Translated from French by an automated online translation service, so please excuse the roughness. See link for original. Thank you to Anne Dillon for volunteering time to finding these French articles and doing the online translating.
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Where are we going with this poaching of another kind that is observed in the different parks of the Democratic Republic of Congo? In its issue of Wednesday, October 21, 2015, according to the Congolese Press Agency, poachers killed in the first fortnight of October, four park rangers in Garamba National Park (PNG). This information was revealed during a routine patrol, according to a statement of African Parks, a private partner of the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation “ICCN.
“The PNG patrol team consisting of 10 men, were following in the footsteps of elephant poachers near a camp in the Azande hunting area west, when there occurred an exchange of fire between the two groups. The numerical inferiority of eco-guards forced them to disperse,” informed the press.
Furthermore, the African Parks helicopter, deployed to rescue rangers, was shot, but managed to recover the six members of the patrol unit to deposit them in a secure location. Note that the bodies of four guards killed were discovered and recovered by an army patrol able to access the site of the attack.
Four Congolese officials assigned to the Garamba monitoring were killed in October of this year by poachers in this nature reserve northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo where elephants are particularly at risk, officials said.
The four men, three guards of the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation “ICCN” and a colonel of the Armed Forces of the DRC “FARDC,” were killed during a “shootout” with poachers that they tracked with the collar of an elephant killed by criminals, said a statement of the African Parks Network, which manages the concert Garamba park with ICCN, without specifying the date of the drama.
Eight people killed since the start of the year
The director of the Garamba Park, Erik Mararv, fearing other confrontations between park rangers and poachers, said eight people have been killed since the beginning of this year in the Garamba Park. It became the favorite place where operate poachers, armed groups, members of the Lord’s Resistance Army “LRA” of Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony.
Poaching has received renewed international attention in recent months, with the United Nations calling on member states to fight against trafficking and poaching supported by funds from the rebel groups operating in Africa.
The elephant population of Africa is estimated to have decreased by 60% during the last decade, with nearly 30,000 elephants poached for ivory each year to provide Asian countries.
According to African Parks, other people were killed in other parks in the country. In June, African Parks had lamented the death of a guard ICCN and two soldiers in an “ambush by heavily armed poachers.”
World Heritage of Humanity is in the endangered category as are the four other reserves of the DRC recognized as exceptional by Unesco. The Garamba National Park is located in the extreme northeast of the DRC, on the edge South Sudan and near the Uganda, a landlocked region and unstable due to the presence of Ugandan rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army: “LRA.”
In June 2014, African Parks and ICCN, partners in the management of the park, had launched a cry of alarm against “the slaughter of elephants in the park,” under the blows of rebel LRA attacks, armed groups from South Sudan, deserters from the Congolese army and other poachers, even as efforts against these criminal activities were intensified. Park managers indicated at the time that 68 elephants were killed in two months.
Jocelyne Wandje Mbote