Fighting in gorilla park
2007-09-08 21:41
Dakar - Fighting erupted in a DRC national park housing endangered mountain gorillas on Saturday, forcing rangers to flee for the second time in less than a week, conservationists said.
Clashes between fighters loyal to warlord Laurent Nkunda and government soldiers broke out for the second day straight in Virunga National Park, where some of the world's last remaining mountain gorillas live on the slopes of a volcanic mountain range that borders Rwanda and Uganda, the international conservation group WildlifeDirect said.
Rangers fled the park on Monday with their families after skirmishes first broke out there. Wildlife groups said huge swaths of the park, including several patrol posts, had been occupied by and looted.
Concerned about the fate of the gorillas, some rangers returned several days later. But on Friday and Saturday, they reported hearing shelling and gunfire, and fled again.
"We thought the situation was calming a couple of days ago, but once again the mountain gorillas are in peril and the rangers cannot do their job," the director of WildlifeDirect, Dr Emmanuel de Merode, said in a statement. Conservation is "consistently challenging, and we can only hope the mountain gorillas survive this most recent saga."
Only about 700 mountain gorillas remain in the world, an estimated 380 of them in the Virunga range. About 100 of them are believed to live on the Congo side of the park.
- AP