It’s all monkey business
* Get Attenborough off our screens
* Take sides with rebels
* Big business behind you
* Stop aping around
For once, David Attenborough seems lost for words. As he kneels beside the mountain gorillas of central Africa during an historic encounter for the 1979 BBC Life on Earth series, the veteran broadcaster is overcome with awe. ‘There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know,’ he whispers. The primates crouched before him have DNA which is 97.7 per cent identical to that of the human being. As Attenborough’s cameramen gently follow the family of gorillas feeding, you might as well be watching yourself through the lens.
They are one of the most symbolic creatures on earth. No other species has won more love and curiosity than the mountain gorilla; the ultimate international icon of all that is endangered. Nothing could rival the extinction of humanity’s closest cousin as confirmation of man’s power to dramatically alter the face of the planet. In one stroke, our evolutionary bridge would be obliterated for ever. Darwinists will gasp in horror. Conservationists will lament the loss of a keystone species. You will have seen off your nearest relative in the relentless progression to a mighty goal.
Recent events play a helping hand. Already Attenborough’s apes are staring into the abyss. They are innocents at the epicentre of the deadliest war since Hitler’s armies marched across Europe. The Democratic Republic of Congo is not only home to more mountain gorillas than any other country, but its jungles neatly double as the battleground for one of the world’s most lethal conflicts. The official ceasefire of 2005 is doing little to stem the inevitable reprisals of a struggle that has claimed four million human lives. And it is the fug of this war that will play host to the most audacious extinction in modern history.
More than likely, Karema stretched out a welcoming hand as the gunmen approached. Fully habituated by tourism, the solitary Silverback trusted implicitly the figures marching closer through the jungle mist. Karema was held down and hacked apart with machetes. His heart, arms and legs were eaten by rebel soldiers for breakfast one morning in January 2007. Renowned for his exceptionally calm personality, the huge gorilla was the archetypal gentle giant and would not have fought back. His remains were found two days later, smothered in human excrement at the foot of a pit latrine. News soon spread that another Silverback, one of the males crucial to controlling the species breeding pattern, had also been scoffed by the same gang of anti-government rebels. Gorilla meat, the soldiers swore, made them courageous killers.
Just two isolated, tantalizingly vulnerable pockets of gorillas survive. Around 380 live in Africa’s oldest national park, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga Mountains, whose looming volcanoes and pristine rainforests, popularized by the film Gorillas in the Mist, are known as the gorilla sector. Another 320 gorillas are to be found in the adjoining jungles of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Also buried deep inside these forests are men with the impunity, weaponry and, allegedly, the moral compass required to vanquish the creatures that so astonished Attenborough.
Karema is believed to have died at the hands of those under the command of Laurent Nkunda, a gaunt, university-educated 38-year-old whose rebel armies hide among the Congolese southern forests. Fate has thrown your man Nkunda and the world’s few remaining mountain gorillas together. Commander for rebel forces known as Rally for Congolese Democracy-Goma (RCD-Goma), Nkunda is wanted for appalling war crimes including summary executions and mass rape. Violent oppression is the group’s modus operandi. Murdering the odd gorilla shouldn’t pose too much of a problem for a figure of such calibre. His whereabouts must be known to the United Nations, since a warrant for his arrest was issued more than three years ago, but scant evidence exists to suggest serious efforts have been made to seize him. And a good job too, as Nkunda seems beautifully suited to orchestrating this outrageous operation. Getting him on your side poses the first obstacle but there’s an obvious solution. Guerrilla campaigns are not cheap. Nkunda no doubt requires constant funding to finance militia attacks against the Congolese authorities. Procuring his services, therefore, should involve nothing more than a simple monetary transaction. Karema would have fetched around £20,000 as bush meat. An estimated eighty wild Silverbacks are surviving in central Africa. If Nkunda does the maths, as little as £1.5 million might persuade him to see off our remaining ancestors.
Laudable conservation efforts ensured the tiny population of mountain gorillas clung on throughout the civil war but the few, under-funded wardens tasked with protecting them will be easily overcome by Nkunda’s well-trained fighters. Karema’s remains were found, tragically, near to an abandoned patrol post. Almost a hundred park rangers have been killed by poachers in the past decade. Protecting the mountain gorilla is the deadliest job in world conservation and only the mad or simple of mind need volunteer. Nkunda’s militia regularly use Virunga as a base from which to launch incursions into the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park of Uganda, whose similarly modest sprinkling of wardens can also be expected to offer paper-thin resistance. In other words, all surviving Silverbacks are found within the killing range of Nkunda with little or no protection against his vices.
