OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Kong Six: Mapping the Road to Tayna

The Tayna Gorilla Reserve is located some 50 kilometers west of the spine of the Great African Rift Valley and the “spooky”—in the words of Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Salopek—Virunga National Park (VNP). Salopek’s trip in 2000 from Mgahinga National Park in Uganda to the Virunga National Park in Congo found a “spooky, derelict national park that (had) doubled as a battlefield for nearly two years.”

The VNP landscape encompasses 790,000 hectares (1.95 million acres) of rich equatorial swamps, plains that rival the brawny savannahs of the great South African Kruger Park, and steppes that merge into the Mountains of the Moon snowfields of the Ruwenzoris. Lava plains old and new flow down slopes of volcanoes and buffer the last refuge of the king of the volcanoes—the inspiration for the mythical KONG—the embattled mountain gorilla.

This is a land that once formed the cradle of civilization, but humans here are also fighting a losing battle for survival. As we noted in KONG: The Hanged Man (http://coanews.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1964), in recent years hundreds of thousands of refugees—mostly women and children—fled west from Rwanda into Virunga’s forests and were hunted down and slaughtered by Rwandan and Ugandan forces. The mapping agencies, the money, the scientists, the humanitarians and family planners, and the crooks on the run all followed the doomed humans.

The Tayna Gorilla Reserve is the flagship Community Conservation Program of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I). As DFGF-I boasts on their website, it is “a program that empowers local people to protect and preserve their heritage.” The claim is repeated in a jungle of press releases published as independent news, in lavish reports, fundraising campaigns, and expensive, glossy, full-color brochures.(3)

However, there is a damning indictment of DFGF-I published in the Annex of the Weidemann Report. Comments by Jefferson Hall, the former Assistant Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Africa Program, caution that DFGF-I is totally incapable of managing the Tayna conservation landscape or the CARPE conservation project at Kahuzi-Biega.

“In the Maiko-Tayna-Kahuzi Biega Landscape, the Landscape Lead,” Hall notes, Conservation International “has no implementing activities on the ground or presence in the Landscape or the country.” (emphasis added) Hall characterizes the DFGF-I as a sub-recipient whose involvement will cause conflict. He notes that DFGF-I does not have a cooperative agreement with CARPE or the experience or capacity to take the Landscape Lead. Hall recommended that activities on the ground should be a prerequisite for Landscape leadership.(4)

It seems that both CI and DFGF-I were inexperienced and incapable, but went ahead with their program anyway. Were Hall’s comments based upon predatory competition for funding, or was WCS supporting the Mwami’s claims that Tayna was in shambles? Were the hyenas of the conservation clique breaking ranks, now that the prey was down?

The ecology of the Democratic Republic of Congo is certainly worth protecting, but in terms of dollars spent and pressure put upon the humans that share the land, at what cost? Home to endangered human primates and their endangered relatives—the Grauer’s gorillas, the chimpanzees and another twelve species of non-human primates—there are more than eighty species of mammals in the Tayna forested area, including elephants, leopard, buffalo and the rare okapi. It is an achingly vibrant and beautiful landscape.

This area, especially north of Lubero District, could probably feed all of Africa–certainly all of DRC. This countryside of stunning vistas is the most fertile in the world. While we were perched on hills that that roll 2500 meters above sea level into verdant valleys, our eyes feasted on virgin timber and cultivated fields. Beautiful women wrapped in colorful fabrics tended to maize and tethered their goats in grasses that ringed the family plots. Chronological time may have marched forward, but these villagers have been living the same lifestyle for hundreds of years. It is one of the most breathtaking landscapes on earth.

It is also drenched in blood. At this writing—July 2007—there are 700,000 internally displaced people struggling to survive in North and South Kivu—CARPE Landscape 10—and the security situation is deteriorating.

The Paper Trail to Tayna

Members of the United States Congress should read the 127 plus page Weidemann Report. Beyond accusations of the ubiquitous pork, it fries the bacon of the BINGOs and DINGOs and their chief funder, USAID.

The Weidemann Report described the initial design and scope of CARPE as “insufficient” for the undertaking. Policy coordination is/was assessed to be “dispersed across a confusing array of U.S. Government and NGO organizations whose efforts were very unevenly implemented in scope, scale, and geographic focus.” (5)

Washington D.C. is described as “isolated” and landscape partners “cut off” from each other and Washington and even from the structures of power in DRC. In other words, Washington hasn’t got a clue what is going on in Central Africa as far as results from dollars spent in the human misery and conservation sectors. No surprises there—given the black hole of dollars that vanished with Hurricane Katrina and the absence of accountability at home.

We submitted a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) (6) to USAID in January 2007, asking for a partial evaluation of Tayna that has not been answered. No independent party has ever evaluated the program at the Tayna Center for Conservation Biology (TCCB). The Mwami on the run insisted that CARPE had evaluated the horrible conditions in villages and at the “university.” Just six sentences into the Weidemann Report we ran headlong into the Monkey Smuggler of our series and the vindication of the Mwami’s Tale, told to us in a hotel room in central Africa in 2006.

“Meetings in Goma DRC and the team’s initial travel itinerary to Kahuzi-Biega were organized by Patrick Mehlman, Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund program director. Unfortunately, due to heavy rains, those travel plans had to be cancelled.” (7)

In fact, Patrick Mehlman of DFGF-I and Carlos Bonilla of Conservation International prepared the only existing written evaluation of the project at the Tayna Gorilla Reserve. The CI Final Report to USAID CARPE was written in December 2006 and revised by Mehlman for Conservation International (CI) in May of 2007. The report summarizes activities at both Kahuzi-Biega and Tayna Conservation areas. Graphs, charts and maps take up much of the content. There is one very small photo of the TCCB “university” from a distance, which reveals the tops of buildings. But it was all done by the Monkey Smuggler and his partners at Conservation International.

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