Conflicts and Conservation of Park facts
The fishing village of Vitshumbi lies on the southern shore of Lake Edward in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), about 25 km west of the Ugandan border and 200 or so south of the Equator. Economic life in the village revolves around the local fishery, and both the fishery and the village fall within the boundaries of Africa’s oldest park,
Virunga National Park (Parc National des Virunga, PNVi). Vitshumbi pre-dates the park, having been settled before its creation in 1925, when PNVi was first established as Albert National Park by the country’s colonial administrators.
More recently, the people of Vitshumbi have experienced a number of turbulent changes. Over the past 20 years, violent conflicts, both local and regional, have engulfed the area, and rebel groups, park guards and armed forces often fight for control of the surrounding territory. The village itself has grown dramatically, as more and more fishers and their families arrive in town to vie for an increasingly small slice of the fishery pie. Public services have all but dried up, with most coming not from the state but from humanitarian organizations working in the area. The formal economy is stagnant. Poaching has increased.
In late December 2006, a fleet of four motorized pirogues arrived in Vitshumbi, each carrying 20 men armed with AK-47s. The rebels had not come to intimidate the villagers, but were there to target the lake’s hippo population.1 Conflict had erased most of the Congolese wildlife authority’s control in this part of the park; according to newspaper reports, by nightfall, with no protection, 74 of the animals had been dragged out of the water and hacked into large pieces, their meat and ivory quickly shipped off to markets. While in the 1970s tens of thousands of hippos had maintained the ecological balance of the lake, by late 2006 only a few hundred remained.
Seven months later, on July 22, 2007, rangers working in the park’s Southern Sector heard gunshots as night fell. The next day, patrolling the sector by foot, they came across the executed bodies of three members of the Rugendo family, a habituated, well-known group of endangered mountain gorillas. More bodies would be found in the next few days, and by the end of the summer, 10 gorillas in all were dead, none killed by poachers.3 Only 720 of the animals remain in the world, so the loss was significant. Eventually the murders would be tied to the perpetrators of the region’s lucrative but illegal charcoal trade, a warning to those conservationists trying to break up that trade and protect the park resources and habitats it was destroying. Rebels, soldiers and corrupt members of the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) would be implicated, though none have yet been held accountable.
These two recent examples underscore the threats conflict poses to conservation in Virunga National Park. Stretching along the Congolese border with Uganda and Rwanda, it is Africa’s most biodiverse park, with more bird, mammal and reptile species than any other on the continent. It is home to the critically endangered mountain gorilla, once hosted the world’s largest hippo population and recently witnessed the first sighting of an okapi in the wild in 50 years.
But two decades of near-constant conflict have placed this unique ecosystem at risk. Park-based natural resources have been used by belligerents to finance conflict. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, displaced by war, have relied on the extraction of park-based resources for their livelihoods. Insecurity has kept tourists away and in doing so has significantly reduced park receipts and conservation budgets. Conservation has fallen down the list of international priorities as resources are diverted into the ongoing humanitarian crisis. And 120 park rangers—a sixth of the total patrolling the park—have been killed while on duty.
Park management officially falls under the remit of ICCN, the Congolese wildlife authority. But years of conflict and corruption have severely affected the capacity of ICCN to protect PNVi. The park’s continued existence now depends on the dedicated efforts of its under-resourced staff, its under-equipped rangers and a handful of international conservation organizations working in the region; its survival to date is a testament to their hard work.
The protection of unique ecosystems like PNVi was one of the driving forces behind the creation of many of the UN’s multilateral environmental agreements. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was signed in 1992 to conserve biological diversity and ensure the sustainable use of its components. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES, 1973) was designed to ensure that the international trade of specimens of wild animals does not threaten their survival (such as the ivory derived from PNVi’s hippos). UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention (1972) sets out to protect the world’s natural and cultural heritage; PNVi was inscribed on their list in 1979. And the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS, 1979) recognizes the need to protect migratory species like the mountain gorilla, along with their habitat.
There are other relevant environmental conventions (Ramsar, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, etc.), and the DRC is a signatory to most of them. Most were written and binding by the time of Rio Earth Summit in 1992; as such, they had been drafted and were being enforced before policy-makers and researchers began to consider the environmental impacts and drivers of conflict, thinking which emerged in the early- to mid-1990s.
