Wildlife defenders work to overcome deadly attacks on rangers, surrounding poverty

Jean Claude Kyungu

DENVER - Jean Claude Kyungu has been attacked 13 times in nearly 20 years of protecting wildlife at Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s oldest and most biologically diverse national park.

“I’ve lost four rangers during those attacks,” he says. “And nowadays, every month we are losing one ranger. It is a serious challenge.”

Potentially dangerous working conditions are a part of conservation work everywhere, but particularly so in many African nations, like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where poachers and political unrest put rangers, managers and other conservationists at risk.

More than 160 rangers have sacrificed their lives protecting Virunga National Park in the last 20 years.

“We have lost 12 rangers this year,” Kyungu says. “The armed groups want to use natural resources in the park so when the rangers are doing patrols they are attacked by the armed groups.”

The country gained independence from Belgium in 1960, and afterward “saw a mix of unrest and rebellion, secession, dictatorships, armed conflict, and neighboring countries controlling parts of the D.R.C.'s territory,” according to the U.S. State Department. The country was the battle ground for the African World War (1997-2003) during which time nine African countries fought over the D.R.C’s resources, causing the deaths of upwards of five million Congolese. Armed groups still roam the country, seeking refuge in Virunga National Park and exploiting its resources.

The park, on the border with Uganda and Rwanda, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and its 3,000 square miles are home to about a quarter of the world’s critically endangered mountain gorillas; the Okapi, an endangered species resembling a zebra but more closely related to the giraffe; and large colonies of hippopotami, forest and savanna elephants, lions, and numerous rare bird species, according to the Virunga National Park website.

 “We are losing elephants, we are losing gorillas, we are losing hippos; we are losing chimps. It is a serious problem with us. So now the smaller groups of rangers are being attacked,” Kyungu says. “It is not easy to change but it is a process.”

Part of that process is trying to reduce conflicts with the local community and improve living conditions.

People started creating farms inside the park and were supported by armed groups, so Virunga has focused on clarifying the boundaries of the park and creating community conservation programs to benefit surrounding residents.

“We find out what the population needs and create projects,” says Kyungu, who has led those community conservation efforts for the last four years.

Previously, Kyungu, who has earned a doctorate in protection of gorilla habitat, led the park’s gorilla project and had created a network of community conservation reserves to protect gorillas and chimpanzees in eastern Congo.   

A minimum of 30 percent of the park’s revenues is invested in community development projects.

Projects focus on electrification, tourism, sustainable fishing and agriculture. Electrification is the central pillar.

By creating hydroelectric plants, the park can provide power to help create businesses and jobs. Already two plants have been created, and each megawatt of power generated can employ up to 1,000 people, Kyungu says.  

The goal is to eventually create power plants that will generate up to 100,000 jobs, helping local residents, including local militia members. Enabling local residents and businesses to afford the $280 hook up to the hydroelectric plants is one of the biggest challenges. The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world, with 77 percent of the populations living on $1.90 or less a day, according to the World Bank.

Despite these challenges and the dangers of his job, Kyungu is excited about applying some of the approaches he learned at the International Conservation Chiefs Academy, and having the opportunity to consult with the conservationists he met during the academy.

Most of all, his deep love for the park that keeps him going.  

“I’m passionate about conservation,” says Kyungu.

“When I was young I was travelling across the park and I was very interested in the wildlife. I started to draw the animals and rangers, and I went to the university to study conservation,” he says. “Even if we are attacked I must continue.” 

Horrors of wildlife trafficking on display at Repository

Colonel Mamadou Bhoye Sow, one of Guinea’s top conservation officials, could not believe his eyes as he walked through a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) warehouse stuffed with wildlife products confiscated from international smugglers.

Hundreds of pairs of boots made from pythons and other reptiles.

Three-foot ivory tusks, figurines carved from ivory, foot stools made from elephant legs, and boots and carrying cases made from elephant skin.

Dozens of preserved sea turtles stacked on shelves, purses made from frogs; boxes of coral; heads of  bears, leopards, jaguars and other big cats; and thousands of exquisite rare butterflies and insects.

Tiger mounts, rhino mounts, fur coats and rugs, and hundreds of tubes of face cream made from sturgeon eggs. Products billed as aphrodisiacs from tiger parts and “hangover cures” from rhino horn.

1.3 million pieces in all, and much of it from wildlife species at risk of extinction in the countries where they came from and globally.

