JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

By John Ruch

© 2008

Gorillas and Guerillas: Illegal Charcoal and the Burning of an Ape

It’s possible, just barely, to imagine some rationale for killing one of the approximately 700 mountain gorillas still alive in the wild.

But to kill a mountain gorilla and set it on fire? Here we stare into a mirror uncrack’d, into the dead eyes of the medievalesque irrational.

And yet, such was the reality staring up at me from page 156 of the December 2007 “National Geographic”: a photograph of men in a night-darkened forest kneeling over a fallen gorilla, awesome even in death, its lovely fur singed into ragged steel wool.

The men were rangers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) Virunga National Park. The gorilla was known to them as Mburanumwe. That much made sense.

Mburanumwe was “shot, then set on fire by her killers,” the magazine said. And who were these villains? “[P]ossibly…people involved in the illegal charcoal trade.”

That made no sense at all—an inexplicable crime perpetrated by inexplicable criminals. What is the “illegal charcoal trade”? Why would its practitioners kill and burn a gorilla? Surely they don’t attempt to make gorilla briquettes?

“National Geographic” provided no answers. As I later learned, it also didn’t report the full depth of the tragedy: when she was killed and mutilated, Mburanumwe was pregnant.

In this era of cell phone ubiquity and shadowy virtual-phone-card companies online, I figured I’d get one of the Virunga rangers on the horn, find out what strain of madness is infecting charcoal bootleggers. I got in touch with WildlifeDirect, a Kenya/UK/US-based organization founded by animal-protection firebrand Richard Leakey that aids the rangers of DRC’s Institut Congolais pour la Conservacion de la Nature (ICCN; the equivalent of the US National Park Service).

My first lesson was that this is the DRC. As with so much of Africa, the horrors are abundantly obvious; but the explanations are infinitely complex, and how you ask for them can literally be the difference between life and death—for a gorilla, or for yourself.

WildlifeDirect spokesperson Dipesh Pabari was not eager to lay it all the on the line for an American journalist whose column was quoting Gary Gygax at the time. Fair enough. “The situation is far too complex and whilst there are of course problems based on animosity towards conservation initiatives, this is rooted in much deeper problems,” he told me in an interview-declining e-mail.

Or maybe there was something more to his hesitancy. Depth and complexity sounded like understatements when, nine days later, as I was in the midst of writing this column, DRC officials announced the arrest of a suspect in the killing of Mburanumwe and several other gorillas—and the suspect is one of the ICCN’s own. Honore Mashagiro, an ICCN director of one sector of Virunga, is accused of orchestrating the slaughter to further his illegal charcoal profits. There are suggestions that corrupt rangers may have done his dirty work.

The previous top suspect was a rebel militia leader known to wear a button reading, “Rebels for Christ.”¹ Violently perverse political corruption looks almost rational by contrast. But it doesn’t really make any more sense, does it?

For that depth and complexity, Pabari pushed me into the deep end of WildlifeDirect’s Olympic-sized blog. WildlifeDirect is essentially a virtual organization, with blogs as its main product and purpose. (See WildlifeDirect.org.)

“Just look at our Web site” is usually the modern mode of the classic PR blow-off of a journalist. But this is not the industrial world’s Web 2.0 of plagiaristic morons, virtual singles bars and obfuscatory corporate marketing. WildlifeDirect uses the Web to let people working on the front lines—often in the true military sense of the term—of animal protection speak for themselves from some of the most remote preserves on Earth. Readers can see the microchallenges of implementing conservation policies on the ground, and develop a personal connection with those bold enough to do the work. If the blog so moves them, they can donate directly to the conservation area of their choice. Personal connections via words and Flash videos from places that may not even have phone lines—it’s exactly the sort of thing all the dreamers told us the Web could someday do.

The bloggers include Virunga rangers like Innocent and Diddy, and their stories are arguably WildlifeDirect’s most dramatic. The rangers face poaching traps, militia bullets and poverty-angered mobs as they attempt to save Virunga’s priceless ecosystem even as it becomes a war zone. This is not the US, and these are not glorified tour guides in Smokey the Bear hats. At least a hundred rangers have been killed in the line of duty in the past 12 years. The second donation category offered on the ranger’s WildlifeDirect blog is “Support to Deceased Rangers’ Families.”

