‘You think it’s over, but it begins again’: can Virunga national park survive more conflict and a new hunt for oil?
When Justin Katenga arrived at Matebe power station at dawn, the fighting was already under way. He had woken up a few miles away, in the headquarters of Virunga national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), to the sound of heavy artillery echoing across the valley, underscoring the urgency of the evacuation planned for civilian staff in the facilities across the river from the frontline.
As Katenga entered the plant’s perimeter with his team, bullets whistled above their heads, lodging in the buildings’ walls; one engineer fainted in fear on the spot. Katenga, the deputy south sector warden of the park, took time to talk to the guards who had stayed behind to secure the site. The M23 rebel militia – fighting government forces in the area – had been gaining ground and were expected to break through and overrun that section of the park. Yet abandoning it would cut off 80% of the power supply to Goma, the capital city of North Kivu province and home to 2 million people.
“Your presence here means that we still have hope – even if things look bad now – that we will be able to continue our work once this crisis is over,” Katenga told them.
The M23’s advance in the following days was swift. In less than a week, rebels had taken the towns of Rutshuru, Kiwanja and Mabenga to the north, and Rumangabo and Rugari, to the south. The park headquarters, located next to a strategic military base, was caught in the crossfire for two days, with 134 people hiding in the underground command centre, coming up for air between rounds of mortar shelling.
The M23, the latest iteration of the rebel forces that have wreaked havoc across eastern DRC since 1998, have revived dark memories and traumas that many hoped belonged in the past, not least among the staff of Virunga national park. The oldest national park in Africa has been at the centre of the violence for more than two decades, spanning 7,800 sq km across the length of troubled North Kivu, along the border with Rwanda and Uganda.
Rangers have been unable to access the gorilla sector for nearly a year. The apes have been left unmonitored and unprotected since M23 rebels ransacked their base camp at Bukima on 20 November last year and killed Etienne Mutazimiza, a 48-yearold ranger and father of four. It was a worrying escalation for an armed group that historically had avoided harming the park.
Then, as now, Rwanda has been accused of using the rebel movement as a pawn in a proxy war with DRC for control over resources and access to land. At least 232,000 people have been displaced from North Kivu since the beginning of the conflict in March, camping out in schools and churches or in makeshift shelters on the outskirts of Goma.
“It’s a complete repetition of what we experienced a decade ago,” says Katenga, who was assigned to the park’s headquarters security as a young ranger in July 2012 after the M23 had seized Rumangabo.
To compound the feeling of déjàvu, the DRC government announced in July that it is auctioning 30 oil and gas exploration blocks spanning vast areas of the Congo Basin rainforest, including Block IV and V, which overlap the national park.
That battle had seemed to have been won by conservationists after Soco International, a British oil company that had bought exploratory rights for Block V in 2010, abandoned the project in 2014 after an international campaign and huge divestment from some of its biggest shareholders, including the Church of England.
“Everything here, you think it is over, but it begins again. The M23, the oil … we feel like it’s a neverending battle. It’s exhausting,” says Josué Mukura, the secretary-general of the Federation of of Individual Fishermen of Lake Edward, which represents communities around the lake at the centre of Virunga, where Soco concentrated its exploration.
Mukura, with several other activists, had played a key role in fending off Soco’s illegal plans – mobilising local communities to denounce the company’s lack of free, prior and informed consent process and its violation of international law. Virunga, a world heritage site, is protected by a Unesco convention that forbids extractive activities within its boundaries.
Back then, the park was only beginning to rebuild after two regional wars that had upended every aspect of life in DRC. But after a decade of hard work that laid the groundwork for a vision combining conservation and sustainable development, the stakes seem higher than ever.
Flying above the Rwindi plain in the park’s tiny Bat Hawk aircraft, the progress made in just a decade is breathtaking to see. Below, herds of Kob antelope, waterbuck and topi scatter in graceful leaps across the savannah, as warthogs scamper between low bushes and a flock of white birds takes off. In a small lake, dozens of hippos bathe while a group of elephants move along the shoreline. Many more are visible under the cover of trees as the plane comes into the Ishasha valley, where the park recently set up a camp to better monitor the animals’ migration.
A similar journey 10 years ago had only summoned a buffalo herd. “Soco had said Rwindi was just a burntout savannah,” recalls Emmanuel de Merode, the park’s director. “Well, this is what happens when we give nature a fighting chance.”
Virunga’s famed mountain gorillas have also rebounded from 220 individuals in 2012 to 350 today, a rare conservation success story. Crucially, the park has implemented an ambitious plan to support the emergence of a green economy, to ensure that conservation benefits local communities beyond safeguarding the ecosystems. Created in 1925, Virunga, like all national parks in DRC, is regulated by the controversial “fortress conservation” model, which excludes humans, including Indigenous people, from the area – apart from, in Virunga’s case, several fishing villages on Lake Edward’s shores.
While the park counted about 30,000 people in its immediate vicinity in the early 20th century, 4 to 5 million people now live in villages and cities around it, partly the result of colonisation and the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, when more than a million Rwandans crossed into DRC.