 “My first reaction was I was extremely shocked,” said Colonel Sow through an interpreter. “The quantity was so huge there was something industrial about it. If you had so many people poaching that way, I could see all the biodiversity disappearing.”

He was most saddened and embittered, he said, by the elephant products.

“When I think of an elephant and all of the time it needs to reproduce and survive—I wonder how I will be able to help save it,” said Sow, deputy director generation of Guinea Parks and Reserves. “The trafficking is so fast. I do not know how long the elephants will survive.”

Colonel Sow and 41 other African law enforcement and wildlife officials working on the front lines to save endangered wildlife in their countries toured the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s National Wildlife Property Repository on Sept. 16th  as part of the International Conservation Chiefs Academy they’re attending.

The 22,000-square foot office and warehouse northeast of Denver, Colorado, at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge was the last educational stop in a day focused on best practices for collecting, analyzing and storing evidence seized in illegal wildlife trafficking.

What Colonel Sow and his colleagues were seeing is only a tiny fraction of what USFWS wildlife inspectors seize every year at each one of the 37 U.S. ports, says Coleen Schaefer, the facility supervisor and tour leader.

 “We’re a huge consumer nation,” she said. “I would not have a single wildlife product in this warehouse if not for someone in the U.S. importing them.”

History and species recovery on the menu for African wildlife protectors

DENVER – African wildlife protectors began their whirlwind two days of training and travel in Colorado not in the gleaming skyscrapers of one of America’s fastest growing cities but in a modest two-story brick building housing its oldest restaurant.

Called the Buckhorn Exchange, the establishment is famous for its taxidermy – 575 mounts including giant buffalo, big horn sheep and deer staring out from the walls – its gun collection, and its history.  Founded in 1893 by Henry H. “Shorty Scout” Zeitz, a scout to Buffalo Bill Cody,  the site has fed and watered miners, railroaders, cattlemen and more as well as five U.S. presidents, movie stars, astronauts and other luminaries making the pilgrimage here.

Dave Hubbard, who manages the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s international operations unit, welcomed the group to Denver and the American West.

 “For us as Americans, this is how we identify ourselves…This is also where thousands of years ago, if you could look down from an airplane, it would be black with buffalo. We killed every one of them. But we brought them back.”

Hubbard noted that President Theodore Roosevelt, who he called the greatest conservation president and the person who came up with the North American model of conservation, ate dinner here in 1905, an event described on the restaurant’s website.

“Roosevelt strutted in presidential style, asked old Shorty Scout to be his guide and hunting partner, and after dinner and drinks, the pair took off by train to hunt big game on Colorado's western slope.”

On this night, wildlife officials from 17 African countries attending the International Conservation Chiefs Academy and tucked into steaks and quail and listened as Heather Dugan, assistant director for law enforcement and public safety for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, laid out the details of what she called one of the most egregious wildlife poaching cases.

A joint investigation by Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service led to hunting outfitter and guide Christopher W. Loncarich of Mack, Colorado, receiving a sentence of 27 months in prison with 3 years probation and loss of hunting and fishing privileges during probation.

Loncarich and his associates illegally captured and maimed mountain lions and bobcats in order to make taking the cats easier for their paying clients.  The investigation uncovered about 18 clients since 2004 who had taken part in the illegal killing of more than 30 mountain lions and bobcats.

“What I appreciate is for all of us to learn from each other and collaborate on poaching cases such as this,” Dugan told the African conservation officials.

They are in the United States for two weeks to train and build relationships with their American counterparts to address global wildlife trafficking, which soared from $53 billion a year in 2011 to $213 billion in 2014.

While visitors including Kobus De Wet of South Africa seemed shocked by the sentence given Loncarich and criticized it as too lenient, they appreciated the choice of venue.

De Wet, national head of environmental crime investigation in South Africa’s national parks, said the buffalo mounts reminded him of his own country’s story of wildlife extinction and introduction.

 “There was not a single rhino in Kruger (National Park) in the 1950s. We started with a rhino program and now we’ve got 8,000 white rhino and 500 black rhino,” he said. “So it’s interesting to me.”

“There’s a lot of history in that building so it makes it special to have it there,” he said.

The High Price Paid by Those Protecting Wildlife in Chad

National Conservation Training Center, Shepherdstown, West Virginia--- Protecting wildlife sometimes has tragic consequences, including the loss of human life.

Klamon Haktouin, from the African country of Chad, is still upset after six of his best eco guards were killed by a poacher in September of 2013.  The country has lost at least 28 eco guards at the hands of poachers over the years.