“We are all quite scared, but continue to work as best we can,” the ranger Balemba blogged a few weeks ago. One can only marvel at the daring involved in risking their lives, working with next to nothing, making next to nothing, to save those of gorillas and other animals in a jungle of armed enemies. In part, they are motivated by the ideal that they are saving the souls of their country, and of us all; Virunga is a United Nations World Heritage site—one of the places that “belong to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory on which they live.” But the everyday challenges and stresses they face are localized and unglamorous.

That involves the squeeze of cultural forces too big to come across clearly in scattered blog entries. It would be like trying to understand the Civil War through a soldier’s diary—literally, in the DRC’s case.

DRC has an incredible wealth of natural resources and an infamous history of exploitation to match. King Leopold II’s depredations on the then-Belgian Congo are known to generations of Western college students as the backdrop for Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” DRC has been independent for nearly a half-century, but exploitation remains, under what has been called a “bandit culture” of theft and corruption.² DRC produces a mineral widely used in electronics, including the cell phone I figured I’d use to dial-a-ranger. The gigantic Millennium Star diamond, the target of a spectacular theft attempt in London, came from DRC’s bountiful fields of blood diamonds; the locals who found it were rumored to have been kidnapped and killed by the military for their cash.³ Despite such natural riches and many more, DRC remains mired in poverty, its resources squandered or mismanaged.

Virunga was established in the 1920s to protect such treasures as mountain gorillas. But it continues to suffer open industrial exploitation, including black-market logging and poaching for both meat and the illegal zoo trade. Last year, Virunga rangers found dead a young female gorilla, one of two captured for zoo sale at a reputed asking price of $8,000 each. The gorillas suffer from poaching as well, which is generally conducted with thousands of vicious homemade snares; it is not uncommon for Virunga gorillas to lose fingers or hands to their wire loops. (Poachers have been known to set out indiscriminate piles of poison, too.)

Patrolling the 1.85 million acres of Virunga for such hazards and crimes would be work enough. But that isn’t the half of it.

There is, of course, war. How we treat animals is simply a byproduct of how we treat each other. By that standard, a burned gorilla in the DRC is no surprise at all.

The recent crisis in Virunga began in 1994. Virguna sits on DRC’s northeastern border, adjacent to Uganda and Rwanda. The year 1994 was when Rwanda’s vicious civil war exploded into horrific genocide. At least a million people fled the country into DRC (then called Zaire)—and near or into Virunga—as refugees.

They weren’t all civilians. Militias came, too. Eastern DRC quickly spawned its own ethnic-tinged civil war against the country’s longtime dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. It was successful in deposing him, but in 1998 the country erupted into an infamous five-year war that left millions dead and millions more displaced. Refugees again headed for the Virunga area.

The war officially ended in 2003, but fighting in the eastern DRC has never really stopped. It is still the stomping ground and hideout of Rwanda-backed or -affiliated rebels. Today, rebels actually control large sections of Virunga. And all of this produces more refugees.

It is easy to imagine years of war being bad for wildlife. Indeed, gorillas reportedly have been killed when they were caught in crossfire. They have also been deliberately killed by soldiers as bushmeat—that is, for food. (The park’s hippo population has met the same fate before rebel guns.)

But the real criminal motive comes not from warriors, but from the refugees they create. Everybody needs fuel for cooking and for boiling water—especially people living under plastic tarps. And the most common household cooking fuel in the area is charcoal.

Known locally as makala, charcoal is wood that has been slowly, partially burned. It is much lighter and easier to transport than the original quantity of wood, while also offering a long, hot burn. As fuels go, it is horribly wasteful and inefficient. Charcoal production is one of the reasons for the massive deforestation of Europe and Scandinavia in medieval times.

As you would imagine, it is illegal to chop down and burn a tree in Virunga. But it is happening on a large scale. An illegal charcoal trade worth tens of millions of dollars has evolved to serve the refugees; nearby towns such as Goma; and Rwanda, which banned charcoal production within its own borders a few years ago—thus creating the most lucrative demand of all. Refugees sometimes make their own charcoal directly, too.

