Post by Bozur on Apr 2, 2005 16:01:45 GMT -5
War and Politics Threaten Congo's Endangered Rhinos
Kes Hillman-Smith and Fraser Smith/International Rhino Foundation - Garamba National Park Project
Congo's northern white rhinos in Garamba National Park get their name from the Afrikaans word weit, or wide, which describes their mouth.
By MARC LACEY
Published: March 28, 2005
EPULU, Congo - If the endangered northern white rhinos are driven to extinction, which many experts predict, it will be politics, and not just poachers, that finishes them off.
With fewer than a dozen still alive in the wild, the northern white rhinoceros is considered by conservationists to be the most endangered large mammal on earth. Besides those found in zoos in San Diego and the Czech Republic, where they have not reproduced well, the rhinos are believed to exist only in Garamba National Park, a rugged place near the border with Sudan that is full of wildlife and lush vegetation but also men with guns.
"I do not believe that any rhinos will survive the year," predicted Thomas J. Foose, program director at the International Rhino Foundation, which is based in the United States and has been working for years in Garamba, the last refuge for the northern white rhino. The immediate culprits, according to conservation groups, are poachers from an offshoot of the janjaweed, the Arab militia groups that have been pillaging villages in the Darfur region of Sudan. Rather than attacking people, these militias are on a mission to make money. They steal over the border to kill elephants and rhinos, leaving the carcasses and taking the valuable tusks and horns, which are carried back in long donkey trains.
These militias have proved particularly violent and, as a result, difficult to combat. But the greatest threat to the rhinos is political, specifically a growing Congolese nationalism that has undercut protection efforts, including a last-ditch program to move five of the remaining animals to safety in Kenya.
That plan set off an anticolonial uproar, with opponents likening it to the days when Congo exported its wealth to European nations, by force. Rumors circulated that foreigners were buying up the rhinos at low prices, paying off corrupt officials and spiriting the animals out of the country. One newspaper in Kinshasa, the capital, described the Western conservationists as "modern-day poachers," and Congolese politicians seized on the white rhino as a symbol of national pride, off limits to exploitive outsiders.
A decades-old Western-financed project to train and pay Congolese park rangers to fight off the poachers was abandoned after similar accusations surfaced that the Westerners were stealing the animals and selling them abroad, a charge that the Western conservation groups strongly deny.
"It is sad that politics, not poaching, will probably kill these rhinos," said Emmanuel de Merode, who was running the European Union project before it was shut down. White rhinos, known scientifically as Ceratotherium simum, weigh up to 6,000 pounds and are the second-largest land mammal species, behind the elephant. They get their name not from their color, experts say, but from the Afrikaans word weit, meaning wide, which was used to describe their mouths.
South Africa has a white rhino population of about 11,000, making them the most abundant kind of rhino in the world. But the going has been much tougher for the northern subspecies, which used to be found in several countries in eastern and central Africa.
The animals' decline has closely tracked Congo's chaotic past. There were anywhere from a thousand to several thousand of them when the country, then Zaire, gained independence from Belgium in 1960. Their numbers fell steadily over the decades, partly because of a long civil war in neighboring Sudan. As two armed insurrections ravaged eastern Congo in the 1990's, the population plummeted to around 30.
Other unique animals found in Congo have managed to endure the fighting. The population of mountain gorillas, also found in neighboring Uganda and Rwanda, has actually grown in recent years. The okapi, a bizarre-looking relative of the giraffe that is found here in Epulu, about 150 miles south of Garamba, is hanging on.
The fact that the northern rhinos survived this long is the result of an international conservation effort, now collapsed, that for decades had supported Congolese rangers, who had acted as bodyguards for the rhinos. The rhinos' horns are a valuable prize, sought after in Asia for their medicinal value, and in the Middle East, where they are carved into dagger handles.
The latest troubles began in 2003, with the outbreak of the Darfur conflict and the appearance of the Arab militias, which presented a new, more organized and far more deadly threat than did previous poachers. Last year, two South Africans who had been brought in as trainers for the rangers were wounded in their first clash with the poachers.