A survey of the conventions shows that few are equipped to deal with environmental protection in times of conflict, although some ad hoc tools and mechanisms do exist. Full protection and on-the ground conservation are of course outside of the mandates of the Conventions and their Secretariats; national sovereignty has to be respected. But more can be done in times of conflict, using these international policy instruments, to protect the globally significant biodiversity hotspots they were created to save—to protect Lake Edward’s fishery, its hippo population and PNVi’s critically endangered mountain gorillas.
Using PNVi and the Great Lakes conflicts as a case study, this paper analyzes where entry points exist for policy-makers and conservationists to use existing international environmental agreements to better protect biodiversity and ecosystems in times of conflict. While not an exhaustive study, the paper will identify some of the shortcomings of existing agreements, where entry points might exist and what other international policy instruments and fora could be used to help protect important ecosystems like PNVi.
Conflict has defined much of the history of the Great Lakes region of East Africa over the past two decades. Conflicts have been both local/national and regional, latent and violent,5 with those at the local level often fuelling and being fuelled by regional conflicts. For the local population, the result has been widespread suffering: death, rape, displacement, sickness and starvation.
The causes of conflict in the region are numerous and complex: the legacies of colonialism; the polarization of identities and ethnicized political violence, particularly between Hutus and Tutsis; disputes over citizenship; chronic poverty and underdevelopment; regime survival; poorly defined, conflicting and weakly enforced resource rights regimes; and the predatory exploitation of natural resources. This section provides a broad overview of the key events and actors in what are very complex regional conflicts among the Great Lakes countries.
In October 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-dominated militia based out of Uganda, launched its first attacks on the Hutu government that ruled Rwanda. Fighting continued between the RPF and the Rwandan army until the April 1994 assassination of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, his plane shot down near Kigali Airport. While the perpetrators remain unknown, the assassination was used by Hutu extremists to trigger ethnic violence against Tutsis, and set off the 100-day Rwandan genocide that claimed the lives to up to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
When the RPF ended the genocide by taking control of Kigali in July 1994, over two million Rwandans—among them génocidaires (members of the Interahamwe and Hutu Power organizations), members of the defeated army and Hutu civilians—fled to neighbouring Burundi, Tanzania, DRC and Uganda. Half of these refugees made their way across the Virunga massif to DRC, settling in poorly governed camps established on the edge of Virunga National Park. Amid the anarchy of the camps, the Hutu génocidaires eventually re-organized themselves politically and militarily, and used the camps as bases from which to launch attacks on Tutsi-controlled Rwanda, as well as attacks on Congolese Tutsis.
The failure of Congolese President Mobutu Seso Seko to respond to these attacks (or latent support of them) served as a pretence for three neighbouring countries to respond by joining forces to invade and oust the Congolese leader; the Rwanda government wanted to eliminate those responsible for the genocide, while Uganda and Angola simply wanted rid of the Congolese President, as he had supported similar rebel groups threatening their borders and security.6 In October 1996, Rwanda and Uganda launched a military campaign against Mobutu, supporting an armed coalition led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila known as the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaïre (AFDL). As the AFDL advanced from South Kivu province towards the capital, Kinshasa, to oust Mobutu, they met with little resistance from the refugee camps and from deserting soldiers, and eight months later, entered the capital. By that time, Mobutu had fled, and on May 17, 1997 Kabila declared himself president of the newly-renamed country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. This marked the end of what is referred to as the First Congo War.
By 1998, relations had begun to sour between Kabila and his former allies in Uganda and Rwanda. Displeased, both the Rwandan and Ugandan governments began to build a political and military campaign against the administration in Kinshasa, and in August 1998 launched a second war in DRC that would last until 2002.7 Breakaway factions of the Congolese army, supported by Rwandan troops, announced control of major cities in the east (including Goma and Bukavu), and sparked a mass displacement of people fearing violence. Rwanda and Uganda both initially backed the Congolese Rally for Democracy (Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocracie, RCD), an antiKabila rebel group based in Goma, but their partnership eventually dissolved, with Uganda going on to sponsor its own rebel movement, the Congo Liberation Movement (Mouvement pour la Libération du Congo, MLC), as well as breakaway factions of the RDC.
