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The rangers guarding the sweeping savannah and ice-capped mountains of Virunga, Africa’s oldest national park, have over the years fought off Ebola epidemics and incursions by militias.
Now, they are facing both at the same time.
Just as the virus has spread across eastern DR Congo in the two provinces that Virunga spans, northern parts of the park have been occupied by Isis-affiliated jihadis from the Allied Democratic Forces. The park is also home to around a third of the world’s endangered mountain gorillas.
On Tuesday night, park rangers and Congolese soldiers fought a seven-hour pitched battle against ADF militants who attacked a funeral wake attended by several hundred people, according to the park’s director. Sixteen people died, including two security agents assigned to Virunga.
The attacks have compounded a looming health crisis, as a region fractured by years of persistent conflict is now prey to what the WHO fears could become the worst Ebola epidemic since the 2014 outbreak in West Africa, which claimed 11,000 lives.
So far, there have been 381 confirmed cases of Ebola, most of them further north of Virunga, and several hundred more suspected infections. However, the disease has now spread across three provinces, with cases identified in the cities of Beni and Butembo, both next to the park.
The Kinshasa government has leaned on the park’s rangers as one of the best-formed public outfits in an otherwise crumbling state, to protect not only the gorillas but also the communities that live within and around the 3,000 square mile park, which contains two active volcanoes.
The national public health institute has now called on the park to set up Ebola screening and isolation centres at four key river transit points. These potentially act as a firewall to prevent the virus further spreading from the epicentre of the outbreak in Ituri to North Kivu province further south.
“We have had to pivot on a whole number of activities and reassign resources to Ebola. At the same time, we are very committed to civilian protection because of the ADF violence,” said Emmanuel de Merode, a Belgian conservationist and director of the park.
Virunga staff were previously mobilised in 2018 to contain an Ebola outbreak that claimed 2,299 lives.
But that time, they did not also “have to manage an insurrection from a jihadist group that is incredibly violent coupled with all of the precautions needed to contain Ebola”, Merode said.
Another 13 people were killed on Sunday when the ADF attacked a camp for Bambuti indigenous people displaced from the Ituri rainforest, he said.
The strain on park resources comes just as it has been tasked with expanding a “green corridor” stretching 1,700km from the volcanic mountains of Virunga to the capital Kinshasa in the west in what would be the largest stretch of protected tropical rainforest in the world.
The process, which had already begun when Ebola struck, involves establishing forward operating bases for rangers to protect communities and wildlife, and develop local economies as a way of combating trafficking networks.
The ADF, which was founded by Ugandan Muslims in the 1990s, fled into eastern Congo and in 2019 pledged allegiance to Isis, forming one of the only offshoots of the global organisation to operate in a mostly non-Muslim region.
It has evaded five years of joint operations by Ugandan and Congolese forces, carrying out a succession of massacres and mass abductions in Ituri and North Kivu villages during its prolonged reign of terror. The group survives on cocoa and gold smuggling and on extracting ransoms from the families of abductees.
In the past year, the Congolese army’s ability to contain the ADF has been stretched by Rwanda-backed M23 rebels, who have established a parallel administration in the Kivu regions to the south, where Ebola has also gained a hold.
Despite an already mounting toll from the disease, Merode said it felt like “the calm before the storm” because the virus had been incubating for months and there were likely many cases yet to be officially recorded.
“We are braced for some very difficult months ahead. It lasted 18 months last time. We are in a much worse situation this time,” he said.
