The Battle for Africa's Oldest National Park
National Geographic Society - 7 hours ago
The mystery surrounding a wounded conservationist, and the fight for
war-torn Virunga
Emmanuel de Merode, a member of the Belgian royal family, was named
the chief warden of Virunga National Park in 2008. He was ambushed
while driving in the park on April 15 and is currently recovering from
gunshot wounds.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES
Jon Rosen
PUBLISHED JUNE 6, 2014
The waters of Lake Edward have finally grown calm as Josué Kambasu
revs his pirogue's outboard motor, steering the craft past the local
pod of hippos before heading toward the fishing boats returning with
their previous night's catch.

NG STAFF
Kambasu, the head of a local fishermen's cooperative, has invited me
on an early morning tour of the lake—located within
Virunga National Park in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic
of the Congo (DRC).
Plagued by decades of overfishing, he tells me, Edward's stocks of
tilapia, bagrid catfish, and the eel-like
protopteur have begun to recover. To prove it, he's hoping to show me
pêche de Merode
—local slang for a bumper catch and a testament to the park's chief
warden, Emmanuel de Merode, whose strong enforcement of fishing
regulations has helped drive the industry's revival.
Despite de Merode's popularity on the lake, it's a sensitive time to
be discussing his record.
Two weeks earlier, on April 15,
the 44-year-old Belgian had been ambushed
while driving to Virunga's Rumangabo headquarters, shot by unknown
gunmen. Although he was widely admired for upholding the law in a
region long defined by lawlessness, his work also had given him many
enemies: poachers, illegal charcoal harvesters, and members of the
Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a rebel militia
founded by the ethnic Hutu perpetrators of Rwanda's 1994 genocide who
have long hunted the park's animals for bush meat, cut down its trees,
and built bases in its vast remote areas. Along the way, they have
often clashed with park rangers and raped and looted local
populations.
In addition, de Merode had been a leading critic of oil exploration
inside the park, currently being carried out by London-based Soco
International.
Under a contract signed with the DRC government in 2010, Soco has
access to a block of land that includes 1,500 square miles of the
park—roughly 50 percent—including much of Virunga's southern and
central sectors and the two-thirds of Lake Edward that falls within
the DRC's borders.

Fishermen haul in their nets near the southern shores of Lake Edward
in the village of Vitshumbi. They, along with some 20,000 other
residents of Vitshumbi , rely on the lake's resources to earn a
living.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES
Go to page 1 Zoom out
On May 1, as de Merode was recovering from the shooting in Nairobi,
Kenya, and preparing for his eventual return to the park three weeks
later, Soco contractors began recording seismic data from the lake
floor. In the coming weeks, data they collect will be used to
determine whether there are underground formations that might hold
extractable oil.
It's a prospect, Kambasu tells me, that worries many in his home
village of Vitshumbi, located at the southern end of Lake Edward.
Almost entirely dependent on fishing, Vitshumbi's 20,000 residents
fear a future of invasive rigs, polluted waters, and disrupted
fish-spawning zones. But they also worry about potential violence,
which has plagued the area for 20 years as multiple militia groups
(some backed by neighboring countries) have fought the Congolese
military and each other. Now the villagers see potential threats from
powerful political actors vying for a piece of possible oil contracts;
by armed groups targeting oil infrastructure for profit; and by local
youths who, like many across the region, can't find work and often
join militias out of desperation.
For now, though, there's little Vitshumbi's fishermen can do but cast
their nets and hope.

NG STAFF. SOURCE: SOCO INTERNATIONAL
Rangers, assisted by local volunteers, carry the body of a silverback
mountain gorilla killed in Virunga National Park on July 24, 2007, by
members of an illegal charcoal-harvesting syndicate.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES
The Belgian Prince
Appointed by the DRC government in August 2008, Emmanuel de Merode was
an unusual choice to manage Africa's oldest national park, which is
overseen by the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature
(ICCN), a government agency.
