DRC soldiers 'killing gorillas'

2005-06-22 15:48

Nairobi - Three government soldiers have been jailed for allegedly killing four endangered lowland gorillas in the troubled eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a United States (US) conservation group said on Wednesday.

The Atlanta-based Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International said the troops were detained after offering to sell meat from the dead gorillas to villagers near the Bakumbule Community Primate Reserve (Recopriba) earlier this month.

"According to eye-witness reports from people who work with us they were killed by members of the military," said Patrick Mehlman, the fund's Kigali-based vice-president of Africa programmes.

"Two foot-soldiers and one lieutenant have been arrested and put into military prison," he said.

The killing of the Grauer's gorillas took place on June 7 but news of it filtered out only slowly due to the remoteness of the region where the reserve is located in the DRC's Walikale Territory, he said.

The fund said in a statement residents of Pinga village had turned down the soldiers' offer of the bushmeat and several had reported the incident to local authorities, prompting the arrests.

Mehlman said the fund, founded by the late American researcher Dian Fossey, who pioneered studies of highland gorillas in neighbouring Rwanda before being killed by poachers in 1985, had agreed to organise a campaign to sensitise DRC troops to the plight of endangered primates.

Number of gorillas dwindling

Only a few thousand Grauer's, or eastern lowland, gorillas are believed to remain in the wild, many of them in the Recopriba reserve which protects a forest corridor between two national parks in the eastern DRC: Kahuzi-Biega to the south and Maiko to the north.

Earlier this year, the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) reported a census it conducted in one part of the Kahuzi Biega park had shown the population of Grauer's gorillas to be holding its own, despite the activity of armed groups in and around the area.

The bigger picture though is worrying, according to Mehlman who said the area in which lowland gorillas are found had shrunk by at least 25% since the early 1960s.

He said the total number of Grauer's gorillas left in the world is thought to be at the "lower end" of an estimated range of between 5 000 and 25 000.

Grauer's gorillas are found in the wild only in some 21 000 square kilometres of the DRC's South Kivu province.

South Kivu is home to a myriad of different armed groups and, even among troops of the regular DRC army, not all units receive their small salary on time, often making poaching of endangered species an attractive option.

- AFP