Three French security experts were then hired by the European Union last fall to lend the experience they had gained fighting poachers in the Central African Republic. But the last of them pulled out in recent weeks in the furor surrounding the failed attempt to send five of the animals to Kenya.
That deal, struck in January between conservationists and officials at the Congolese Institute for Conservation of Nature, was intended to give the rhinos a chance to breed in peace. The plan was to return them to Congo sometime in the future, to a more stable park.
"We believed the translocation of the rhino to a more secure locale in Kenya was absolutely vital," Mr. Foose said in a telephone interview from Indonesia.
But that plan is now as dead as the rhino carcasses that have been turning up regularly in Garamba.
Vice President Abdoulaye Yerodia had indicated that the government would support the plan, conservationists say, but there are four vice presidents in the country's transitional government as well as numerous ministers from an array of parties. Rarely do they agree on anything, and this was no exception.
Before a deal had been signed, groups like Fauna and Flora International and the International Rhino Foundation began trumpeting the relocation in press releases. Some Congolese politicians saw that as presumptuous.
"There was no official decision on this," said the information minister, Henri Mova Sakanyi, in a recent telephone interview. "There was a suggestion. Nobody should be announcing a government decision until there is a government decision."
With the prodding of political leaders, Congolese began to see the long-neglected rhino as a symbol of sovereignty that ought to remain on Congolese soil, dead or alive.
To make their point, angry residents living near Garamba grabbed machetes and joined mutinous rangers in roughing up the small group of foreigners working there. They disarmed the French security officers and briefly detained Kes Hillman-Smith and Fraser Smith, a couple who have worked for decades at the park, which Unesco has named a World Heritage Site.
Mr. Sakanyi said the government was hoping donors would put the same resources that were set aside to move the animals - more than $1 million - into protecting them in Garamba. "This country has to show that it is a sovereign nation able to protect its own wildlife as well as its own people and its cultural heritage," he said.
But conservationists, who maintain that the government has shown little commitment to the animals in the past, are wary about pumping money into Congo's notoriously corrupt government. The losers in the dispute are the rhinos, which remain for now "at the mercy of the poachers," Mr. Foose said.
Kes Hillman-Smith and Fraser Smith/International Rhino Foundation - Garamba National Park Project
Congo's northern white rhinos in Garamba National Park get their name from the Afrikaans word weit, or wide, which describes their mouth.
By MARC LACEY
Published: March 28, 2005
EPULU, Congo - If the endangered northern white rhinos are driven to extinction, which many experts predict, it will be politics, and not just poachers, that finishes them off.
With fewer than a dozen still alive in the wild, the northern white rhinoceros is considered by conservationists to be the most endangered large mammal on earth. Besides those found in zoos in San Diego and the Czech Republic, where they have not reproduced well, the rhinos are believed to exist only in Garamba National Park, a rugged place near the border with Sudan that is full of wildlife and lush vegetation but also men with guns.
"I do not believe that any rhinos will survive the year," predicted Thomas J. Foose, program director at the International Rhino Foundation, which is based in the United States and has been working for years in Garamba, the last refuge for the northern white rhino. The immediate culprits, according to conservation groups, are poachers from an offshoot of the janjaweed, the Arab militia groups that have been pillaging villages in the Darfur region of Sudan. Rather than attacking people, these militias are on a mission to make money. They steal over the border to kill elephants and rhinos, leaving the carcasses and taking the valuable tusks and horns, which are carried back in long donkey trains.
These militias have proved particularly violent and, as a result, difficult to combat. But the greatest threat to the rhinos is political, specifically a growing Congolese nationalism that has undercut protection efforts, including a last-ditch program to move five of the remaining animals to safety in Kenya.
That plan set off an anticolonial uproar, with opponents likening it to the days when Congo exported its wealth to European nations, by force. Rumors circulated that foreigners were buying up the rhinos at low prices, paying off corrupt officials and spiriting the animals out of the country. One newspaper in Kinshasa, the capital, described the Western conservationists as "modern-day poachers," and Congolese politicians seized on the white rhino as a symbol of national pride, off limits to exploitive outsiders.