“We need to make this work for everyone,” says de Merode, who was appointed by the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation in 2008.The hydroelectric power station in Matebe is one of three stations already built for a total production of 30MW. Another plant, the largest yet, is under construction in Rwanguba, but the fighting has halted work. In Mutwanga, a village north of Lake Edward on the park’s outskirts, a pilot hydroelectric plant was completed in 2013. Producing just 1.4 MW, it has already had a transformational impact. Street lighting and free, constant electricity for the local hospital have improved security and health, and a local industry has emerged with support and loans from the park’s foundation.
A soap factory sources palm oil from around a thousand farmers, and a chocolate factory works with a cocoa cooperative that ferments members’ cocoa beans, a great security improvement for growers whose fields are regularly attacked during the fermentation process by the ADF, an Islamist militia scourging the villages north of the park. The chocolate, embossed with the emblematic silverback gorilla, is sold in Goma and abroad.
In total, 2,000 companies in North Kivu benefit from Virunga’s electricity. The diversification means that today, even after tourism came to a standstill after the kidnapping of two British tourists in 2018 (they were released without harm), the pandemic and last year’s volcano eruption, half of its operating costs are covered by its economic activities.
“What we hope is that this can serve as a model of development that can be reproduced elsewhere in DRC,” says de Merode. “Small hydroelectric power stations providing clean energy for a local industry that does not harm nature, and provide people with a stable source of revenue.”
It is unclear what the DRC government hopes to achieve in the long term by selling exploratory rights to Virunga and other fragile areas of the Congo Basin rainforest. Its main argument has been that as one of the world’s poorest countries, and with little support from wealthier nations to protect its forests, DRC has little choice other than to exploit its own resources. “Our environmental sovereignty is managed by donors who can produce billions of barrels a year without anyone questioning that,” says Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, DRC’s lead negotiator on climate issues.
Some analysts see the auction as leverage to demand more funding for climate mitigation, as well as assert control over the way the funding is disbursed.
The Central African Forest Initiative (Cafi), the primary funder for the Congo Basin rainforest REDD+ programme, a UN mechanism helping developing countries value the environmental services of their forests, only disburses its funds to the DRC through international organisations, leading to 42% of the budget being lost in overhead costs and a lack of governmental capacity building. And funding is sparse. At Cop26 in Glasgow, donors pledged $500m (£438m) over five years, a drop in the ocean compared with the $350bn needed between 2020 and 2030 to protect the planet’s second-largest rainforest.
Yet, hiding behind discourses on sovereignty and climate justice, the intent may be more self-interest. With elections scheduled for 2023, the government needs to quickly access cash and, historically, selling oil rights has been an easy money dispenser. “We saw the same pattern before the 2018 elections,” says Kristof Titeca, a researcher on the DRC oil sector.
Since oil and gas concessions were delimited in 2005, the bulk of activities in the DRC oil sector has been in the sale of exploration licences rather than production. Companies that have bought licences have tended to be small and speculative. Many have not carried out any work and simply held the titles to sell on. Licences are a
first step and do not provide companies with the rights or infrastructure to exploit oil – if they find it. “Even if you do find something in the ground, it’s a whole different ballgame to produce and export oil,” says Titeca. “You need capital to build infrastructure that does not exist yet, especially in the middle of the rainforest.”
The challenge of declassifying a world heritage site like Virunga may prove too much for either government or business to shoulder. Mpanu-Mpanu says the blocks only overlap the park and companies could exploit outside the boundaries or use technologies that go beneath the ground to avoid disturbing ecosystems on the surface, something he also concedes may not be practical near an active volcano.
Only the future will tell if oil exploitation will prove a threat to Virunga, but the park’s experience with Soco International indicates that it can expect accrued violence and intimidation if the auction goes ahead. “Life had become really hard for us,” says Mukura. “I received death threats. My house was attacked. I’m worried about what this will mean for us and the future of the community.”
He recalls being sent bottles of alcohol as a bribe, and troubling meetings with local politicians determined to push the oil project through, no matter what. Collusion between armed groups, politicians and business has also led to violence.
In 2013 Rodrigue Katembo, then Virunga’s middle sector warden, was arrested by military officers working for the oil company and tortured. In 2014, de Merode was ambushed on his way back from the prosecutor’s office in Goma, where he had taken a file of evidence of wrongdoing. He barely survived, after being shot twice in the abdomen by the FDLR, a Hutu armed group formed by those involved in the Rwandan genocide who fled into DRC, and used as a mercenary force by private interests.
The M23 also allege they were used for access to the lake during the worst of the fighting in 2013. A high-ranking officer in the movement, Vianney Kazarama, claimed he had been approached by the then minister of planning, Célestin Vunabandi, and promised shares in the oil project being proposed by Soca International.
Today any conniving between government members and the rebels seems unlikely , with fighting in full force. The M23 controlling a strategic area of territory for exploratory operations could prove an important obstacle. Reputational risks mean that companies bidding for oil rights are likely to be those that care less about due diligence.
The auction will close on 30 April 2023 and blocks will be awarded in June. In the months to come, Virunga and those who want to protect it are likely to be on ever-shifting grounds.
“Everything can change any minute. It feels so uncertain,” says Justin Katenga. “We just hope and keep working, that’s all we can do.”
Soco had said Rwindi was just a burnt-out savannah. Well, this is what happens when we give nature a fighting chance
Emmanuel de Merode