Born into a family of Belgian noble lineage and officially designated
a prince, he first arrived in Congo in 1993 to conduct research for a
Ph.D. in anthropology. Eventually he began working closely with
Virunga's rangers through the Nairobi-based NGO
WildlifeDirect, established in 2004 by his father-in-law,
Richard Leakey, the Kenyan paleoanthropologist. De Merode slowly
molded a reputation as a friend of Congo's people and its wildlife.
Virunga, which was founded in 1925 by Belgium's King Albert I, is a
naturalist's utopia: Slightly smaller than Yellowstone, it's a land of
unparalleled biodiversity, home to half of all the species on the
African continent. Because of the park's wide variations in altitude
and rainfall and its location along the seismically active
Albertine Rift,
its habitats include lava plains, tropical forests, marshes, savannas,
glaciers, mountain snowfields, and two active volcanoes—including one,
Nyiragongo, with what is arguably the world's most spectacular
open-air lava lake.
Virunga's fauna, which includes elephants, lions, hippos, chimpanzees,
and okapi—striped forest-dwelling mammals most closely related to
giraffes—is just as varied. The park's most prized inhabitants,
though, are 200 of the world's 880 remaining mountain gorillas, which
inhabit the lower slopes of several extinct volcanoes that rise from
the southeastern edge of the park and cut across the borders of Rwanda
and Uganda.
Slightly smaller than Yellowstone, Virunga is a land of unparalleled
biodiversity, home to half of all the species on the African
continent.
Despite Virunga's natural wealth, the park de Merode inherited was a mess.
Already in decline from decades of mismanagement by previous wardens,
Virunga had served for the past 14 years as a theater for what some
scholars have termed Africa's World War—a multilayered conflict that,
at its height, involved nine African national armies and dozens of
rebel outfits, and spawned a regional humanitarian crisis that left an
estimated five million dead.
Since July 1994, when more than a million Rwandan Hutu
refugees—including scores who had participated in the genocide—fled
across the DRC border as the Rwandan Patriotic Front captured power in
Kigali, the park had been under serious strain. With the passing of
time, this would only accelerate, as myriad armed groups turned to
poaching, illegal fishing, and other extractive activities to fund
their operations. Sometimes, as the years went on, they continued to
fight because they knew no other livelihood.
By 2007 Virunga's crisis had reached a breaking point. That September,
forces loyal to a Congolese Tutsi warlord, Laurent Nkunda, had
captured the Mikeno Sector of the park, home of the Virunga mountain
gorillas, and had refused to let any rangers inside the area.
Emmanuel de Merode (top left), along with rangers and
conservationists, checks on a group of mountain gorillas in a part of
Virunga located in North Kivu Province. In late 2008 de Merode
negotiated the return of the rangers after they had been kept out of
Virunga by rebels, who occupied part of the park for more than a year.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES
That year, ten gorillas had been killed. As it turned out, at least
seven of the rare animals were not killed by rebels or poachers, but
rather by members of an illegal charcoal racket linked to the park's
chief warden at the time, Honoré Mashagiro. In August 2008, with
Mashagiro in jail and facing trial and the government-run ICCN reeling
amid internal power struggles, Kinshasa turned to a foreigner, de
Merode, to take back control of the park.
By all accounts, he attacked the assignment with gusto. First on de
Merode's to-do list was to approach the rebel leader, Nkunda, and
negotiate a return of his rangers to Mikeno—a feat that, despite the
burning of park headquarters, he managed to accomplish by November.
Next he turned to securing the rest of the park, improving patrols of
its forests, cracking down on charcoal harvesters and poachers,
impounding unlicensed fishing boats, and soliciting foreign donors to
boost his administration's meager budget.
De Merode also worked to improve conditions among the park's 300
rangers, whose jobs have been called the most dangerous in all of
conservation. Since the start of the Congo conflict, 140 have been
killed in the line of duty, yet before de Merode arrived, their
salaries—which often went unpaid by the government—barely covered the
basic necessities of life.