A decades-old Western-financed project to train and pay Congolese park rangers to fight off the poachers was abandoned after similar accusations surfaced that the Westerners were stealing the animals and selling them abroad, a charge that the Western conservation groups strongly deny.
"It is sad that politics, not poaching, will probably kill these rhinos," said Emmanuel de Merode, who was running the European Union project before it was shut down. White rhinos, known scientifically as Ceratotherium simum, weigh up to 6,000 pounds and are the second-largest land mammal species, behind the elephant. They get their name not from their color, experts say, but from the Afrikaans word weit, meaning wide, which was used to describe their mouths.
South Africa has a white rhino population of about 11,000, making them the most abundant kind of rhino in the world. But the going has been much tougher for the northern subspecies, which used to be found in several countries in eastern and central Africa.
The animals' decline has closely tracked Congo's chaotic past. There were anywhere from a thousand to several thousand of them when the country, then Zaire, gained independence from Belgium in 1960. Their numbers fell steadily over the decades, partly because of a long civil war in neighboring Sudan. As two armed insurrections ravaged eastern Congo in the 1990's, the population plummeted to around 30.
Other unique animals found in Congo have managed to endure the fighting. The population of mountain gorillas, also found in neighboring Uganda and Rwanda, has actually grown in recent years. The okapi, a bizarre-looking relative of the giraffe that is found here in Epulu, about 150 miles south of Garamba, is hanging on.
The fact that the northern rhinos survived this long is the result of an international conservation effort, now collapsed, that for decades had supported Congolese rangers, who had acted as bodyguards for the rhinos. The rhinos' horns are a valuable prize, sought after in Asia for their medicinal value, and in the Middle East, where they are carved into dagger handles.
The latest troubles began in 2003, with the outbreak of the Darfur conflict and the appearance of the Arab militias, which presented a new, more organized and far more deadly threat than did previous poachers. Last year, two South Africans who had been brought in as trainers for the rangers were wounded in their first clash with the poachers.
Three French security experts were then hired by the European Union last fall to lend the experience they had gained fighting poachers in the Central African Republic. But the last of them pulled out in recent weeks in the furor surrounding the failed attempt to send five of the animals to Kenya.
That deal, struck in January between conservationists and officials at the Congolese Institute for Conservation of Nature, was intended to give the rhinos a chance to breed in peace. The plan was to return them to Congo sometime in the future, to a more stable park.
"We believed the translocation of the rhino to a more secure locale in Kenya was absolutely vital," Mr. Foose said in a telephone interview from Indonesia.
But that plan is now as dead as the rhino carcasses that have been turning up regularly in Garamba.
Vice President Abdoulaye Yerodia had indicated that the government would support the plan, conservationists say, but there are four vice presidents in the country's transitional government as well as numerous ministers from an array of parties. Rarely do they agree on anything, and this was no exception.
Before a deal had been signed, groups like Fauna and Flora International and the International Rhino Foundation began trumpeting the relocation in press releases. Some Congolese politicians saw that as presumptuous.
"There was no official decision on this," said the information minister, Henri Mova Sakanyi, in a recent telephone interview. "There was a suggestion. Nobody should be announcing a government decision until there is a government decision."
With the prodding of political leaders, Congolese began to see the long-neglected rhino as a symbol of sovereignty that ought to remain on Congolese soil, dead or alive.
To make their point, angry residents living near Garamba grabbed machetes and joined mutinous rangers in roughing up the small group of foreigners working there. They disarmed the French security officers and briefly detained Kes Hillman-Smith and Fraser Smith, a couple who have worked for decades at the park, which Unesco has named a World Heritage Site.
Mr. Sakanyi said the government was hoping donors would put the same resources that were set aside to move the animals - more than $1 million - into protecting them in Garamba. "This country has to show that it is a sovereign nation able to protect its own wildlife as well as its own people and its cultural heritage," he said.
But conservationists, who maintain that the government has shown little commitment to the animals in the past, are wary about pumping money into Congo's notoriously corrupt government. The losers in the dispute are the rhinos, which remain for now "at the mercy of the poachers," Mr. Foose said.