganizing and rearming into the Forces Démocratiques

de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR).

IT IS 1996, and I’m standing with one foot in Uganda and the other in Congo, after

slogging six hours up the Uganda side of the 3,645-metre extinct Sabinyo volcano

at the junction of the Uganda, Congo and Rwanda borders. I am filthy, tired and

sweaty from climbing through montane forest, then scaling pitch after pitch of

rickety nailed branch ladders that reach upward through a fantasyland of freakish

giant lobelia spears and towering leafy-headed groundsels.

Thirty or so FDLR are now blasting at the outnumbered rangers.After 40 minutes of heavy fighting, the militiamen vanish into thejungle. The rangers have won the battle, but Badirushaka, a marriedfather of five, is dead.

From the rolling countryside of Rwanda to the south comes the distant sound of

artillery and a heavy machine gun, as Tutsi government troops battle Hutu fighters

bent on retaking the country. But it is westward toward Congo that I mostly gaze.

Below me lies the jungle of those waking mono-fever dreams. By now I know

Congo’s violence makes Crichton’s book look tame. And beneath the jungle canopy,

the First Congo War is about to begin. I’m on my first journalism trip overseas. I’m

not ready for war. Still, I feel Congo’s pull.

Fifteen Virunga rangers are deep in the jungle searching for a charcoal-making

operation. It is April 2011. In a region where nearly all cooking and heating is fuelled

by trees, the FDLR-run charcoal trade is worth tens of millions of dollars — $30

million in nearby Goma alone, de Merode estimates. Virunga Park supplies most of

Rwanda’s charcoal as well. As the ranger patrol climbs a hill, a voice shouts, “Who

are you?” and a Kalashnikov begins to fire. Ranger Magayane Badirushaka takes a

copper-jacketed slug in a buttock that tears into his abdomen. Ranger patrol

leader Sekibibi Bareke dispatches four men to carry Badirushaka away and try to

stop his bleeding. Of the 30 or so FDLR now blasting at the outnumbered rangers,

Bareke can see only three, but the direction of incoming fire shows the gunmen are

trying to surround them. After 40 minutes of heavy fighting, the militiamen vanish

into the jungle. The rangers have won the battle, but Badirushaka, a married father

of five, is dead.

After Rwanda’s new Tutsi government kicked off the First Congo War by invading

Congo in 1996, Rwandan soldiers and allied Congolese militias chased hundreds of

thousands of Hutu refugees from the camps and are alleged by the UN to have

Children in a squalid, cholera-ridden internal refugee camp in Rutshuru. Four months after this photo was taken,rebels burned the camp to the ground and drove the refugees into the jungle.

slaughtered tens of thousands, génocidaires and innocents alike. Mobutu was

overthrown in 1997 and Congolese rebel leader Laurent Kabila installed as

president. A year later, the Second Congo War erupted, a savage six-nation

squabble over the country’s vast mineral and timber wealth. Some five million

people died through violence, disease and starvation. Kabila was assassinated in

2001; his son Joseph took his place. Conflict waned in 2003, but Virunga continued

to suffer the depredations of armed groups and refugees who carried on

widespread poaching and forest-clearing. By 2005, only 900 hippos remained in

the park. Nineteen mountain gorillas were killed in five separate incidents in 2007.

In 2008, the forces of Congolese Tutsi warlord Laurent Nkunda swept through the

region. After overrunning the Congolese army base at Rumangabo, Nkunda’s

troops attacked the adjacent Virunga Park headquarters. Rangers fled into the

jungle. Nkunda was captured in early 2009. Renegade Congolese army general

Bosco Ntaganda replaced him. Fighting between Ntaganda’s militia and

Congolese troops led warden de Merode to evacuate non-Congolese

headquarters staff for a week in March 2012, and shut two ranger posts near the

mountain-gorilla sector two months later.

Virunga National Park rangers travel on high alert through an area frequented by murderous perpetrators of theRwandan genocide. In spring 2012, heavy fighting erupted once again between government and rebel troops. ByJuly, the park was closed to the public, temporarily, it is hoped.