"The conditions before were very, very bad," Augustin Rwimo, a 28-year
ICCN veteran, tells me when I ask how his profession has changed under
de Merode's management. "But now we eat three meals a day. And
everyone who is working is able to send his children to school. Most
of our rangers have even built their own houses."
After boosting the morale of his staff, de Merode then turned to local
people—four million of whom, he estimates, live within a day's walk of
the park. Knowing that their support is crucial for Virunga's revival
to be successful, he balanced his crackdown—arrests and
confiscations—with new roads, schools, health clinics, and water
sources. He also implemented a program to support the manufacturing of
eco-friendly cooking briquettes, intended to reduce reliance on
expensive and destructive charcoal.
"Today, for many of our youth, the main occupation is war. We want to
change that."
—IR SAFARI SAMUEL, HYDROELECTRIC ENGINEER
The projects are part of an initiative known as the Virunga Alliance,
an ICCN-led consortium of government, civil society, and
private-sector actors working to support local residents through four
pillars: promoting investment in sustainable fisheries, developing
green energy, establishing agro-industries, including palm oil, soap,
and papaya enzyme processing, and—as the security situation
allows—working to promote tourism.
For the moment, the alliance's flagship project is a 12.6-megawatt
hydroelectric plant, funded by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, under
construction near the town of Rutshuru, where less than 5 percent of
households are connected to the grid. Although it was delayed by yet
another rebellion—the Rwanda-backed M23, which occupied swaths of the
park from April 2012 until last November—the project, which follows a
smaller pilot in the north of the park, is due to be on line in 2016.
"Once we have power, we believe we can create sustainable industries,"
says Ir Safari Samuel, an engineer overseeing the project. "Today, for
many of our youth, the main occupation is war. We want to change
that."
It is clear that such investments have gained de Merode the respect of
many locals—from fishermen, to farmers, to children who shout his name
as I pass, unaware, perhaps, that the
mzungu (Swahili slang for "white person") they know best is recovering
from his shooting in Nairobi.
Even so, there are some who are not happy.
Vitshumbi is one of several villages located in or around Virunga's boundaries.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES FOR WWF-CANON
In the village of Kibumba, not far from the shooting site, Cristophe
Bahati, 18, tells me of neighbors who were angered last year when no
one from the area was selected in a drive to recruit new rangers. In
Kibirizi, several hours farther north, villagers recount an episode
from last October, when they say ICCN rangers ordered the destruction
of several agricultural plots, leaving local farmers on the verge of
ruin. Although they admit that the fields were inside park boundaries,
they say authorities gave little warning before arriving to uproot
their crops and that soldiers working alongside the ICCN had
threatened them when they tried to resist.
One man, Kambale Katsuva, tells me he was previously harvesting 50
sacks of potatoes a year, worth $50 each—a decent living in eastern
Congo—but now is jobless. After seeking approval from the local chief,
he takes me on a motorbike to show me his former field, now overrun
with weeds.
"I've been farming this land for years," he tells me. "And ICCN knew
about it. I don't understand why they had to surprise us like this."
The most contentious issue of all, though, is the search for Virunga's oil.
Despite Soco's contract with de Merode's employer, the Congolese
government, de Merode has been a leading opponent of all oil-related
activity in the park, arguing that exploration and possible future
extraction not only pose grave environmental risks but also are
illegal under Congolese law.
The extent to which de Merode and ICCN have been involved in legal
challenges to oil exploration remains in dispute. Prior to his
shooting, according to multiple local activists who track issues
related to the park, de Merode visited the Office of the Prosecutor
General in Goma, North Kivu's provincial capital, to discuss a legal
inquiry into the Block 5 contract. However, the prosecutor general
Dieudonné Kongolo Ilunga, has said that no such meeting took place.
De Merode has not commented publicly on whether or not he met with the
prosecutor about Block 5, and neither he nor ICCN legal adviser
Mathieu Cingoro responded to repeated requests for comment.
