At the end of the 19th century, European explorers cautiously murmured, “Ibirunga.” This Kinyarwanda term referred to the chain of volcanoes, extinct or active, that marked the horizon of still little-known territories: Rwanda, which the Germans had just entered; eastern Congo awarded to Belgium by the Berlin Conference; and Uganda, the pearl of British possessions.
The craze for the volcano region began when Robert van Beringe, a captain in the imperial colonial army of East Africa, shot two mountain gorillas on the slopes of the Sabyinyo volcano and sent one of the remains to the Berliner Zoologische Museum.
In a contribution published in a collective work devoted to Virunga National Park on the occasion of its centenary, the historian Patricia Van Schuylenbergh relates that this mountainous region immediately aroused the enthusiasm of colonizing nations and the curiosity of Western scientific institutions and museums. After King Leopold II bequeathed the vast Congo, which had until then been his personal property, to Belgium in 1908, the Belgian Ministry of Colonies was tasked with administering it. It had to respond to numerous requests for hunting permits, inspired by the desire to bring back spectacular trophies.
The requests came from prestigious scientific institutions, often American, and European royal families. In 1921, an expedition led by Prince William of Sweden succeeded in obtaining fourteen hunting permits. This privilege drew fierce criticism, so much so that the beneficiary himself drew the attention of the Belgian monarchy to the need to protect exceptional flora and fauna. A committed conservationist, Carl Acheley, sent by the American Museum of Natural History, brought back the remains of several gorillas across the Atlantic. Later, convinced that gorillas were an endangered species, the American dreamed of establishing a sanctuary dedicated to the protection of the species at the foot of the Mikeno, Karisimbi, and Visoke volcanoes.
This request was favourably received in Brussels, as the Belgian King, Albert I, successor to Leopold II and highly respected for his resistance to the Germans in 1914-1918, wished to protect not only the gorillas but also all the region’s flora and fauna. In 1925, one year before the creation of Kruger National Park in South Africa, Albert National Park was established, later renamed Virunga National Park.
Bambuti People Prevented From Getting Access to Land
In 1929, Albert National Park extended over 200,000 hectares, from the eastern slopes of the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda to the equatorial forest where the okapi live. It currently covers 7,800 km2, 300 km long and 23 km wide. Considered a common heritage of humanity, Congo’s national parks are officially dedicated to research and the protection of flora and fauna. Tourism is accepted with the hope that it might contribute to scientific work.
However, the Governor General of Congo tried in vain to remind Belgian decision makers that the local populations needed arable land. The decision was taken to close the entire volcano region to all human presence. Gathering, hunting, and fishing activities, as well as the harvesting of medicinal plants—a speciality of the Pygmies called Bambutis—will be strictly regulated, if not prohibited. Since then, local populations have consistently asserted their right to cut bamboo, graze cattle during the dry season, and fish in Lake Edward and the Rutshuru River. They also demand land to establish settlements and cultivate crops on the lakeshore.
Patricia Van Schuylenbergh and other authors note that on the eve of Congo’s independence in 1960, the populations living near the park felt growing resentment toward the authorities. This persistent resentment partly explains the conflicts that still trouble the region. Tensions are particularly felt above the city of Goma, capital of North Kivu, because, in what is called the “Great North” of the province, the Nande population has willingly left the area, fleeing the epidemic of trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness).
Poaching and the Rwandan Crisis
Until the eve of independence, the park’s only visitors were scientists, cartographers, filmmakers, and photographers. No Congolese conservationists appeared on the staff lists. The local workers, numbering around 700, were loggers, road workers, catechists, drivers, canoeists, and porters, and only the rangers’ wives were allowed to cultivate small family plots.
After 1960 and the sudden departure of the Belgians, the park faltered until President Mobutu Sese Seko decided to revive it and create the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN). Now supported by Belgian cooperation, the park, declared a protected area, was opened to a few privileged tourists as well as scientists.
Since 1988, the “Kivu program,” funded by the European Union, has combined tourism, infrastructure development, lodges, and ranger equipment. This revival was short-lived: during the 1990s, the Mobutu regime was weakened, and new actors emerged in neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda.
