#kahuzi biega

[janvier-shweka90]

Gorilla Ambassadors is an environmental education program created by a group of young conservationists based in eastern DR Congo who are members of the organization Congo Tourism Gate created in 2019 to support the conservation of the Mountain Gorilla.

[iweb-rdc001]

Guerre du M23 : après le Nord-Kivu, des militaires rwandais préparent-ils un assaut contre le Sud-Kivu via le parc de Kahuzi Biega?

Par Charles Mapinduzi Les alertes sont de plus en plus persistantes. Alors qu’une accalmie apparente s’observe sur le terrain des affrontements au Nord-Kivu, notamment grâce à l’interposition des troupes de l’EAC, des soldats rwandais, de connivence avec des groupes armés locaux, tenteraient un autre coup contre le Sud-Kivu, via le parc national de Kahuzi-Biega. Déjà, les responsables de ce parc…

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Africa’s top human rights commission said the Democratic Republic of Congo violated the rights of Indigenous Batwa people when it forcibly evicted them from their ancestral territories and imposed a national park on those lands without the original inhabitants’ consent. 

The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights ordered the DRC to provide the Batwa legal title to their homelands, among more than a dozen other prescribed remedies. 

The decision was decided in 2022 but wasn’t made public until late June of this year. Lawyers involved said publication was delayed because of mistakes made in the text of the French version of the decision, and that the DRC has not taken any action to comply with the decision.

The government’s embassy in D.C. did not respond to a request for comment and also did not participate in the Commission’s proceedings despite requests that it do so.

Since Kahuzi-Biega National Park was established in 1970, the DRC has forced about 6,000 Batwa people, sometimes violently, from an area of rainforest in the eastern DRC the size of West Virginia. Those evictions began on the recommendation of a Congolese conservation organization, according to the Commission’s decision, despite the Batwa having a long and proven track record of protecting and preserving their homelands.

In its decision, the commission sharply criticized the logic behind “fortress conservation,” the removal of Indigenous peoples from their land in the name of protecting nature. That model, born in the United States with the creation of national parks like Yellowstone, has been exported around the world. Increasingly, it is being used in conjunction with some carbon offset programs. 

“If the purpose of creating a park is to protect biodiversity for the good of all, should the way of life, culture and environment of the indigenous populations occupying it not be taken into account?” the commission wrote.

The Batwa’s culture is entirely based on a thriving ecosystem, the commission said, and their removal may have worsened biodiversity in the region because park guards and governmental officials granted forest access to non-Batwa groups that carried out extractive activities including mining and logging, leading to severe deforestation and environmental degradation. The Congo Basin is home to sensitive ecosystems with iconic species, including chimpanzees, forest elephants and critically endangered gorillas. 

[decolonize-the-everything]

Article from July 29, 2024:

The forcible eviction of the indigenous Batwa community from their ancestral lands within the Kahuzi-Biega National Park (PNKB) was a violation of their rights by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government, finds the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights in a historic decision. The ruling recognizes Batwa as the best guardians of biodiversity and calls for their return to their land. ‘This is a huge win for the climate justice movement,’ says Samuel Ade Ndasi, African Union Litigation and Advocacy Officer at Minority Rights Group (MRG). ‘The decision negates the idea that solving the climate crisis requires displacing indigenous communities and seizing their lands. Instead, it sets a strong precedent that recognizes the value of indigenous traditional knowledge and environmental and biodiversity conservation practices. From this point forward, no indigenous community should be evicted in the name of conservation anywhere in Africa.’

In the 1970s Batwa were violently expelled from their homes and dispossessed of their ancestral lands to pave way for the creation of the PNKB. They were forced into decades of grinding impoverishment, severe discrimination, landlessness and skyrocketing mortality in informal settlements on the outskirts of the park. In the two devastating decades after expulsion, the number of Batwa expelled from the park fell from an estimated 6,000 to just 3,000. In 2022, an MRG investigation documented a three-year campaign of organized violence by park authorities and Congolese soldiers to expel Batwa who had returned to their lands in 2018, resulting in the death of at least 20, group rape of at least 15 and forced displacement of hundreds. The case, brought by MRG and Environnement, Ressources Naturelles et Developpement (ERND) on behalf of the Batwa community, highlighted the continual violent evictions and human rights abuses suffered by the Batwa community was filed at the African Commission in 2015, after five years of fighting for redress in the DRC’s domestic legal system to no avail. Joséphine M’Cibalida, a Batwa community member, shares her experience: ‘While we were hunting, state agents invaded our community and burned down our homes, leaving us homeless and destitute. We lost everything, including our dignity as human beings. This ruling brings us hope that we will receive justice for the harm done to us.’ For the first time ever, the Commission’s ruling specifically recognizes an indigenous people’s crucial role in safeguarding the environment and biodiversity. It found that conservation models excluding indigenous peoples from their lands are not effective for fighting climate change in Africa.