Other countries were soon drawn into the conflict, with Zimbabwe, Burundi, Angola, Namibia, Chad, Eritrea and Sudan all involved during its course, to varying degrees.8 For Uganda and Rwanda, the continued threat of Hutu armed groups based in the east of the DRC sparked their involvement, but territorial aspirations and resource control soon fuelled the war. Rival factions eventually split the country into three sections: Uganda and the MLC controlled a swath of the north; the RCD and Rwanda controlled much of the east and centre; and the Congolese government occupied the south and west.
On January 16 2001, Laurent Kabila was shot and killed during a failed coup; he was replaced 10 days later by his son Joseph. Fighting continued, and after nearly a year and a half of failed attempts at dialogue and negotiations, a peace agreement was finally signed between warring parties in April 2002. This fragile peace has held through the installation of a power-sharing transitional government in 2003, a new constitution in 2005 and, finally, democratic elections in 2006, which formally consolidated Joseph Kabila’s power.
Despite the peace agreement, insecurity continues to govern the lives of the residents of DRC’s eastern provinces. The continued presence of Hutu militias along the DRC’s eastern border, along with Mai-Mai rebels, has contributed to persistent insecurity. In addition, in August 2007 Congolese army general (and Tutsi) Laurent Nkunda responded to what he saw as collusion between Hutus active in the Congo and the Congolese army by breaking with the national army and forming his own rebel force—the National Congress for the People’s Defense, CNDP—based out of the park’s Southern Sector. The CNDP is said to operate with the tacit support of the Rwandan government, as Laurent’s Tutsi forces fight Interahamwe and Hutu rebel forces while effectively giving Rwanda access and control over many of the resources found in and around the section of PNVi that borders Rwanda. Despite repeated ceasefires, fighting continues through 2008.
The DRC’s vast mineral and forest resources have played a significant and well-documented role in driving the region’s conflicts. With profit made possible for many by the continued state of insecurity, economic gains have often trumped victory as a primary goal of the fighting. Throughout its campaign, Kabila’s AFDL funded its activities with cash generated from mineral commodities sales, including the sale of commodities it did not yet control (so called “booty futures”), promised to private companies once victory was assured.
Hutu extremists who reorganized themselves as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (Forces Démocratique de la Libération du Rwanda , FDLR) continue to fund their operations through mining gold, tin and other minerals, ivory and bushmeat and through the production and trade of charcoal.
In an April 2001 report to the UN Security Council, a UN Panel of Experts recommended sanctions against countries and individuals involved in the illegal exploitation of natural resources in the DRC, and noted that top officers in both the Rwandan and Ugandan armies had economic and financial objectives underpinning their decision to invade in 1998.
The Panel also cited empirical data that confirmed that in many neighbouring countries during the Second Congo War, export values for commodities exceeded national production values, a disconnect it believed could be explained by resource plunder in the eastern DRC: Rwanda increased its mineral production during the war, and had been exporting diamonds, despite its denials; Burundi began exporting minerals that it did not even produce, with diamond exports coinciding with the occupation of eastern DRC.
The revenues from these exports are believed to have funded military expenditures; for neighbouring countries, budget allocations for armed forces were exceeded by actual military spending, and the shortfall is believed to have come from the sale of expropriated DRC resources. This accounts for why Rwandan President Paul Kagame once referred to the conflict in the DRC a “self-financing war.”
“With a blurring of the lines between civil and regional war, and conventional and unconventional war, civilians became the primary victims of the conflict. Caught in between rebel and convention armies, and in the context of the severe militarization of society and the marked collapse of basic infrastructure, civilians suffer most of the ravages associated with the war.”
The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency wrote these words in their 2004 analysis of the Great Lakes conflict, and not much had changed three years later. By that time, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimated that between August 1998 and April 2007, 5.4 million people had died as a result of conflict in the region, making this war the world’s deadliest since 1945. Most of the casualties were civilians, and almost half children. Many died not from violence but rather from preventable and treatable conditions that could have been dealt with in a peaceful setting: diarrhoea, malaria, pneumonia and malnutrition.
Persistent insecurity in the eastern provinces of the country continues to exact a significant toll on the regional population: mortality rates are higher in these provinces than elsewhere in the DRC. Despite the formal end to the national-level conflict in 2002, the death toll continues to mount; the IRC estimates that 2.1 million of the war’s total deaths have come since the signing of the peace deal.