Whatever the case, around 5 p.m. on April 15, de Merode was fired on
by three gunmen. An hour later, he lay on an operating table in a Goma
hospital, alive but deeply shaken.

NG STAFF
A Geological Scandal
That the outside world is drawn to the natural wealth of Congo is far
from a new phenomenon. Beginning in 1885, Belgium's King Leopold II
embarked on a vicious campaign of forced labor and terror to extract a
personal fortune from Congo's natural riches. Its rubber, ivory,
diamonds, copper, and mahogany helped build industrial Belgium.
During the 32-year rule of Mobutu Sese Seko, the nation's industrial
mining infrastructure withered to the point of collapse and then was
largely sold off to foreign entities after 2001, when current
president Joseph Kabila took office. More recently, actors linked to
Rwanda and Uganda have also exploited the artisanal gold, tin, and
coltan.
Overshadowed by its mineral wealth, Congo's known hydrocarbon
potential has historically attracted little interest from both
would-be investors and the DRC government.
Aside from limited oil production along its tiny Atlantic coast—which
began in the 1960s—the country saw little hydrocarbon activity until
the early 2000s, when a British firm, Heritage Oil, signed a deal with
Kinshasa to explore a vast concession in the Albertine Rift, which
included parts of Virunga. Although the exploration did not take
place, prospecting across the Ugandan border proved successful. There,
in 2006, the Anglo-Irish firm Tullow Oil made a 1.1-billion-barrel
discovery in the vicinity of Lake Albert, the first commercially
viable oil in East Africa. Interest in the region jumped immediately.
Soco, formed in 1991 and valued at $1.4 billion on the London Stock
Exchange, is similar to Tullow, Heritage, and the many other small
companies at the forefront of a new wave of oil and gas exploration in
sub-Saharan Africa. Unable to compete with the industry's major
players, the company focuses its search for hydrocarbons on what Roger
Cagle, Soco's deputy CEO, calls "places that are not overcrowded or
overpriced"—a euphemism for the less desirable and often more
difficult areas of operation. It's a model, he tells me by phone from
his London office, that comes with considerable risk.
"In this business, the odds are generally not in your favor," he
speaks in a Western drawl, the relic of a childhood in small-town
Oklahoma. "But if you're successful, the payoff can be big."
As Cagle explains, Soco's engagement in the DRC actually began in
Bas-Congo, the Atlantic-bordering province in the country's distant
west—where it drilled two exploratory wells in 2010 that were
ultimately unsuccessful. That year, Kabila ratified a 2006 license
granting a consortium of Soco and the British firm Ophir rights to
Block 5, one of five government-drawn concessions in the Albertine
Rift and one of three that include slices of Virunga.
Today one of these blocks remains unallocated, while the French giant
Total, which heads a consortium with rights to the third, has pledged
it will not explore within the park's boundaries. Yet Soco, which
bought out Ophir's stake in 2012, has forged ahead, returning to Lake
Edward this year after evacuating its camp during the height of the
M23 rebellion.
The seismic study that began last month, Cagle says, entails the
releasing of compressed air at intervals along the lake bed—a process
that previously was conducted on the one-third of Lake Edward that
sits in Ugandan waters. The data collected over roughly six weeks will
identify whether subterranean structures exist from which oil could
potentially be extracted—after which point Soco, together with the
Congolese government, will assess the future viability of the project.
"The seismic study won't even tell us if there's oil," says Cagle,
noting that such a discovery would require drilling—most likely on
land—at a possible later phase in the contract. "It will simply give
us a profile of the subsurface geology and whether there could be the
potential for oil, if it is even there, to have been trapped."

Rangers destroy a kiln in the Kibati region, during an anti-charcoal
patrol. The illegal trade in charcoal, which local people use for
cooking, has caused major deforestation in the park.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES
The Grassroots Fight
For a leading figure in the battle against Virunga oil, environmental
activist Bantu Lukambo has his office in an odd location: a gas
station. I meet him in Goma, a hardscrabble town that sprawls along
Lake Kivu's northern shores and, despite being briefly overrun by the
M23 in 2012, is one of the safer population centers in the region.