One of WildlifeDirect’s US-based bloggers calls those involved in this trade the Charcoal Mafia. A valid analogy, perhaps, at least in terms of popular support—the way residents of old-time Sicily or early-1900s urban immigrant enclaves viewed the real Mafia. In January, a mini-mob of residents attacked three rangers who had stopped a charcoal-smuggling truck. (Such trucks are often so overloaded with booty they topple over; this one crashed while fleeing.) The rangers were severely beaten, and their own truck was shoved off the side of the road.⁴

But “Mafia” implies order and hierarchy, when chaos is the real nature of the problem. This isn’t classic organized crime; it’s war profiteering. Everybody tries, and often succeeds, to get a slice. Anybody can burn a tree. Anybody can haul a bag of charcoal.

As one ranger blogged late last year, “…[W]e cannot let individuals destroy the forest for a short term financial gain. At the moment with the war, it is still chaos, and people take advantage of this because it is a good way to earn money. We, with our fellow Rangers, are protecting the forests for future generations….We have been raising awareness at the local markets near the Gorilla Sector—we tell people that Virunga and the Mountain Gorillas are their heritage, and potentially an enormous source of [tourism] revenue. We do not want to stop people from cooking, but it has gone way beyond that.”

That’s well and good, but like all war profiteering, the charcoal trade breeds treachery—even by DRC standards. The money doesn’t just lure criminals from Goma. It also turns the allegiances of soldiers. One of the rangers’ most dangerous tasks is confronting charcoal-smuggling DRC troops, who have been known to smash through ranger roadblocks in military trucks.

The ranger Innocent blogged last month about the Pyrrhic sensation to recent arrests of such corrupt troops: “So the rangers won the day, but we have a load of really annoyed soldiers and we have to be quite careful.”

But in some ways, the DRC is used to turncoats, traitors and mutineers. After all, the current president to whom the rangers have sworn loyalty, Joseph Kabila, is the son of a rebel who staged the successful 1997 coup d’état, then was himself assassinated amid further rebellion. Rebellions have continued pretty much ever since, along with foreign intervention and ethnic rivalry.

Which brings us to the guy who actually controls much of Virunga: rebel guerilla chieftain and accused war criminal Laurent Nkunda.

When I was in sixth grade, we did a little spelling bee, and I got asked to spell a word pronounced like “gorilla.” I nervously asked, “Which one?”, knowing the homophones “gorilla” and “guerilla.” The whole class laughed at me.

In DRC, everybody knows the difference, and nobody would laugh.

Nkunda is a real piece of work. He started off as a Tutsi-minority militia volunteer in the early-’90s Rwandan crisis. Then he brought the war home against Congolese Hutus in 1998. In the uneasy multiethnic peace that followed, Nkunda was given high rank in the DRC army. But he quickly refused it, heading off to the eastern jungle with his own troops. He reputedly has declared his own country there under the name of Land of the Volcanoes. (Virunga itself is named for its vulcanous mountain range.)

He’s wanted for torture, rapes (including gang rapes in front of children) and extrajudicial executions going back to 2002, along with an assault on UN investigators of the same.⁵ He reportedly also is into forcing children to become soldiers; building a cult of personality at gunpoint; and generally massacring people perceived as threats to Tutsis. He’s the guy who wears the “Rebels for Christ” button; he is a convert to Pentecostal Christianity, which does not give one much hope for improvements in his mental stability.

Nkunda is now the guerilla in charge of the gorillas. A ceasefire with the government is now in effect—an improvement from virtual war last year—but Nkunda still holds the mountain gorilla territory and refuses rangers access to it.

“Refuses” is a gentle word. Here’s how Diddy, one of the rangers, put it in a February blog: “[The rebels] are very aggressive against the rangers of ICCN, our organization, and have threatened to execute any of us who return to the gorilla sector.”

With rape and murder allegedly under their belts, the rebels naturally have no problem being deeply immersed in the illegal charcoal trade as well.

Thus, virtually everyone except the rangers has a hand in charcoal. With depredation on that scale, it is no surprise that it has a devastating impact on the endangered gorillas—especially since some of charcoal traders literally control their territory. (Or at least the DRC part of it; gorillas are not so picky about political boundaries and regularly wander across the Ugandan and Rwandan borders.)

The gorilla body count is not some abstraction deduced from animal censuses. The rangers have a gorilla graveyard.

Rangers recover gorilla corpses, lashing them to stakes and hauling them back to the cemetery. It takes about a dozen men to carry the corpse of a silverback. Names inscribed on wooden crosses mark each grave. One cross, marking the grave of an infant, bears the name Mufabure. It means, “Killed Without Reason.”