This humanitarian crisis is taking place against the backdrop of one of the world’s most biodiverse and important ecosystems, Virunga National Park. The impacts of the local and regional conflicts— both direct and indirect, covered in the next section—are threatening the park’s survival. And while it would be wrong to prioritize conservation over the very real needs of suffering local and refugee populations, sustainable development and environmental protection cannot be set aside; the ecosystem services, natural resources and tourism potential of the park will undoubtedly play an important role as the economy rebuilds once peace is re-established.
The Virunga landscape is home to some of Africa’s richest biodiversity. Unfortunately, as the previous section outlined, the area surrounding PNVi has also been the site of some of the continent’s most intense social and political conflicts.
Conflict itself is not necessarily a negative thing; when resolved peacefully, it can be a force for positive change. Violent conflict, on the other hand, always has negative repercussions; it refers to the actions, attitudes or systems that cause physical, psychological, social or environmental damage.19 Violent conflict and its impacts on conservation are the focus of this paper.
Conservation interventions themselves are inherently conflictual. Any decision to pursue conservation activities, including the gazetting of a park like PNVi, will undoubtedly create some level of conflict, as it is a decision involving access and control over valuable natural resources. This is particularly an issue in developing countries, where dependence on the natural environment is high and where interventions that affect access to and management of natural resources will have impacts on livelihoods, the distribution of wealth, established power structures and group identities.
In eastern DRC, conservation interventions take place against a backdrop of social inequality, poverty, corruption and ethnic tension. Research has identified three principal ways in which conservation can itself lead to conflict: by restricting access to livelihood resources for surrounding communities; by introducing or increasing the costs of conservation; and through unequal benefit sharing.
Conservationists and policy-makers have to be sensitive to the potential for conflict arising from their interventions. However these relationships (the impacts of conservation on conflict) are not the primary focus of this paper. Instead, this analysis focuses on reducing the impacts of conflict on conservation.
In 2001 the World Wildlife Fund’s Biodiversity Support Program released The Trampled Grass, a guide to mitigating the impacts of armed conflict on the environment. In times of conflict, especially the prolonged conflicts that have affected PNVi, conservationists are exposed to a number of threats. Habitats are destroyed and wildlife killed. Natural resources are overexploited, both for subsistence by a suffering population and for profit by those keen to take advantage of the chaos.
Pollution grows as refugees and the displaced live in increasingly crowded spaces. Park staff are threatened and even killed by warring factions vying for park resources.
Conservation funding sources can dry up, as insecurity scares off donors and the environment slips down the priority list in favour of needed humanitarian interventions.
Virunga National Park (Parc National des Virunga, PNVi). Vitshumbi pre-dates the park, having been settled before its creation in 1925, when PNVi was first established as Albert National Park by the country’s colonial administrators.
More recently, the people of Vitshumbi have experienced a number of turbulent changes. Over the past 20 years, violent conflicts, both local and regional, have engulfed the area, and rebel groups, park guards and armed forces often fight for control of the surrounding territory. The village itself has grown dramatically, as more and more fishers and their families arrive in town to vie for an increasingly small slice of the fishery pie. Public services have all but dried up, with most coming not from the state but from humanitarian organizations working in the area. The formal economy is stagnant. Poaching has increased.
In late December 2006, a fleet of four motorized pirogues arrived in Vitshumbi, each carrying 20 men armed with AK-47s. The rebels had not come to intimidate the villagers, but were there to target the lake’s hippo population.1 Conflict had erased most of the Congolese wildlife authority’s control in this part of the park; according to newspaper reports, by nightfall, with no protection, 74 of the animals had been dragged out of the water and hacked into large pieces, their meat and ivory quickly shipped off to markets. While in the 1970s tens of thousands of hippos had maintained the ecological balance of the lake, by late 2006 only a few hundred remained.
Seven months later, on July 22, 2007, rangers working in the park’s Southern Sector heard gunshots as night fell. The next day, patrolling the sector by foot, they came across the executed bodies of three members of the Rugendo family, a habituated, well-known group of endangered mountain gorillas. More bodies would be found in the next few days, and by the end of the summer, 10 gorillas in all were dead, none killed by poachers.3 Only 720 of the animals remain in the world, so the loss was significant. Eventually the murders would be tied to the perpetrators of the region’s lucrative but illegal charcoal trade, a warning to those conservationists trying to break up that trade and protect the park resources and habitats it was destroying. Rebels, soldiers and corrupt members of the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) would be implicated, though none have yet been held accountable.