Entering Lukambo's compound, I step past old tires, a rusted vintage
fuel pump, and piles of hardened lava rocks—the building material of
choice in a town that lies ten miles from an active volcano. Dressed
in a purple T-shirt, carrying a cane, and limping on a clunky
prosthetic leg, Lukambo invites me into his cluttered office. Speaking
in French, he offers me instant coffee, served in a plastic mug, and
begins to tell me how he, like Emmanuel de Merode, is working to save
Virunga.
At 40, Lukambo has been fighting for Congo's wildlife for most of his
adult life—a profession that has made him many enemies. The son of a
local chief, he was born and raised among the fishermen of Vitshumbi,
relocating to Goma in 1996, the same year the Rwanda-backed rebellion
had swept through the region. Alarmed by the spike in poaching and
illegal fishing as the rebels lurked inside Virunga's forests, Lukambo
founded an NGO called Innovation for the Development and the
Protection of the Environment (IDEP), and began partnering with ICCN
and other local and international organizations working to protect the
region's wildlife.
Today, Lukambo has an operational budget of $300,000, employs 22
mobile staff, and has a reputation for daring feats of activism. Since
establishing IDEP, Lukambo says he's been arrested six times and been
forced to flee the country twice: once after rescuing a baby gorilla
that had been captured by poachers and sold to a network of animal
traffickers, and again after implicating leaders of a rebel militia in
the slaughter of ten hippopotamuses. His most recent brush with the
law occurred in early 2012, when he organized a demonstration in
Vitshumbi to protest Soco's planned exploration for oil. This, he
tells me, is now the park's greatest threat.
Lukambo is not alone in this assessment.
Since Kabila ratified Soco's rights to Block 5, the firm has received
a barrage of criticism from local and international conservationists,
human rights groups, and even the British government. UNESCO, which
listed
Virunga as a World Heritage site
in 1979, has said that oil exploration in Virunga violates the DRC's
commitments to the World Heritage Convention and called for the
cancellation of all oil permits inside the park. Over the past two
months, de Merode's shooting, the start of seismic testing, and the
release of a new feature-length documentary,
Virunga, which includes undercover footage that purports to expose
several acts of attempted bribery by individuals said to be Soco
supporters and security operatives, have brought the issue back into
the spotlight. Soco, which has since released a statement that insists
the company "condemns all forms of corruption" and accuses the
filmmakers of misrepresenting its "track record to date of responsible
operating," has nonetheless been caught off guard by the outcry.
"We knew there would be opposition," Cagle tells me. "There always is.
But the timbre and clamor of the people who are against this boggles
my mind."

Fishermen unload their pirogues near Kavanyongi, a fishing village on
Lake Edward, which is located in a section of the park where the
government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has contracted the
oil company Soco to conduct seismic surveys.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES
For Soco's critics, though, reasons for alarm are plenty. First there
are concerns over the project's legality, under both the DRC's World
Heritage Convention commitments and Congolese national law. Most
critically, the DRC's law on the conservation of nature, adopted in
1969, prohibits several activities, including "disturbing or harming
wildlife in any way" and "excavating, drilling, sampling, or all other
work that would alter terrain or vegetation" within the country's
protected areas.
As both Soco and the DRC government have stressed, however, the law
contains exemptions for "scientific research activities," which under
some interpretations could legally justify the current phase of
exploration. In our conversation Cagle insists the current seismic
survey is not against the law, and he emphasizes that Soco's only
legally binding contract is its commitment to provide seismic data to
the government.
Critics, like the Goma-based attorney Isaac Mumbere, disagree, arguing
the loophole does not apply to any studies, however "scientific," that
also have a stated commercial purpose. According to Mumbere, who also
serves as a project manager at Goma's Center for Research on
Environment, Democracy, and Human Rights (CREDDHO), the existing Soco
contract violates not only the law of 1969 but also laws related to
fishing, agriculture, and the preservation of the country's forests.