Key recommendations from the Commission to the DRC government include:

A full public apology to the Batwa, acknowledging the deadly abuse by ecoguards, eviction-related deaths and the inhumane living conditions to which Batwa have been subjected;

Legally recognize Batwa as full citizens of the DRC;

Pay compensation to the Batwa;

Demarcate and grant collective titles to Batwa over ancestral territories within the PNKB;

Establish a community development fund and share park revenues with Batwa;

Withdraw non-Batwa persons from Batwa ancestral lands.

Jean-Marie Bantu Baluge, ERND spokesperson says: ‘Reclaiming the rights of indigenous peoples to their ancestral lands and resources is paramount to their survival and in protecting biodiversity. The Commission’s Decision offers a lifeline to the Batwa people and other indigenous communities in the Congo Basin who have been battered for over half a century in the name of conservation.’ MRG’s 2022 investigation also found that international supporters of the PNKB, such as the German and US governments and the global conservation organization, Wildlife Conservation Society, may be complicit in these crimes – including in violating a UN Security Council arms embargo. The African Union has fully endorsed the Commission’s Decision. Both the Executive Council and the Assembly approved it during their Ordinary Sessions held in February 2023 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. However, its publication was delayed by months. MRG received a copy of a corrigendum to the Decision, containing important clarifications in late June 2024. The corrigendum will be made available on the African Commission’s website in due course.

Aug 5, 2024:

But above all and since 2019, this People has been the subject of serious violations and repeated attacks, in particular allegations that militarized ecoguards of the park raped, killed and terrorized communities returning to their ancestral lands. This has been all very well documented by MRG in an investigative report from 2022.

In its decision, the African Commission found that the DRC government violated at least 10 articles of the African Charter, to which DRC is a signatory and party. These included the rights to life, to property, to natural resources, to development, to religion and to culture.

‘Crucially the African Commission has recognised that the Batwa, and consequently many other Indigenous Peoples all around the continent, have a critical role to play in conserving and protecting their land and natural resources,' said Jennifer Castello of FPP.

“The Commission has recognised that the so-called ‘fortress conservation’ is ineffective for preserving and protecting the biodiversity of PNKB. To succeed, conservation has to be based on securing Indigenous Peoples’ land rights, not on evicting them from the lands they have conserved for generations”.

Given that the DRC has recently adopted a specific legislation to protect the rights of Indigenous Peoples in the country, it is about time that the Batwa of the PNKB finally obtain justice and receive support to go back to their land.

FPP, RFUK, AI and IPLP urge the DRC to fully respect the Commission’s calls to the government and to take immediate steps to remedy the violations experienced by the Batwa over decades. We also urge all donors and conservation organisations engaged in the DRC to work with the government to fully implement the decision, ensure that conservation at PNKB recognises and respects the rights of the Batwa to their ancestral lands, and supports the People to take the leading role in conserving and protecting them.

More broadly, we urge the government and its international partners to provide redress to other victims of ‘fortress conservation’ in DRC’s other protected areas and to ensure that all conservation initiatives are implemented through rights-based, community-centred approaches.

[labutansa]

“From Abuse to Power: Ending Fortress Conservation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Oakland Institute exposes conservation’s counterintuitive deep ties to the extraction of natural resources and abuse of Indigenous Peoples in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Throughout decades of environmental conservation in the country, the government and NGOs have failed to address the issue of land grabbing and violence against Indigenous communities. Measures taken in recent years, such as training, grievance mechanism, and safeguards, are inadequate given the systemic flaws of the current fortress conservation model.”

“The Indigenous communities in DRC have, for years, unsuccessfully sought justice by filing lawsuits in domestic courts. Batwa community members expelled from the Kahuzi-Biega National Park took their case to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, alleging violence, rape, murder, and arson that have victimized their people are crimes against humanity. In July 2024, the African Commission recognized the Batwa’s rights to their land and ordered the DRC government to return the land to its rightful owners, compensate them, and ensure their full protection.”

[dailyanarchistposts]

Asia, Africa, India and Latin America

While we have been focusing on North America, the park model was actually exported throughout the world, forcing millions of tribal peoples out of their habitats/territories. The practice continues to this day in Asia, Africa and India, for example, where non-profit foundations and United Nations sponsored organizations are eagerly trying to protect what little land is left that hasn’t been destroyed by industrial modes of living.