These two recent examples underscore the threats conflict poses to conservation in Virunga National Park. Stretching along the Congolese border with Uganda and Rwanda, it is Africa’s most biodiverse park, with more bird, mammal and reptile species than any other on the continent. It is home to the critically endangered mountain gorilla, once hosted the world’s largest hippo population and recently witnessed the first sighting of an okapi in the wild in 50 years.
But two decades of near-constant conflict have placed this unique ecosystem at risk. Park-based natural resources have been used by belligerents to finance conflict. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, displaced by war, have relied on the extraction of park-based resources for their livelihoods. Insecurity has kept tourists away and in doing so has significantly reduced park receipts and conservation budgets. Conservation has fallen down the list of international priorities as resources are diverted into the ongoing humanitarian crisis. And 120 park rangers—a sixth of the total patrolling the park—have been killed while on duty.
Park management officially falls under the remit of ICCN, the Congolese wildlife authority. But years of conflict and corruption have severely affected the capacity of ICCN to protect PNVi. The park’s continued existence now depends on the dedicated efforts of its under-resourced staff, its under-equipped rangers and a handful of international conservation organizations working in the region; its survival to date is a testament to their hard work.
The protection of unique ecosystems like PNVi was one of the driving forces behind the creation of many of the UN’s multilateral environmental agreements. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was signed in 1992 to conserve biological diversity and ensure the sustainable use of its components. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES, 1973) was designed to ensure that the international trade of specimens of wild animals does not threaten their survival (such as the ivory derived from PNVi’s hippos). UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention (1972) sets out to protect the world’s natural and cultural heritage; PNVi was inscribed on their list in 1979. And the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS, 1979) recognizes the need to protect migratory species like the mountain gorilla, along with their habitat.
There are other relevant environmental conventions (Ramsar, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, etc.), and the DRC is a signatory to most of them. Most were written and binding by the time of Rio Earth Summit in 1992; as such, they had been drafted and were being enforced before policy-makers and researchers began to consider the environmental impacts and drivers of conflict, thinking which emerged in the early- to mid-1990s.
A survey of the conventions shows that few are equipped to deal with environmental protection in times of conflict, although some ad hoc tools and mechanisms do exist. Full protection and on-the ground conservation are of course outside of the mandates of the Conventions and their Secretariats; national sovereignty has to be respected. But more can be done in times of conflict, using these international policy instruments, to protect the globally significant biodiversity hotspots they were created to save—to protect Lake Edward’s fishery, its hippo population and PNVi’s critically endangered mountain gorillas.
Using PNVi and the Great Lakes conflicts as a case study, this paper analyzes where entry points exist for policy-makers and conservationists to use existing international environmental agreements to better protect biodiversity and ecosystems in times of conflict. While not an exhaustive study, the paper will identify some of the shortcomings of existing agreements, where entry points might exist and what other international policy instruments and fora could be used to help protect important ecosystems like PNVi.
Conflict has defined much of the history of the Great Lakes region of East Africa over the past two decades. Conflicts have been both local/national and regional, latent and violent,5 with those at the local level often fuelling and being fuelled by regional conflicts. For the local population, the result has been widespread suffering: death, rape, displacement, sickness and starvation.
The causes of conflict in the region are numerous and complex: the legacies of colonialism; the polarization of identities and ethnicized political violence, particularly between Hutus and Tutsis; disputes over citizenship; chronic poverty and underdevelopment; regime survival; poorly defined, conflicting and weakly enforced resource rights regimes; and the predatory exploitation of natural resources. This section provides a broad overview of the key events and actors in what are very complex regional conflicts among the Great Lakes countries.
In October 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-dominated militia based out of Uganda, launched its first attacks on the Hutu government that ruled Rwanda. Fighting continued between the RPF and the Rwandan army until the April 1994 assassination of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, his plane shot down near Kigali Airport. While the perpetrators remain unknown, the assassination was used by Hutu extremists to trigger ethnic violence against Tutsis, and set off the 100-day Rwandan genocide that claimed the lives to up to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
When the RPF ended the genocide by taking control of Kigali in July 1994, over two million Rwandans—among them génocidaires (members of the Interahamwe and Hutu Power organizations), members of the defeated army and Hutu civilians—fled to neighbouring Burundi, Tanzania, DRC and Uganda. Half of these refugees made their way across the Virunga massif to DRC, settling in poorly governed camps established on the edge of Virunga National Park. Amid the anarchy of the camps, the Hutu génocidaires eventually re-organized themselves politically and militarily, and used the camps as bases from which to launch attacks on Tutsi-controlled Rwanda, as well as attacks on Congolese Tutsis.
