Congo tries to protect rare mountain gorillas

KINSHASA, Congo -- Farmers have overrun thousands of acres in Congo's oldest national park, the latest threat to more than half the world's 700 remaining mountain gorillas, conservationists and park workers say.

Stacking lava rocks, 200 workers are building a wall at the Rwandan border of Virunga National Park in a desperate effort to stop farmers, fighters and refugees from sweeping into the home of the endangered primates.

After a decade of conflict, militia forces still roam Virunga's forests, said Eugene Rutagarama, head of the International Gorilla Conservation Program. Officials suspect the fighters in the killings of three park workers over the last month.

"We want to have this wall built as soon as possible," Rutagarama said Thursday.

The 3-foot-high wall, however, will be little more than a "symbol to show the limit of the forest," he acknowledged. "I don't think it can really stop people."

Farmers seeking landThe gorillas live on the misty, green tops of volcanoes along Congo's and Rwanda's border, nesting in the forests as farmers work terraced fields on the volcano sides below.

In Virunga live 380 of the mountain gorillas. Their only other known home is the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, a national park in neighboring Uganda.

The latest threat to Virunga's gorillas came in May and June, when between 5,000 to 6,000 Rwandan and Congolese farmers overran unarmed guards, leveling 3,800 acres of the 100,000-acre park for cattle ranching.

They leveled trees, turning forests into pastures, and set thousands of cattle to grazing.

There was no sign of gorillas being hunted this time. In previous encroachments, poachers killed gorillas to use parts of their bodies for fetishes or to sell their young. Impoverished Congolese also eat the gorillas.

"Ivory, bush meat, fish and land," all are coveted in Virunga, said Terese Hart, based in Congo's capital, Kinshasa, for the Wildlife Conservation Society.

"Land is the scariest one, as once people inhabit the land it is very hard to move them," Hart said.

By this month, Congolese and Rwandan authorities stopped the destruction, and farming in the area has ceased, Rutagarama said.

Congo and Rwanda are now conducting monthly monitoring trips in Virunga.

Another swath of Virunga was destroyed during Congo's 1998-2002 war, which drew in troops from at least five other African nations.

Settlements continue to threaten the area. Virunga's once-dense forest area of Kilorwe is now the site of large pastures and villas, and trees are continually felled to fuel furnaces, said Eulalie Bashige, head of the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation.

Rwanda also has been fighting off encroachments on the gorillas' territory on its side of the border. The government there said this month that several farmers were evicted recently from Volcanoes National Park, a key tourist area.