If this role as Virunga’s undertakers hardened the rangers at all, it still didn’t prepare them for last year’s gorilla slaughter. Ten gorillas, including an entire family, were killed in 2007 in mass executions.

Particularly shocking was the July 2007 massacre of three females and a silverback. As in the killings of adult humans, the devastation was greater than the direct results of the crime. One of the females had a 2-year-old baby that disappeared. Another infant, still nursing, was taken away from the scene by her brother. With remarkable luck, rangers later found the infant alive, clinging to her brother’s corpse.

That slaughter is the one that took the life of Mburanumwe. Her pregnancy had been cited that year as one of Virunga’s hopes for the future by a ranger speaking to the world in a YouTube video. The cynical brutality of her killing—shot, then burned—shook the rangers.

In a WildlifeDirect blog at the time, one of the rangers said that Mburanumwe’s burning was “for some reason that we couldn’t understand….I think it must have been done to offend us, but I don’t know. It’s difficult to get into the minds of people who can do a crime as terrible as this.”

Especially because the perpetrators were unknown. Charcoal was the presumed motive—whether that meant a practical attempt to get gorillas out of the area, or a way of intimidating and demoralizing rangers who patrol there. But in the DRC, that meant virtually everyone was a suspect in this gorilla version of an Agatha Christie mystery.

The most obvious suspects were the rebels. Already known as homicidal maniacs, gorilla-killers and ranger-threateners, they were in the midst of open war with government troops and, a few months after the July slaughter, took control of most of Virunga.

And yet, it seems that the troops led by an alleged war criminal have come to learn the value of gorillas. Many reports say that the rebels are illicitly bringing tourists from Rwanda and Uganda into the park to see the gorillas. As part of Nkunda’s shadow government, a rebel named Kanamaragi—a traitorous former ranger—in February declared himself the director of national parks. ICCN ranger bloggers even allege that the rebels are receiving funding from an unnamed “conservation group.”

Authorities now say that the mastermind of the killing was not the gunman who seized the park last September. It is the guy who joined the conversation group The Gorilla Organization in a tree-planting ceremony at a local school last November.⁶

Mashagiro was in charge of Virunga’s gorilla sector and would surely know the significance of the gorilla massacres he allegedly ordered. He likely was aware of which ones were pregnant.

All of this underscores the horror, but doesn’t really explain it. Obviously, burning the gorilla’s corpse was in part some form of psychological warfare or insult to the rangers. There is some comfort in envisioning at least a degree of pragmatism to it. But then, there are lots of ways to intimidate rangers that don’t involve killings and burnings—especially if you hold political power over them already.

Animals do strange things to our minds. We see ourselves in them; but we also see ourselves as superior to them. Rarely are they viewed as something to leave alone. Seeing ourselves is part of the rangers’ rationale for protecting gorillas. (There are many other types of animals in the jungle that also need protection; and the rangers do protect some of them, but gorillas remain the main selling point for conservation, both within and outside the DRC.) Seeing ourselves as superior is certainly the mindset that enabled gunmen to kill the gorillas.

There is a nexus to these views, an agreement that animals can become a canvas for our own self-images. Benign though they may be, it feels strangely unwise for the rangers to have dubbed a gorilla Kabila in honor of the president as rebels swarm the countryside. And in at least one case, they have deplored how a gorilla was easily killed because he had learned to trust humans—a result of acclimation to the proximity of rangers.

The self-hate involved in the gorilla killings is equally striking, particularly if Mashagiro is indeed guilty. Killing the very creatures the park exists to protect incarnates the hypocrisy of charcoal-trade corruption, of course. Killing the gorillas is a kind of proxy murder of rangers. The chaotic rage of burning an animal so like ourselves perhaps implies a kind of suicide—as all natural exploitation and abuse does.

This is not to say that the rangers are morally culpable in the mass slaughter. I just find that extreme opposites are often sides of the same coin, and it benefits us to note how easily it can be flipped, and to question whether it should be legal tender at all. In the realm of endangered wildlife, we now live in a world where zoos are packed under the rationale of conservation while delivering far more tangible benefits of superficial entertainment and local prestige. Either way, we have developed the view that animals must be managed. I don’t necessarily disagree; I just note that such a broad claim to power will always lead to abuse—indeed, becomes an excuse for it.