The failure of Congolese President Mobutu Seso Seko to respond to these attacks (or latent support of them) served as a pretence for three neighbouring countries to respond by joining forces to invade and oust the Congolese leader; the Rwanda government wanted to eliminate those responsible for the genocide, while Uganda and Angola simply wanted rid of the Congolese President, as he had supported similar rebel groups threatening their borders and security.6 In October 1996, Rwanda and Uganda launched a military campaign against Mobutu, supporting an armed coalition led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila known as the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaïre (AFDL). As the AFDL advanced from South Kivu province towards the capital, Kinshasa, to oust Mobutu, they met with little resistance from the refugee camps and from deserting soldiers, and eight months later, entered the capital. By that time, Mobutu had fled, and on May 17, 1997 Kabila declared himself president of the newly-renamed country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. This marked the end of what is referred to as the First Congo War.
By 1998, relations had begun to sour between Kabila and his former allies in Uganda and Rwanda. Displeased, both the Rwandan and Ugandan governments began to build a political and military campaign against the administration in Kinshasa, and in August 1998 launched a second war in DRC that would last until 2002.7 Breakaway factions of the Congolese army, supported by Rwandan troops, announced control of major cities in the east (including Goma and Bukavu), and sparked a mass displacement of people fearing violence. Rwanda and Uganda both initially backed the Congolese Rally for Democracy (Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocracie, RCD), an antiKabila rebel group based in Goma, but their partnership eventually dissolved, with Uganda going on to sponsor its own rebel movement, the Congo Liberation Movement (Mouvement pour la Libération du Congo, MLC), as well as breakaway factions of the RDC.
Other countries were soon drawn into the conflict, with Zimbabwe, Burundi, Angola, Namibia, Chad, Eritrea and Sudan all involved during its course, to varying degrees.8 For Uganda and Rwanda, the continued threat of Hutu armed groups based in the east of the DRC sparked their involvement, but territorial aspirations and resource control soon fuelled the war. Rival factions eventually split the country into three sections: Uganda and the MLC controlled a swath of the north; the RCD and Rwanda controlled much of the east and centre; and the Congolese government occupied the south and west.
On January 16 2001, Laurent Kabila was shot and killed during a failed coup; he was replaced 10 days later by his son Joseph. Fighting continued, and after nearly a year and a half of failed attempts at dialogue and negotiations, a peace agreement was finally signed between warring parties in April 2002. This fragile peace has held through the installation of a power-sharing transitional government in 2003, a new constitution in 2005 and, finally, democratic elections in 2006, which formally consolidated Joseph Kabila’s power.
Despite the peace agreement, insecurity continues to govern the lives of the residents of DRC’s eastern provinces. The continued presence of Hutu militias along the DRC’s eastern border, along with Mai-Mai rebels, has contributed to persistent insecurity. In addition, in August 2007 Congolese army general (and Tutsi) Laurent Nkunda responded to what he saw as collusion between Hutus active in the Congo and the Congolese army by breaking with the national army and forming his own rebel force—the National Congress for the People’s Defense, CNDP—based out of the park’s Southern Sector. The CNDP is said to operate with the tacit support of the Rwandan government, as Laurent’s Tutsi forces fight Interahamwe and Hutu rebel forces while effectively giving Rwanda access and control over many of the resources found in and around the section of PNVi that borders Rwanda. Despite repeated ceasefires, fighting continues through 2008.
The DRC’s vast mineral and forest resources have played a significant and well-documented role in driving the region’s conflicts. With profit made possible for many by the continued state of insecurity, economic gains have often trumped victory as a primary goal of the fighting. Throughout its campaign, Kabila’s AFDL funded its activities with cash generated from mineral commodities sales, including the sale of commodities it did not yet control (so called “booty futures”), promised to private companies once victory was assured.
Hutu extremists who reorganized themselves as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (Forces Démocratique de la Libération du Rwanda , FDLR) continue to fund their operations through mining gold, tin and other minerals, ivory and bushmeat and through the production and trade of charcoal.
In an April 2001 report to the UN Security Council, a UN Panel of Experts recommended sanctions against countries and individuals involved in the illegal exploitation of natural resources in the DRC, and noted that top officers in both the Rwandan and Ugandan armies had economic and financial objectives underpinning their decision to invade in 1998.