Klamon Haktouin, from the African country of Chad, still remembers the day that six eco guards at Zakouma Park were assassinated in 2013 by an elephant poacher.

“This was a shock to me because they were some of my best guards and best shots,” Haktouin said.  “They all had families.”

Haktouin, a forestry engineer, specialist in wildlife and national administrator of the Network of Central African Protected Areas, has been actively helping to investigate and eliminate the illegal killing of elephants in Chad.  Each time that an elephant is killed he goes out and establishes the GPS position so that it can be investigated.

But the loss of human life is much worse, and by 2013 they had lost a total of 28 eco guards including the loss of six that year.  The six guards, (Idriss Adoum, Daoud Adjouma, Zakaria Ibrahim, Djibrine Adoum Goudja,  Brahim Khamis, and Hassan Djibrine), were being assisted by the African Network to control poaching and were assigned to patrol a distant landing field and roads far out in the park.  Authorities feel that illegal ivory from poached elephants then moves out of the country to Sudan.

The President of Chad was very concerned and asked for stepped-up enforcement.

As a result, the six eco guards and one cook were assigned to cover the airfield in March, 2013.  On a September, 2013 morning they went into a mosque to pray, without taking their firearms.  A person snuck into the mosque and killed all six of the guards in the mosque and wounded the cook.

As the shooter ran off he dropped some documents and a SIM card from his phone.  The evidence was sent to Interpol and later they located where the assassin was and he was captured, only to escape from jail and is still at large.

Haktouin said that the shooter admitted to shooting the elephants and the game protectors.

The president of Chad was so upset after the killing that he ordered all of the ivory stock burned.  He said that the ivory was not worth the lives of these eco guards, and the president provided his helicopter to be used to search for the killer.

Haktouin, who has worked 26 years for protected areas, says that as far back as the 1960s Chad had a rich and varied mixture of wildlife.   The elephant population was estimated to be between 90,000 and 100,000.

However in the late 1900s Chad paid a heavy price in wildlife losses, as the animals were poached and slaughtered and today the entire population is estimated to be only about 4,000.  The 610,000-acre Zakouma Park had 4,800 elephants in 2005, but today following organized poaching the park only has only 480.

Species such as the rhinoceros, oryx, and addax are extinct in Chad.   

“Poachers are supported by people with money and influence,” Haktouin said.  The poaching continues.  In April, 2013 as many as 90 elephants were killed.

Haktouin told about the killings at the International Conservation Chief’s Academy (ICCA) where 42 African conservation officials are meeting with their American counterparts to build relationships and a network to help them fight illegal wildlife trafficking decimating wildlife.

Universal Values of Duty, Honor and Respect On Display as Africans Depart NCTC

As 42 wildlife officials from 17 African countries made the short walk from the Commons at the National Conservation Training Center to a bus waiting to take them to the airport, they were greeted by a humbling sight:

Thirty-two state conservation law enforcement officials from 30 states, with whom they had been training at the International Conservation Chiefs Academy (ICCA), lined both sides of the path wearing the dress uniforms of their respective state agency.

The wardens from across the United States stood at attention and saluted as their African counterparts passed. When the last African had passed, the American wardens fell out and quickly made their way to the bus, where suitcases were being loaded, to exchange hugs and handshakes.

There were moist eyes on all sides.

The formal military send-off may have been puzzling to members of the general public, but it was universally meaningful to the African and American law enforcement officials, said Randy Stark, Executive Director of the National Association of Conservation Law Enforcement Chiefs (NACLEC).

“I think in any law enforcement or military realm there is high honor in duty, commitment, sacrifice, and respect” said Stark. “Those universal values pervade this line of work, regardless of where you are standing on the planet, and the presence of the uniformed officers is a symbolic expression of those values.  It triggers an emotional connectedness among law enforcement officers all over the world.”

It was his hope the American and African officials would develop professional and personal relationships, and as the warm farewell embraces indicated, that happened.

“Building these types of relationships is our purpose,” Stark said. “The human connectedness is the currency we need to effectively combat illegal wildlife trafficking on a global scale.”

“It takes a network to beat a network” Stark said.  The goal is that everyone will continue communicating throughout their careers, sharing information on traffickers and coordinating enforcement efforts across transnational borders.  With that goal in mind, NACLEC and the ICCA have set up a network to sustain and enhance the relationships created at the academy. “This global connection, collaboration and information sharing is good news for wildlife both domestically and internationally, and bad news for wildlife traffickers wherever they are.”  Stark said.