Actually getting your money to Nkunda in the first place is more fraught. For that, attention must turn closer to home. A number of major British companies have a track-record of trading with men like Nkunda, a policy that helped prolong the political instability that encouraged civil war. Although the UK government donates generously to the Democratic Republic of Congo, it has also turned a blind eye to UK firms’ behaviour in the country. One company with longstanding links to Nkunda’s RCD-Goma is London-based Afrimex which trades in minerals found in central Africa such as coltan, critical in the production of mobile phones. New evidence reveals that the company made tax payments to RCD-Goma from 1996 onwards, at the same time as the rebels were committing a series of human rights abuses. Afrimex directors say they were not aware of how this money was being spent. All claims are yet to be investigated.
Five years ago a UN inquiry recommended action against a number of companies, including many in the UK, for plundering the Democratic Republic of Congo’s natural resources and dealing with criminal and rebel networks. Not one has been sanctioned by the British government. Your safest option, therefore, is to channel funding behind the respectable facade of some of Britain’s biggest companies. The government’s reluctance to regulate its companies inspires confidence. The conclusions of the influential House of Commons International Development committee said that the failure to satisfactorily conduct inquiries undermined Britain’s claims to corporate responsibility. Only one case appears to be still under investigation at the time of writing. These are allegations against Das Air, based near Gatwick airport, and just down the road from the Crawley headquarters of African International Airways. Das Air are accused of flying five million bullets to the eastern stretch of the country, the area in which Virunga is located.
In the same month Nkunda’s arrest warrant was issued, world delegates congregated 400 miles from Virunga in the country’s capital, Kinshasa. They heard that extinction of the great apes was more than likely by 2010 unless new conservation targets were agreed. Four days later the first comprehensive strategy, the Great Apes Survival Project Partnership (GRASP), was unveiled to international acclaim. Dr Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the UN’s environmental agency, said that a minimum of £12.5 million was desperately needed by the close of 2005, an amount he described as ‘the equivalent of providing a dying man with bread and water’. Much more, he added, would be needed five years later if the great apes were to remain in the wild. By spring 2007, just £2.5 million had been received. The British government sent an extra £50,000. An internal memo named almost thirty donor companies, three of which were British. The support of governments and businesses was critical, the bloke from the UN had urged. This Toepfer character must surely have known that once you start having to beg companies for help, the game is almost up.
Maybe, after all, Nkunda is surplus to requirement and the mountain gorillas of central Africa will fade away without giving him the resources to acquire sixty-three brand-new AK47s. Or, come to that, having to delve into the darkest corner of Britain PLC. The gorillas’ habitat is shrinking, as chainsaws rip through the base of yet another tree. Even without your funding, guerrillas murdered ten gorillas in central Africa last year. The most cost-effective strategy might be to leave things as they are and save your money for when it is really required.
And while plenty of concern is being voiced, the creatures who made Attenborough lose his tongue for a grateful moment are running short on real friends. Karema adored spending time with humans and smiled in the company of his keepers. But when the gunmen approached through the mist that January morning, Karema was only able to outstretch his right palm. The name ‘Karema’ means handicapped, a name he was given because, while frolicking in the forests as a youngster, his left hand was ripped from him by a snare. Men plagued his existence from start to end.
* Nkunda arrested by UN and brought to trial. He is sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘perpetrating innumerable, wicked acts against fellow humans’. Never.
* In a surprise twist, British government prosecutes companies who have aided and abetted known criminals in the DRC. Unlikely.
* Rebels attempt to hold DRC government to ransom by threatening to exterminate all mountain gorillas, a key source of tourism funding. Authorities stand firm. Mountain gorillas are declared extinct after four-day massacre. Possible.
* A massive £100m international fund to save the gorilla is unveiled in 2010. Number of wildlife wardens quadruples. Improbable.
* Footage of rebel soldiers cooking the limbs of a Silverback in a cauldron of curry appear on YouTube in 2009. One shot shows young soldier eating its heart, the gorilla’s giant hand doubling as a bowl. Imaginable.
Likelihood of mountain gorilla population being declared unsustainable by 2020: 67%