Other animals in Africa suffer similar fates as billboards for our woes. Another WildlifeDirect blog recently described the horrific spearing of elephants in Kenya, illustrated by a photo of an animal hobbled by the weapons still hanging out of its hide. The blog ascribed now-familiar motives to the attackers: “revenge, political protest, self- or crop-protection, delinquency…[and] ivory poaching.”

But (other) apes and monkeys have always received our special attention. They’re our closest cousins, after all. They are like a mirror we look at, then defensively smash as soon as possible. Consider the greatest ape of them all, “King Kong” (1933), a perfect embodiment of our mixture of sympathetic fascination and ontological horror. Racism and anti-evolutionism have become so ideological, it’s easy to forget they are built on a far more universal sense of dread. We love to see (other) simians in our entertainments—but only if they are rendered cute, silly, evil and/or dead. On the other hand, when real gorillas are killed, we feel outrage—probably more than anyone outside Africa mustered over millions of human deaths in the DRC’s latest war, if we’re honest about it.

While the burning of Mburanumwe was post-mortem, there is some congruence with the burning of humans as punishments. The stake seems to have been reserved for types of criminals dangerously close to the mainstream, who needed to be destroyed utterly to preserve society’s self-image. In Europe, it was heretics. In America, it was almost exclusively African-American men. During his successful campaign for governor of Mississippi, James Vardaman in 1904 attended the burning at the stake of a black man by a lynch mob; Vardaman spoke in approval, likening the victim to an ape being punished for kidnapping a human baby.⁷

These are just the detached musings of an American. I acknowledge that, and I’m half-impatient with it myself. I don’t know how much real value there is in perusing the complexities of our relationship with fellow simians, because it may ultimately be too self-reflexive to unravel. (Art may help us more than journalism.)

At the same time, I do feel that there is something terribly evident about the whole gorilla-killing thing, some darkness as universally familiar as Conrad’s “The horror! The horror!”, that phrase whispered by someone who did not find an essential evil in the Congo, but rather helped to create one. Anywhere humans fight—physically or verbally—apes become the medium for articulating what we loathe in the enemy, or in ourselves. When I read about the burning of Mburanumwe, I was surprised and curious and wanted to write a column about it; but part of me knew the answer all along. It was just a crude literalization of the bitter punchline of our endless retelling of “Hop-Frog,” where our fellow apes are cast both as parodies and targets of our own self-despising hate.

¹ “Dinner With A Warlord” by Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, June 18, 2007, via http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9Ao2E7DC123FF93BA25755C0A9619C8B63.

² “Rape of a Nation,” undated report by Marcus Bleasdale, MediaStorm.org, recommended by WildlifeDirect.

³ “This was to be the heist of the millennium…” by Dan McDougall, The Scotsman (Edinburgh, Scotland), Feb. 19, 2002, via http://news.scotsman.com/millenniumdiamondheist/This-was-to-be-the.2303740.jp.

⁴ Confiscated charcoal is donated to refugee relief organizations, but the redirection of the supply doesn’t seem to appease many users. WildlifeDirect is also exploring other solutions, such as low-cost plant oil stoves.

⁵ See Human Rights Watch’s call for Nkunda’s arrest at www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/01/Congo12579.htm.

⁶ As described in a Gorilla Organization press release, www.gorillas.org/2007_tree_distribution.

In August 2007, “National Geographic News” reported that an ICCN official had been flogged and arrested for claiming that corrupt ICCN officials were involved with the illegal charcoal trade. The arrest includes charges of spreading false information and obstructing the gorilla killing investigation after he voiced the corruption theory on WildlifeDirect’s blogs. “National Geographic News” at the time quoted Mashagiro as dismissing notions of official corruption: “People say things, but where’s the proof? It’s not true. It’s not true.” (“Congo Gorilla Killings Fueled by Illegal Charcoal Trade” by Stefan Lovgren, “National Geographic News,” Aug. 16, 2007, at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/070816-gorillas-congo.html.)

⁷ See my “Stupid Question” on the subject elsewhere on this site.

Significant sources not cited in the text or footnotes include: CIA World Factbook (www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook); “For Tutsis of Eastern Congo, Protector, Exploiter or Both?” by Stephanie McCrummen, Washington Post, Aug. 6, 2007 (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/05/AR2007080501346_pf.html); “Ranger held over gorilla killings,” BBC News, March 19, 2008 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7304650.stm); and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization site (www.whc.unesco.org/en/list/63). Posted April 6, 2008.

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