Finally Happened: Guerrillas Battle Gorillas
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) - Renewed guerrilla fighting Saturday inside a national park in the Congo that is home to endangered mountain gorillas forced rangers to flee for the second time in less than a week, conservationists said.
So far two gorrillas have been killed and rangers have reported three instances of gorrillas attacking the guerrillas, rushing their positions from the flanks, hurling rocks and other objects.
The clashes between fighters loyal to warlord Laurent Nkunda and government soldiers took place in Virunga National Park, where some of the world’s last remaining mountain gorillas live on the slopes of a volcanic mountain range that straddles Congo’s border with Rwanda and Uganda, the international conservation group WildlifeDirect said.
Tens of thousands of people have been displaced by the fighting across North Kivu province, where the park is located, and tens of thousands more have fled into neighboring Uganda.
About 300 people—rangers and their families—fled the park itself on Monday after skirmishes first broke out there. Wildlife groups said huge swaths of the park, including several of the rangers’ patrol posts, had been occupied by Nkunda’s insurgents and looted.
Concerned about the fate of the gorillas, a few rangers returned Friday. In the brief time they were there they found one body and a five- member group outside of the park and “vulnerable to crossfire,” WildlifeDirect said. The rangers reported hearing shelling and gunfire on Friday and Saturday, and fled again before they were able to check on the condition of any other gorillas.
The gorillas can roam freely and the park is not fenced off.
“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 those are believed to live on the Congo side of the border, where nine gorillas have been killed since January. The other 320 live in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.
“It is imperative that we get into the sector to check on the mountain gorillas. They have been exposed for nearly a week to fighting,” said Norbert Mushenzi, director of the southern sector of the park for the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature.
One park ranger was also shot and killed late last month in a separate patrol post attack at Virunga, officials said. More than 150 rangers have been killed in the past decade at five national parks in eastern Congo while protecting wildlife from poachers, rebels and illegal miners.
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“three instances of gorillas attacking the guerrillas, rushing their positions from the flanks, hurling rocks and other objects.”
…it was too close to call victory for one side or the other…:lol:
Well if gorillas can do it I take back everything I said about the Ewoks.
September 8th, 2007 at 7:20 pmToo bad gorillas wern’t on those ships four hundred years ago. US inner-cities wouldn’t have all the crime they do.
September 9th, 2007 at 2:21 amGee, wonder how long it will take for PETA to demand that the U.S. invade to stop the genocide…..
Sorry PETA, there are no weapons of mass destruction on that mountain. Just can’t go there.
September 9th, 2007 at 3:14 amcouldn’t that nasty bush just arm the gorillas
September 9th, 2007 at 4:39 am[…] read more here […]
October 24th, 2007 at 5:33 pm