"Our position is clear that oil exploration in Virunga is against the
law," he says. "We believe the contract signed by Kabila and Soco has
no legal basis."
In addition to the legal debate, there are the potential risks to
Virunga's vulnerable habitats—both inside the park and among the human
populations at its fringes. More than two decades of studies from
around the world suggest that maritime seismic surveys like the one
under way on Lake Edward pose only minor risks to the health of fish,
other aquatic fauna, and overall maritime environments. However, the
prospect of future exploratory drilling and/or oil extraction present
a host of environmental concerns—from the presence of invasive oil
infrastructure to the risk of spills, leaks, and—in a conflict-prone
region—disasters caused by sabotage.
After the granting of Soco's concession, Lukambo tells me, he and
other activists took a study trip to Muanda, the country's only active
oil-producing zone, along the DRC's distant Atlantic coast. There, he
says, the locals he met were the "poorest" he has seen in Congo,
noting he'd witnessed considerable environmental damage.
His findings are consistent with a 2013 investigation by CCFD-Terre
Solidaire, a French NGO, which reports that more than three decades of
onshore oil extraction have left Muanda's water, air, and agricultural
land polluted, depleted local fish stocks, led to gas flares from poor
waste treatment, and created few employment opportunities for locals.
According to the report, these consequences have been exacerbated by a
"context of delinquency" linked to deeply ingrained corruption and
Congo's weak central state (as of 2013, the DRC trailed only Somalia
in the global
Fragile States Index, compiled by the Washington-based think tank Fund
for Peace).
In Congo's east, still rife with insecurity, analysts warn the risks
of oil activities are even more acute. According to a 2012 report by
the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, oil, if
confirmed, would "exacerbate" the region's "deep-rooted conflict
dynamics," which have long been inextricably linked to its resource
abundance. In addition, the report warns of potentially destabilizing
struggles for access and influence among elites throughout the
exploration and production process.
According to Lukambo, this jockeying over the Block 5 contract has
already begun in earnest, even if it could be years before oil in
Virunga is discovered—if it's ever discovered at all.
"This question of oil, it's controlled by a small group," he tells me.
"It's like a mafia. Their work is to eat this money at the expense of
the population."
Lukambo continues, naming several public officials he says are widely
believed to have personal financial interests in the Soco
contract—even though the company may not know it—and therefore have
incentives to thwart those fighting to keep Soco out of the park.
"You know," he adds, sensing what I'm about to ask him. "The place
where Emmanuel was shot is one of the most secure areas around the
park. There are four different army camps nearby. It's not a place
where there are rebels."
Roadside Gunmen
There is little that distinguishes the shooting site from the many
other forested stretches of Rutshuru Road—the largely unpaved artery
that begins at Goma's outskirts and runs north through the length of
the park and eventually to the town of Bunia, on the western side of
Lake Albert.
Once consisting of smooth tarmac, the road, like much of Congo's aging
infrastructure, gradually has been reclaimed by the elements,
rendering travel by anything but four-wheel drive difficult,
especially during the rainy season. Luckily, the skies are clear on
the afternoon I set off from Goma with a driver and interpreter,
following the route that de Merode had taken two weeks before.
Skirting the base of Nyiragongo, we continue to the village of
Kibumba, where teenage boys hawk beef and goat brochettes, and
children play atop a rusting anti-aircraft weapon, abandoned by the
defeated M23 rebellion.
Reeking of alcohol, he slurs his words as he speaks. I'm thankful that
he's armed only with a walkie-talkie, in contrast to his four
Kalashnikov-wielding subordinates.
