The Bondo Mystery Apes

2010 Update on Bili/Uere

Salutations de Kisangani:

We are coming to the end of a long film shoot which started in South Kivu and now ends in Kisangani

I did hear about your chimp sanctuary from Claudine a few years ago and assumed that progress was slow even by Congo standards, Issaka from Bili then showed me the location and while clearly there have been some efforts in the context of the school (I could not find a single worker on site at 11 am) and the road, it seems, so far to have very little do do with a chimp sanctuary.

We talked to dozens of NGO officials in both North and South Kivu where there must be hundreds of foreign NGOs by now and thousands of expats running them, Pretty much all deal with humanitarian issues such as schools and dispenseraies and pretty much everything else affecting humans, As such I find it more then just strange that a conservation NGO spends years of time and lots of money to build a school - and next the teacher housing and then a dispensary - which really does not make any difference to a single chimp, Why not let the humanitarian NGOs get on with their side of things or write them a check so they can set up and run a school which they are supposedly qualified at and finally do something for orphaned chimps?

(By the way there were quiet a few charcol burning pits combined with the cutting of trees on the road and it is clear that this has become a major activity now that it seems relatively easy to evacuate the bags, (Kind of the opposite what conservation projects hope to achieve).

At the present rate of construction there might in the end be very few wild chimps left by the time this sanctuary is finally ready, Our guys had no problem to find and film fresh chimp. elephant as well as Okapi meat on a daily basis in the markets of Kisangani, I did see your vehicle with the sanctuary logo on the side and was told Michel wanted to ask me where the documentation was for the local registration of the Foundation, Maybe working with ICCN in checking some of the local markets or going around the schools might be a way for the Kisangani based employees to spend some of their time while the years go by and schools and clinics are being discussed and constructed

At the Lwiro end where Cleve dumped the chimps he picked up last year and which clearly could not go to the Kisangani sanctuary, there are now some 47 sitting in miserably small cages, The whole area must be one of the least secure places in the Congo and large scale investments in housing and enclosures might not be the most prudent thing to do, However to have in one province a large island designated as a chimp sanctuary with one watchman living on it while in the neighbouring one there are 47 fast growing chimps squeezed into a range of relatively small cages is kind of absurd.

Once more I have little doubt that if the foundation was more then just an excercise in taking advantage of the Dutch tax code,that there would be more progress on the ground and for a change the plight of the chimps would come first (we were also told that there are dozens of captive chimps in and around Kisangani).

Conservation as a side line generally does not work and it certainly does not work in the Congo context,(that is when pirogues get stolen and lorries crash into newly built schools).

On our shoot we were impressed with the activities at the Okapi Reserve where the Gillman Foundation has invested over U$ 10 million in its creation and upkeep over the last 20 years, At least there are 120 trained and well dressed ecoguards at gates and on patrolls, They have been very active and have succeeded in keeping all gold mining and logging out of the reserve, (elephant poaching by the army is still a major issue).

It is a 'Reserve de la Faune" just like the portion of Bili Uere around Adama on the CAR border. A Reserve de la Faune based on all the same rules and regulations, The Okapi Reserve has over 17 000 people living in it and works as a protected eco system, There is absolutely no reason why, with the right approach. the same status could not have been achieved for the Reserve de la Faune portion of the Bili Uere Ecosystem. The legal basis was there, The diplomatic community and the donors would have backed up some serious pressure on ICCN to live up to its guardian authority, However advancing this issue should not have been left to a long haired researcher in sandals and a local operatives with no trackrecord or relevant background., (I did invest more then ten years and quiet a lot of my resources to get the project to the point it had reached a few years ago and feel I have a right to this assessment after hearing for the first time the full story of all which went wrong).

According to Issaka a lot of the ivory arriving in Kisangani still comes from the Bili Uere area but he admits that the remaining elephants will not survive much longer based on the present hunting pressure (there also seem to be again half a dozen orphanded chimps in Bili), Essentially things are back to where they were over a decade ago.

Maybe Bili required a 'Gillman type of approach' - or had to be written off, However having learnt that lesson I would have hoped that this Boyoma project will not go the same route (since mopping up the conservation failures tends to generally be a lot easier than actually protecting the wildlife in the wild). I certainly feel with cars driving around Kisangani advertising a chimp sanctuary and with the Foundation web site making claims which at this stage are far from the the realties on the ground that you both have a responsability to come up with more then just conservation and animal welfare lip service.