Unfortunately, be it the Twa peoples expulsion from Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega National Park, the Maasai from the Amboseli National Park in Kenya or tribal people in southern India forced out of the Indira Gandhi National Park as part of an “eco-development” scheme funded by the Global Environment Facility, parks and conservation lands remain one more force which dispossesses tribal peoples. In Africa alone, one million square kilometers of land has been expropriated for conservation over the past one hundred years. Estimates in India range around three-quarters of a million people pushed off their traditional lands for conservation, in Africa the number is likely in the millions. Unfortunately, and ironically, land that has long been occupied and protected by indigenous peoples continues to be deemed “wild” and therefore suitable for “conservation” primarily by having them declared parks, thus making them out of bounds for the indigenous peoples who maintained them in the first place.

What happens to the people who once lived rich, meaningful lives within these habitats? They become like you and I. Dispossession leads to rootlessness, discouragement, depression, inability to be self-reliant, bad nutrition, broken communities, severed kinship ties, and anger, too often turned inward or directed to the nearest person.

I think we need to realize that dedication to creating parkland and conservation areas does not necessarily coincide with helping regenerate ways of living harmoniously with a habitat. More often than not it promotes a misanthropic outlook that posits intact, healthy land areas being by definition “human-free’’, rather than capitalism-free. We tend to ignore the fact that indigenous peoples seeking to maintain or renew their traditional life ways need to have access tothese areas, especially if the parkland in question was actually part of their traditional territory.

Even liberal organizations like UNESCO have begun to realize that there has been a negative social impact associated with many protected areas. In some places in Asia, Africa and Latin America, provisions have been made for local control so that traditional lifestyles might continue. But these tend to be limited “buffer zones”, where the original inhabitants can control “development projects”. These attempts have not succeeded.

Apparently coalitions of indigenous peoples have had some success in forcing international bodies to recognize their inherent right to manage their traditional territories. “In the 1990s, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), the World Conservation Congress and the World Commission on Protected Areas all adopted new policies and resolutions which strongly endorse indigenous peoples’ rights and promote the co-management of protected areas, based on negotiated agreements.[8]” However, these organizations aren’t arguing for free access to one’s habitat, but to “negotiated agreements” with outsiders and centralized authority, and land bases integrated into the scheme of state regulations and subject to the pressures of politics and the market.

Regardless of some recognition, many parks and conservation areas, especially in impoverished countries, remain part of the greater theft of traditional homelands by arrogant, powerful outsiders who impose their views of what constitutes healthy habitats. It isn’t parks and conservation areas that will help stem the tide of destruction and plunder, but recognition that new ways of living are required. And these new ways can be informed by the old ways ofland based people.

[nedsecondline]

Let’s save the wildlife – Eastern lowland gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri) – Myrela

Eastern lowland gorillas, also known as Grauer’s gorillas, are found only in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and are critically endangered, threatened by increased contact with humans. Of the four sub-species of gorilla, all of which live in equatorial Africa, the eastern lowland gorilla is the largest. It’s estimated that there are just 6,800 individuals living in DRC’s Kahuzi-Biega and…

[projectourworld]

All My Children: Human/Nature Finalist. Chimpanzees share nearly 99 percent of their DNA with human beings. At the Lwiro Primate Sanctuary in Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this genetic bond is perhaps reflected in the relationships that form between orphaned chimps and their human caregivers. Wild chimps typically stay close to their mothers until they’re about 5 years old, so when a mother is killed by poachers, the separation can cause irreparable harm for young, developing chimps. Many of the orphaned chimpanzees brought to the sanctuary by Congolese wildlife officials arrive carrying both physical and emotional wounds. The healing at the sanctuary goes both ways: Some of the caregivers who feed, cuddle, and help rehabilitate chimps are themselves victims of sexual abuse who have found independence and employment working with chimpanzees. The photographer Marcus Westberg, who spent weeks at the sanctuary, said that caregivers treat the chimpanzees as tenderly if they’re human children, and the young chimps, likewise, often act like kids—alternately playful, mischievous, and vulnerable. Article ; Courtesy The Atlantic. Picture: Marcus Westberg / BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition #chimpanzees #caregivers #children

[grandmaster-anne]

The Countess of Wessex is in South Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Today, HRH met representatives from @TRIAL International; a non-governmental organization dedicated to fighting impunity for international crimes in conflict, and supporting survivors.

The Countess also met the people behind @EarthshotPrize finalist The Pole Pole Foundation, which protects the gorillas of the Kahuzi Biega National Park from poachers, and works with local communities on initiatives to develop skills for alternative, nonexploitative livelihoods.