A few miles up ahead, we come across a group of soldiers and stop to
talk with them. I'm met by the platoon commander, who tells me he's
been assigned to secure the shooting site. He invites me to have a
look around. Reeking of alcohol, he slurs his words as he speaks, and
I'm thankful that he's armed only with a walkie-talkie, in contrast to
his four Kalashnikov-wielding subordinates. Though gruff, he's
nonetheless happy to chat, telling me he didn't witness the shooting
himself (his unit, he says, was dispatched here afterward), but like
most, he is well versed in the details. Perhaps owing to his
drunkenness, he launches into an impassioned reenactment, crouching
behind a moss-covered outgrowth, which, he says, the shooters had used
for cover. Unable to see de Merode's vehicle as it approached, he
tells me, the would-be assassins must have had informants on the
route, who kept them abreast of his whereabouts by mobile phone. Then,
as the warden's Land Rover came into view, the shots rang out.
"Bam! Bam! Bam!" the commander shouts, mimicking the gun's firing. "He
ended up on the ground over there," he says, pointing to a turn just
down the road. "That's when we heard the news over the radio."
Who shot Emmanuel de Merode? During a week of traveling in and around
the park, I find that everyone I ask seems to have a different answer.
Some refuse to speculate, others pin the blame on the government,
Soco, poachers, or FDLR rebels. Some ICCN rangers compare the episode
with the Crucifixion of Jesus, casting the incident as a case of good
versus evil. The commander tells me he thinks it was people with
stakes in illegal charcoal. Before we drive off, he pulls my
interpreter aside.
"Make sure this white man doesn't go back to America and tell everyone
we did it," he demands. "Remember, we only came here afterward."

A worker adjusts the flow of water to a newly constructed
hydroelectric plant in Virunga National Park. Water from the Rwenzori
Mountains is slated to provide electricity for some 30,000 residents
in the village of Mutsora.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES FOR WWF-CANON
As is often the case in Congo, the full details of the incident may
never be known. Like the country's most famous assassination plots—the
murder of independence hero Patrice Lumumba, the killing of former
president Laurent Kabila, Joseph Kabila's father—there will be
competing theories, counterclaims, and conspiracies.
Still, some explanations are more plausible than others. As Mumbere
points out, although de Merode had a long list of enemies, most of
those potential threats—poachers, charcoal harvesters, rebels—had been
around for years.
"He even spent a year [with the park] under the control of the M23
rebellion," Mumbere says. "The question we ask is, Why now?"
The answer to that question, both Mumbere and Lukambo believe, lies in
de Merode's opposition to oil exploration in Virunga and—whatever the
status of his alleged legal inquiry—his crusade against the Block 5
contract.
Mumbere and Lukambo each told me independently that they believe
someone with much to lose from a suspension of the Soco contract, and
much to gain if oil is discovered in Block 5, had ordered the
attempted assassination.
"De Merode is someone who tried to apply the law," Lukambo says. "That
was his problem."
To try to boost his theory that oil played a key role in de Merode's
shooting, Lukambo shows me anonymous text messages from his cell
phone, including one dated April 18, three days after de Merode was
attacked.
"You see, we are determined to wipe you out if you continue to keep us
from this oil," he translates the message, written in Swahili.
Another message, in French, arrived two days later. Lukambo is
"playing with fire," it warns, threatening to "burn" his second
leg—referencing his prosthetic. "Just because we failed to kill your
director," the text says, "doesn't mean we'll fail with you."
I ask him if he's frightened.
"Oui...," he says in French, drawing out the word for emphasis. "But
others are receiving the same threats too. And this is my life's work.
I'm prepared to die if I have to."
Go to page 1 Zoom out

Locals depend on Lake Edward for drinking water, washing, and
transport, in addition to fish.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES FOR WWF-CANON
The Fight Continues
Given the drama surrounding Soco, the shooting of de Merode, and the
struggles of Lukambo and other activists, it's easy to forget that
Virunga, by the standards of the past two decades, is actually
undergoing an impressive revival.
As I travel around the park and its surrounding villages, six months
after the M23's defeat, I'm struck by a sense of optimism among park
rangers, Vitshumbi fishermen—even on days that
pêche de Merode eludes them—and civilians who believe that a sustained
peace in the region may finally be possible.
