Death for the great apes

The great apes have long struggled for survival in a world increasingly dominated by their human cousins.

The big game hunters who shot them for sport have been replaced by poachers seeking valuable trinkets and the ingredients for dubious medicines. The gorillas’ natural habitat has been gradually destroyed to make way for farmland and cash crops for sale on the global market.

Now a ‘gold rush’ of miners seeking a metal used to make mobile phones has pushed one species to the brink of extinction.

The desperately poor workers are slaughtering the eastern lowland gorilla for food in a national park designed to protect them in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In just three years, the gorilla population has plunged from 17,000 to less than 1,000 as people flock to the area in search of the metal, known as coltan.

At a meeting in South Africa tomorrow, campaigners trying to protect the gorillas will make a last-ditch attempt to persuade Congolese government ministers to intervene.

But with no sign of an easy solution, those who have tried to carry on the work of pioneering American conservationist Dian Fossey, who was murdered in 1985, admit there is little chance of success.

Her struggle to save the gorilla captured the imaginations of millions of people around the world when it became the subject of the 1988 film Gorillas in the Mist, starring Sigourney Weaver. Unwittingly many of those same millions are now hastening the demise of the animals they so much admired by buying a mobile phone.

Ahead of the crisis meeting in South Africa, Greg Cummings, European director of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, told Scotland on Sunday that the situation was now desperate.

"The eastern lowland gorilla is on the brink of extinction. Their numbers have dropped by 90% in the past three years," he said.

"They’re being hunted and decimated by thousands of small-scale miners who have invaded Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the north-east Congo.

"Miners have turned the park upside down in their hunt for coltan which is a mineral vital to the electronics industry and they have moved in - anything from 10,000 to 15,000 people - without food, cattle or access to crops.

"They are slaughtering the gorillas, chimps and elephants for protein and at this rate the battle to save Africa’s great apes will be lost within the next couple of years."

The national park covers some 2,500 square miles and was the birthplace of ‘gorilla tourism’ in Africa. It was hoped the money brought in would help save the apes from extinction.

But that was before the arrival of warlords and the discovery of a new source of wealth.

After the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda in 1994, refugees flooded into the Congo, followed shortly afterwards by militia groups armed with AK47 assault rifles, spears and machetes. Today, more than 90% of the park is controlled by the warlords.

Until recently, there were nine different armies competing for food and access to the local mineral wealth. Bush meat - from gorillas, monkeys and other wild animals - has become a lucrative local industry.

Park warden John Kahekwe said: "With the rise in bush meat trade, we knew that the days of the gorillas are numbered.

"These soldiers live alongside frightened villagers who have nothing to eat. They are told that they must scrape the earth looking for coltan.

"I cannot imagine how many animals have been killed."

Some gorillas are kept in private enclosures to amuse the children of the rich warlord class.

But usually the reclusive and surprisingly gentle mammals end up in the cooking pot, their bodies first stripped of anything that might be sold to entrepreneurs with an eye to markets in Europe and the Middle East.

Sources in Bakavu, the provincial capital of the South Kivu area of the eastern Congo, said a vast array of gorilla trophies, including skulls, pelts, teeth, fingernails and bones, were available for sale at the right price.

Kevin D’Souza, a 31-year-old mining engineer from Stoke-on-Trent who will be a key speaker at the Durban meeting, recently returned from a fact-finding trip to the area.

"It’s a tragedy. Destitute people feel that they have no alternative but to dig for coltan and then smuggle it out of the park. But at the same time they are destroying the natural habitat," he said.

The miners also eat birds, insects, flowers and grass. But their main source of protein is meat from chimps and gorillas.

The workers are paid the equivalent of a few pence a day while the warlords who control them make fortunes selling their products to middle men connected to big companies in Europe, Middle East and the USA.

On the international market, coltan is worth anything between 50 and 90 a pound, according to trading conditions.

D’Souza will tell delegates at the Durban meeting that somehow miners must be persuaded to move out of the park and only exploit coltan resources away from where the gorillas normally reside.

"At the same time, the local population must be encouraged to return to farming and fishing so there are alternative sources of food," he said.

But without peace in the region and the removal of those warlords intent on getting as much coltan as possible, D’Souza admitted there was little hope for the gorillas, villagers or the region as a whole.

There are three main species of gorilla. The mountain gorilla - the most rare with only about 600 animals remaining - is found at high altitudes, generally between 5,400ft to 12,440ft, in the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.

The slaughter of the once relatively common eastern lowland gorilla, which is only found in the Congo, in the past few years has meant it has joined its highland cousin on the endangered list.

It is estimated there are as many as 80,000 western lowland gorilla still found in Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Gabon, the Congo and Equatorial Guinea. However, with more than 100 being killed by hunters each week, experts have predicted they could be extinct within 10 years.

Celebrities such as Sigourney Weaver, Leonardo DiCaprio and science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke have added their voices to the more pressing campaign to save the eastern lowland apes.

"If we do not act quickly, these gentle creatures could become victims of our progress," Clarke said.

"Ironically, the ubiquitous computer chip, which has transformed human culture, is now threatening theirs."

Attempts have also been made to find alternative sources of coltan for ‘gorilla-friendly’ mobile phones, but without any major success. The Congo remains one of the world’s biggest exporters. There is enough coltan in New Zealand and Australia to meet the demand, but it is more expensive.

The University of St Andrews geologist, Dr Adrian Finch, recently reported that he has found coltan inside extinct volcanoes in the remote North Motzfeld region of Greenland. Dr Finch has received a two-year funding from the Carnegie Trust and Gino Watkins Fund, to investigate the commercial viability of mining the volcanoes.