Poachers operating in the park seized weapons of war imported from Uganda. Above all, the volcano region, straddling Rwanda and Congo, would bear the brunt of the conflict that broke out in Rwanda in October 1990: soldiers from the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front, composed mainly of Rwandan Tutsi refugees) camped in the Virunga massif, government forces composed of Hutu soldiers launched reprisal operations, and mines were laid along the border between the two countries.
An Unprecedented Influx of Refugees
At the end of the Tutsi genocide in 1994, when the French Operation Turquoise, deployed in southwestern Rwanda, ended, some 750,000 Hutu civilians and soldiers, who had often taken part in the massacres, fled the RPF takeover. They crossed the Congolese border, scattered across North and South Kivu, and also settled on the edge of Virunga National Park. The damage to the park was immense: while humanitarian agencies provided food and shelter, the refugees found the wood they needed to cook, reinforce their huts made of interwoven branches, or even engage in the charcoal trade.
Poorly paid and poorly equipped, the park rangers were powerless in the face of massive logging. Believing they were doing the right thing, one NGO even encouraged the refugees to create handicrafts from bamboo—bamboo, of course, cut in the park. We later learned that Rwanda had developed a tropical timber industry and exported expensive furniture made from its neighbouring country. During the 2000s, poaching intensified in Virunga National Park, targeting antelopes, forest buffalo, and even elephants.
Deforestation, damaged or looted infrastructure, hemp and tobacco crops: the park paid a heavy price for the violence that erupted in the region, from the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 to the official end of the Congolese wars in 2002.
A Real“Hippocide”
In reality, while DR Congo was reunified, the eastern part of the country has never known peace, and Virunga National Park has always been home to rebel groups of Rwandan and Ugandan origin, smugglers, and rare animal hunters. Forced to fight armed invaders and drive out farmers, the guards deployed by the ICCN lost more than 200 men in the clashes, while also being accused of forcing out populations in search of land and natural resources, including medicinal plants.
When a national unity government was established in Kinshasa in 2006, it was also discovered that Islamist rebels from Uganda, united within the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), had begun settling in the northern part of the park. They killed nine gorillas “as an example” to dissuade forest rangers from preventing them from accessing the forest, where, among other things, they produced charcoal. However, the worst was never certain: when patrols were once again authorized to approach and count the gorillas, it appeared that their total number, instead of declining as feared, had increased by 8%! On the other hand, mammal populations in general were in free fall, and the hippos, which were paddling on the shores of Lake Edward, had been mercilessly slaughtered by armed groups, to the point that the term “hippocide” was coined.
The widely disseminated pictures of the massacre of the family of nine gorillas paved the way to a new management team. With the support of the European Union, a “public-private partnership” was established. It brings together the ICCN and the Virunga Alliance, a British foundation based in London. It brings together economic operators and volunteers. Emmanuel de Merode, an aristocrat of Belgian origin, embodies the synthesis of this partnership: son-in-law of Richard Leakey, the British conservationist who founded Kenya’s national parks, he also holds an officer rank in the Congolese armed forces, which allows him to exercise military authority over the park guards. He also ensures their families are taken care of in the event of their death.
Developing Energy Potential
Over the years, another policy was implemented: partnerships with the private sector and financial support from the European Union encouraged park managers to collaborate with local authorities. They believed that the park’s economic potential should benefit local communities.
This new approach — making the park a tool for poverty reduction — persuaded the European Union to finance hydroelectric dams. Six sites were identified, with a production capacity of 106 megawatts, which could ultimately generate 100,000 jobs!
The turbulent Rutshuru River, which runs through the park, now appears to be a blessing: a Belgian engineer, Michel Verleyen, accompanied by Congolese collaborators, is building the first power plant in Mutwanga. It is financed by tourism revenues and a European Union grant totalling $1.8 million. Commissioned in 2013, its production capacity is 1.3 megawatts, and it will be followed by Mutwanga II.