"We've been given the gift of nature."
—HOTEL MANAGER CYPRIEN KINIMBA
Tourists appear to be catching on, albeit slowly. Suspended during the
M23 rebellion, visits to Virunga's mountain gorillas resumed in
January. ICCN rangers say that treks to the summit of
Nyiragongo—complete with a night at the edge of its fiery lava
lake—will reopen soon. Cyprien Kinimba, manager of the luxury Mikeno
Lodge, constructed in 2010 at the park's Rumangabo headquarters, says
the hotel is now drawing 160 guests per month, half of them
foreigners. And though Virunga is still plagued by a lack of security
(during my visit FDLR rebels launched an attack on a supply truck in
the park), Kinimba believes the lodge could one day become one of the
most sought after retreats in Africa.
"This is not an ordinary hotel," he tells me. "We have mountain
gorillas, chimpanzees... We've been given the gift of nature."
To Virunga's stewards, it's this revival, in part, that renders the
search for oil so threatening. The more Virunga begins to prosper, the
more it has to lose from future drilling, extraction, or—even if Soco
decides to back out—the mere belief by powerful actors that somewhere
underneath the park there may be oil.
Even Cagle, the Soco executive, tells me he appreciates Virunga's
natural value—one reason, he says, that Soco is committed to improving
the lives of the people in the communities around the park. In an
alternative to de Merode's vision, he believes that oil can create
jobs, which will provide alternatives to poaching, charcoal
production, and other destructive activities, ultimately contributing
to the protection of Virunga's wildlife. He speaks of apprenticeships
and training that he says will ensure that locals benefit from the
industry; of parallel charitable efforts to boost the region's quality
of life. Already, he tells me, Soco has spent close to a million
dollars on projects improving drinking water, supporting mobile
medical clinics, and modernizing telecommunications on Lake
Edward—particularly in the village of Nyakakoma, where Soco maintains
a camp and where residents now have access to satellite television.
"The thing they are most juiced up about is watching the World Cup," he says.
On the ground throughout North Kivu, though, I don't find many people
who are buying it. Why, after all, would locals trust a vision hatched
in a faraway London boardroom, delivered by a man who, despite several
trips to Kinshasa and to the province of Bas-Congo, has never even
visited the communities around the park he's pledging to help?
Why should they listen to Roger Cagle when Emmanuel de Merode—a man
who's spent the past 21 years working on behalf of Congo's nature and
its people—has already launched a plan that's beginning to work?
One evening in Kiwanja, a town along the main road to Lake Edward,
just outside the boundaries of the park, I pose this question to Irene
Rugamba, 17, a high school student working as a waitress at her
family's restaurant.
As she serves us a dinner of Lake Edward tilapia—grilled with onions
and cassava leaves, and accompanied by fried potatoes and extra
pili pili sauce—she delivers an assessment of Soco that most residents
of the area would agree with.
A future of oil, she fears, will destroy Lake Edward's fish and
pollute the local land and water, putting the existence of her farming
community at risk.
When I counter, suggesting that oil might bring jobs and—if Cagle's
words are genuine—better roads, schools, and hospitals, she pauses.
"You know," she begins slowly, speaking in English, "we are suffering
for a long time because of war. But we are independent.
"To take a person who is independent and make him be dependent is not
simple. Us young people, we say to Soco: No."
Jon Rosen is a freelance journalist based in Kigali, Rwanda. He
reported from Goma and several locations in and around Virunga
National Park. Jack Kahorha and Nelson Munganga contributed reporting
from Goma.
Rangers patrol near the government-controlled Tshabirimu outpost, not
far from a small group of gorillas living in the north of Virunga
National Park. During the mid-2000s this area saw much fighting
between various militia groups.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES
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michael williams
From all appearance it is vital to strengthen ,increase and enhance
the human resources and capabilities ,to effectively manned these
conservations,especially given the many disadvantages that accompany
Militia's when they are fighting in these fragile flora .Lets keep up
the good work and focus .
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