In spring 2012, de Merode deployed his newest weapon against poachers and

militias. After a year of training, Virunga’s man-tracking bloodhounds went

operational in March, trailing poachers from an elephant killed for ivory. The

pursuit led to a firefight and seizure of four rifles left by the fleeing suspects. The

dog unit’s five hounds — two of them from Ontario — and the ranger dog team

have been trained by Marlene Zähner of Switzerland, arguably the world’s best

bloodhound trainer. Zähner, 52, spends two weeks every two months in the park,

honing the skills of rangers and hounds.

“Here it’s so dangerous that you really have to have everything perfect,” Zähner

says. Dogs and handlers are trained to find their quarry, then back off and let their

heavily armed ranger colleagues attempt capture. The hounds face significant risk,

and de Merode admits some may die. The dogs’ lives, like those of the rangers, are

on the line in the service of a critical conservation effort, the warden argues.

An alcove has been hollowed out of the embankment above a potholed dirt road

running north to Lake Edward. It is June 2011. The three rangers riding in a park

truck don’t see the FDLR until a gunman in the hollow opens fire. One ranger

escapes, one is shot in the head and left by the militia for dead. The third ranger

lies wounded in the road. Within minutes, a UN military patrol arrives at the scene.

The FDLR are gone. The ranger in the road has had his head cut off.

I see Kalashnikovs, another machine gun and a rocket-propelledgrenade launcher. I raise my camera toward the man. Then I lookinto his eyes and see hatred so fierce I am instantly certain if I shoothim he’ll shoot me. I lower the camera.

It is 2008, and I am in the passenger seat of a hired Land Cruiser, driving slowly

past a dreadlocked FDLR génocidaire draped in bullets and holding a machine

gun. He stands under a huge spreading tree by this dirt road on the edge of

Virunga. I have come up from Goma, a city sprawling over lava fields, where a

young woman in hospital has told me of being gang-raped and sexually mutilated

by men just like this one. Congo’s two multi-nation wars are over, but the east

remains a violent maelstrom, as FDLR, the Congo army, mai mai and Nkunda’s

rebels fight for dominance.

I’m riding in the middle of a four-jeep UN military convoy carrying sixteen Indian

Army soldiers armed with assault rifles and two mounted machine guns. Behind the

militiamen a half dozen fighters sit in the shade on the buttress roots of the tree. I

see Kalashnikovs, another machine gun, and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

I raise my camera toward the man beside the road. Then I look into his eyes, and

see hatred so fierce I am instantly certain if I shoot him he’ll shoot me. I lower the

camera.

On an early evening in February 2011, a truck carrying 15 rangers in the park’s

central region drives into a storm of bullets. Outgunned by the 30 or so attackers,

the rangers — three of them wounded — flee into the bush. A ranger search team

arrives after dark. They find all their comrades but one: Katchupa Changwi, a 40-

year-old married father of three. Changwi is seen leaping from the truck amid the

gunfire. He is found the next day. Shot in the calf, he had hobbled from the ambush

and bled to death overnight.

Mai mai are formidable and familiar with the terrain in which they operate, says

Gilbert Dilis, 52, a former Belgian parachute commando who served in Rwanda

during the genocide. But the FDLR, numbering up to 700 in and around the park

and with leaders from the pre-genocide Rwandan army, pose the greatest threat,

he says. “They have military training. They are in the jungles since 1994. They are

specialists of the guerrilla warfare. Every day and every time is dangerous here.”

IT IS 2012 and I am remembering Nyamulagira, and desolation in an old man’s

eyes; young gorillas spinning round on jungle vines, a gang-raped girl with her

bladder burst by a mai mai’s hand; liquid-gold sunrise on a swimming hippo’s

back, and the deadly promise in a gunman’s stare. I am remembering Virunga and

the people risking their lives to preserve it: Zähner, with the hounds; de Merode, the

prince obsessed; Dilis, who saw too much but still came back for more; and

especially the rangers, working, and dying, for $160 a month.

Maybe some day, not tomorrow, perhaps not for decades, the evil will be gone.

Share ‘Of Blood and Magma’

CONTRIBUTORS

Ethan Baron is a Vancouver-based journalist and photojournalist, recently departed from adaily-newspaper job to devote more time to work in foreign climes. Of Blood and Magma waspublished in the Winter 2012/13 edition of Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine, the RadicalIssue.

/

you@yours.com *

Holding Radical Ideas

Moore’s Code

Articles Archive

About

Sign up for new article news:

©2015 KMC Productions