Guerillas In The Mist.

This morning I had a meeting with Jean-Michel Dumont, the political advisor for the EU’s Special Representative for the Great Lakes Area. He has been working on the democratic workings of the DRC for years and had intimate knowledge of the goings in Kinshasa and elsewhere.
Having the spent the better part of four hours talking to him, I resigned myself to my room for a day of writing. My phone rang after 5 minutes and it was Mr. Dupont.
He was heading to the headquarters of the rangers of the Virunga National Park, and was wondering if I would like to come along. Virunga is incidentally the second oldest national park in the world after Yellowstone, and spans over 800.000 hectars of mountains and lush jungle. It is famous for its gorillas, and Dr. Diane Fossey spent her life with the gorillas just across the Rwandan border.
I through my camera and notebook in a bag, and soon found myself heading into the jungle in a SUV with diplomatic plates.
The rangers of the park had learned, had been attacked by FDLR, the Rwandan Liberation Army, as they had tried to stop them for cutting down the woods in the park for use as illegal charcoal.
The Director of the Rangers, a softspoken man of about 40 from Belgium, told me that the use of charcoal is a giant environmental problem for the entire Africa, as poor people rely on it as their sole source of energy. Needless to say, it is a very dirty fuel, and it also leads to the pillaging of many of Africa’s ancient forests.
It is a multi-million dollar industry, and for the various armed groups, it is a major source of income. The rangers are desperately trying to come up with solutions as they can see their park disappear in front of their eyes, and recently they have come up with an ingenious method of creating brickets of biopulp.
They give machinery to make these brickets to the local population, thus providing both livelihood and cheap fuel at the same time as protecting precious flora and fauna.
On the way back to the hotel, my EU contact told me that the Director was actually a prominent Belgium prince.
I have to say, this country is full of surprises.