Five wildlife rangers shot dead in ambush as violence spreads
Mai Mai militia attack kills six Congo national park staff ahead of a United Nations crisis conference
‘Virunga National Park is deeply saddened to confirm reports of an attack on our staff’
FIVE wildlife rangers and a driver guarding one of the world’s most important refuges for mountain gorillas and other critically endangered species have been killed in an ambush.
Authorities in the Virunga National Park, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s haven for gorillas, said the men were gunned down by militia men early yesterday near the border with Uganda.
“Virunga National Park is deeply saddened to confirm reports of an attack on our staff today,” the park said in a statement yesterday.
“Five Virunga rangers and a staff driver were killed during an ambush in the central sector of the park. A sixth ranger was also wounded.”
Joel Malembe, a park spokesman, said the team had been driving through the bush between the sectors of Lulimba and Ishasha when a group of militia men opened fire on their vehicles at about 6am local time.
Cosma Wilungula, the director of the DRC’S national parks, said the attackers were from one of the country’s “Mai Mai” militia groups, which were initially founded in the Nineties to fight cross-border attacks from Rwanda.
More than 150 rangers have been killed protecting the Virunga National Park, which covers an area three times the size of Luxembourg, over the past 20 years. Virunga was established in 1925 and describes itself as Africa’s oldest national park.
Covering more than 3,000 square miles on the Rwandan and Ugandan border, it is home to about a quarter of the world’s surviving 880 mountain gorillas. It is also a refuge for significant populations of eastern lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, okapis, lions, elephants and hippos.
But it has been ravaged by the unrest sweeping Congo’s troubled North Kivu province, with dozens of armed groups battling for control of rich reserves of timber, gold and other resources.
Emmanuel de Merode, the park’s Belgian director, was shot and wounded in a road ambush in 2014.
The Duke of Cambridge has warned about dangers to rangers from poachers. In a documentary last year called The Last Animals, he said: “Over 1,000 rangers have been killed in the last 10 years. It makes you really angry. It makes you very sad.”
The DRC has seen increasing instability in the past year, after Joseph Kabila, the president, refused to step down at the end of his term in 2016.
Mr Kabila has agreed to fresh elections in January, but the United Nations and aid agencies have warned that escalating violence and lawlessness threatens to spiral out of control, raising fears of a return to the horrific civil wars that claimed millions of lives in the region between 1998 and 2008.
The UN has said over 5.1million people have been displaced in recent years and 13million people are in need of humanitarian assistance.