The Matebe power plant, with a capacity of 13 megawatts, illustrates the site’s potential: not only has it allowed the setting up of a soap factory, but it also supplies electricity to two thirds of Goma. In the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, public lighting is provided free of charge, while individual metering systems are installed by a private company, Virunga Energies (a subsidiary of the Virunga Alliance). The construction of three additional power plants, with the support from the Howard Buffett Foundation, will make Virunga National Park the leading electricity supplier in eastern DR Congo: the latest plant, in Rwanguba, has just been commissioned, with a capacity of 15 megawatts. This access to energy should enable the production and marketing of coffee, palm oil, and chia seeds, not to mention cocoa, which is already produced (DR Congo is the ninth-largest producer in Africa).
Oil, Corruption, ADF, FDLR...
However, the economic activity of Virunga Park has not succeeded in defusing the violence that haunts the region. It remains present in several forms. It is political when local personalities, allied with one or the other armed group, work to denigrate the park, especially during election campaigns, and engage in inflammatory speeches. It is economic when, in 2009, the Ministry of Hydrocarbons, without consulting its counterpart in charge of the Environment, awarded an exploration concession to the oil company Soco, listed on the London Stock Exchange. In the heart of the park, block 5 has been made accessible.
This decision sparked an intense international campaign, but also resulted in violent actions on the ground: the bodies of two fishermen opposed to the project were found in Lake Edward2,, and Emmanuel de Merode was the victim of an attack while he was travelling to Goma with a damning file that he intended to hand over to the prosecutor. Finally, in 2015, evidence of banking transactions between a senior officer and the company forced Soco to withdraw from the project.
These recent years have been particularly difficult: in 2020, thirteen staff members were massacred in an ambush by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), Hutu refugees from Rwanda after the genocide, who are still present and sell charcoal in their home country, where logging is strictly prohibited. In the northern sector, ADF Ugandan rebels established camps and military bases, from where they sow terror in the Ituri villages and seize coffee crops, which they then export via Entebbe or Kampala, Uganda.
... And M23 Occupation
As for the M23, this rebel movement composed of Congolese Tutsis and supported by Kigali, it was at the start of the park that they began their offensive when they seized the town of Bunagana, on the Ugandan border three years ago. At the beginning of this year, the main area of the park came under its control. It maintained the energy supply program while setting up its own taxation system.
During the first months of the war, with only a few guards for company, Emmanuel de Merode remained in his director’s office in Rumangabo. This desire to preserve the park’s headquarters in order to continue ICCN’s tasks, including gorilla protection and electricity production, was, however, denounced by some activists in Goma, and later by politicians in Kinshasa.
Indeed, by force of circumstances, Virunga Energies and the park’s infrastructure department found themselves embroiled in the humanitarian crisis exacerbated by the fall of Goma and Bukavu in January and February. However, Goma’s electricity supply was assured, and NGOs installed water pipes and pumping stations in the displaced persons’ camps around the city until these villages of tarpaulins and canvas were dismantled on the orders of the rebels.
Trump, Peace and Disorder
In addition to the countless armed groups roaming the park and local communities still eager to reclaim their family lands, international politics has added an additional threat to the century-old institution: one of the terms of the peace agreement proposed by the United States, self-proclaimed mediator in the war between government forces and the M23 rebels and their Rwandan allies, concerns access to parks and nature reserves.
Donald Trump simply suggested that Kigali be involved in the operation of the region’s natural parks, including those located entirely within Congolese territory and bordering Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, a national tourism gem. It is well known that, while the two men were talking and negotiating economic agreements, Rwandan President Paul Kagame had proposed to his Congolese counterpart, Félix Tshisekedi, that Rwandan access be opened to Virunga National Park, which borders the Rwandan Gorilla Park. He said he was willing to set up hotel infrastructure and other access facilities on his side of the border... This ambitious project was overshadowed by war, but it cannot be ruled out that the peace imposed by the United States will bring it back into fashion, and that one day Rwandans will be allowed to patrol alongside ICCN guards.
Furthermore, given its expertise in the Virunga Park, the ICCN was offered the management of a ‘green corridor’, a huge protected area of 540,000 km2 (the largest in the world...) which, from North Kivu, would extend to Kisangani, on the banks of the Congo River.