The Panel also cited empirical data that confirmed that in many neighbouring countries during the Second Congo War, export values for commodities exceeded national production values, a disconnect it believed could be explained by resource plunder in the eastern DRC: Rwanda increased its mineral production during the war, and had been exporting diamonds, despite its denials; Burundi began exporting minerals that it did not even produce, with diamond exports coinciding with the occupation of eastern DRC.
The revenues from these exports are believed to have funded military expenditures; for neighbouring countries, budget allocations for armed forces were exceeded by actual military spending, and the shortfall is believed to have come from the sale of expropriated DRC resources. This accounts for why Rwandan President Paul Kagame once referred to the conflict in the DRC a “self-financing war.”
“With a blurring of the lines between civil and regional war, and conventional and unconventional war, civilians became the primary victims of the conflict. Caught in between rebel and convention armies, and in the context of the severe militarization of society and the marked collapse of basic infrastructure, civilians suffer most of the ravages associated with the war.”
The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency wrote these words in their 2004 analysis of the Great Lakes conflict, and not much had changed three years later. By that time, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimated that between August 1998 and April 2007, 5.4 million people had died as a result of conflict in the region, making this war the world’s deadliest since 1945. Most of the casualties were civilians, and almost half children. Many died not from violence but rather from preventable and treatable conditions that could have been dealt with in a peaceful setting: diarrhoea, malaria, pneumonia and malnutrition.
Persistent insecurity in the eastern provinces of the country continues to exact a significant toll on the regional population: mortality rates are higher in these provinces than elsewhere in the DRC. Despite the formal end to the national-level conflict in 2002, the death toll continues to mount; the IRC estimates that 2.1 million of the war’s total deaths have come since the signing of the peace deal.
This humanitarian crisis is taking place against the backdrop of one of the world’s most biodiverse and important ecosystems, Virunga National Park. The impacts of the local and regional conflicts— both direct and indirect, covered in the next section—are threatening the park’s survival. And while it would be wrong to prioritize conservation over the very real needs of suffering local and refugee populations, sustainable development and environmental protection cannot be set aside; the ecosystem services, natural resources and tourism potential of the park will undoubtedly play an important role as the economy rebuilds once peace is re-established.
The Virunga landscape is home to some of Africa’s richest biodiversity. Unfortunately, as the previous section outlined, the area surrounding PNVi has also been the site of some of the continent’s most intense social and political conflicts.
Conflict itself is not necessarily a negative thing; when resolved peacefully, it can be a force for positive change. Violent conflict, on the other hand, always has negative repercussions; it refers to the actions, attitudes or systems that cause physical, psychological, social or environmental damage.19 Violent conflict and its impacts on conservation are the focus of this paper.
Conservation interventions themselves are inherently conflictual. Any decision to pursue conservation activities, including the gazetting of a park like PNVi, will undoubtedly create some level of conflict, as it is a decision involving access and control over valuable natural resources. This is particularly an issue in developing countries, where dependence on the natural environment is high and where interventions that affect access to and management of natural resources will have impacts on livelihoods, the distribution of wealth, established power structures and group identities.
In eastern DRC, conservation interventions take place against a backdrop of social inequality, poverty, corruption and ethnic tension. Research has identified three principal ways in which conservation can itself lead to conflict: by restricting access to livelihood resources for surrounding communities; by introducing or increasing the costs of conservation; and through unequal benefit sharing.
Conservationists and policy-makers have to be sensitive to the potential for conflict arising from their interventions. However these relationships (the impacts of conservation on conflict) are not the primary focus of this paper. Instead, this analysis focuses on reducing the impacts of conflict on conservation.
In 2001 the World Wildlife Fund’s Biodiversity Support Program released The Trampled Grass, a guide to mitigating the impacts of armed conflict on the environment. In times of conflict, especially the prolonged conflicts that have affected PNVi, conservationists are exposed to a number of threats. Habitats are destroyed and wildlife killed. Natural resources are overexploited, both for subsistence by a suffering population and for profit by those keen to take advantage of the chaos.
Pollution grows as refugees and the displaced live in increasingly crowded spaces. Park staff are threatened and even killed by warring factions vying for park resources.
Conservation funding sources can dry up, as insecurity scares off donors and the environment slips down the priority list in favour of needed humanitarian interventions.
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