@RoyalFamily

[gungieblog]

© Marcus Westberg

Grauer's gorillas in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, DRC

While mountain gorillas have been taken off the critically endangered species list, Grauer's gorillas have been added to the list due to their numbers dropping by nearly 80% in just a few decades. Photographer Marcus Westberg captured this image while working with Gorilla Doctors, an organization whose vets monitor a small number of the species in the national park.

[female-malice]

This violence is unlikely to have taken place without the substantial support provided to the park by foreign governments and international organizations. Donors and partners have played an integral role in promoting an aggressive, militarized form of conservation and were instrumental in funding and shaping the paramilitary guards responsible for these abuses.

The violence of the past three years stems from the theft of Batwa lands and resources in the name of nature conservation. The creation and ongoing operation of Kahuzi-Biega National Park is rooted in an inherently violent ideology which mandates clearing natural landscapes to create an ‘unpeopled wilderness,’ void of the very people who safeguarded such ecosystems for generations.

The conservation projects are inherently violent and colonial, rendering them incompatible with the physical and cultural survival of indigenous peoples like the Batwa.

With several communities resolute in their commitment to remain on their ancestral lands, violent attacks by park guards against Batwa civilians are ongoing.

WWF is criticized for the practice of “fortress conservation,” where Indigenous peoples and local communities are displaced from their ancestral lands to create “pristine” protected areas, often involving the abuse of their human rights.

The acts were committed between 2019 and 2021 under the knowledge and paramilitary support of U.S and German government agencies and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), say the report’s researchers who obtained evidence through interviews with eyewitnesses and park guards involved in the attacks.

WCS denies allegations brought against the organization, saying it had no involvement in military operations. The KBNP bulletin denied similar reports of violence during a visit by the government agency that manages the park in February.

With support from the Wildlife Conservation Society, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, Congolese security forces have destroyed villages, murdered at least 20 residents, group raped at least 15 women, and displaced hundreds of Batwa in the name of conserving and protecting Kahuzi-Biega National Park, or PNKB. Batwa are an Indigenous people with communities throughout Central Africa and have inhabited the area that is now PNKB since time immemorial. 

[iweb-rdc001]

Guerre du M23 : après le Nord-Kivu, des militaires rwandais préparent-ils un assaut contre le Sud-Kivu via le parc de Kahuzi Biega?

Par Charles Mapinduzi Les alertes sont de plus en plus persistantes. Alors qu’une accalmie apparente s’observe sur le terrain des affrontements au Nord-Kivu, notamment grâce à l’interposition des troupes de l’EAC, des soldats rwandais, de connivence avec des groupes armés locaux, tenteraient un autre coup contre le Sud-Kivu, via le parc national de Kahuzi-Biega. Déjà, les responsables de ce parc…

[gorillatrekkingsafari]

What is the Cheapest Way to See Gorillas?

If you’re dreaming of seeing gorillas but worried about the cost, you might be surprised to learn that one of the most affordable options is in Kahuzi Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

While gorilla trekking in Uganda and Rwanda is famous, the prices in those countries can be quite high, with permits costing around $700 to $1,500. However, Kahuzi Biega National Park offers a much cheaper alternative. A gorilla trekking permit here costs about $400, making it one of the most budget-friendly ways to have this incredible experience.

The park is home to the eastern lowland gorillas, which are slightly different from the mountain gorillas you might find in other countries, but just as fascinating to watch. The treks are well-organized, and the area is much less crowded, allowing for a more intimate and less commercialized encounter with these majestic creatures.

So, if you’re after a gorilla experience without breaking the bank, Kahuzi Biega is a great option to consider. Plus, you’ll get the chance to explore a lesser-known and less-touristy part of Central Africa!

[infosurbaines]

Réhabilitation du parc Kahuzi-Biega : La RDC et le Fonds pour la Consolidation de la Paix de l'ONU signent un accord de 3 millions USD

Réhabilitation du parc Kahuzi-Biega : La RDC et le Fonds pour la Consolidation de la Paix de l’ONU signent un accord de 3 millions USD

Le ministre d’État et ministre en charge du plan, Christian Mwando a représenté le gouvernement congolais à la signature avec le Fonds pour la consolidation de la paix des Nations Unies, d’un accord visant la réhabilitation du parc national de Kahuzi-Biega au Sud Kivu. Cet accord signé à l’occasion de la célébration du 52ème anniversaire d’existence de ce parc est évalué à 3 millions de dollars…

[leyuwera]

Indigenous women in the village of Tshivanga near the Kahuzi Biega National Park. South Kivu.

#photojournalism #drc #congo