Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

A shorter version of this story ran in the Washington Post, April 30, 1995. For reprint information, email fine@well.com.

“And the Gorillas themselves are too
shrewd to talk… they have a very healthy
wariness about people in general and government
people in particular. As one of them told
me once, ‘If it got out that we can talk, the
conservatives would exterminate most of us and
make the rest pay rent to live on our own land;
and the liberals would try to train us to be
engine-lathe operators.’”
-Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson,
The Golden Apple.

By Doug Fine

It is impossible to sleep past 5:00 a.m. at the Hotel Des Diplomates - one of two Kigali hotels whose foundations have survived the Rwandan Civil War relatively intact - because at about that time every morning the Military Camp adjacent to the Hotel across from the balcony of my room’s veranda awakens in unified responsive chanting, whooping and marching evocative of a Ladysmith Black Mambazo a cappella performed at a Mardi Gras parade.

Though I can’t vouch for my fellow guests’ opinions of their involuntary daily alarm clock (which begins in the distance with the soft crescendo of a cruise ship wake up call), I didn’t mind being up with the sun on this, my fifth morning in Rwanda, because - with the understanding that nothing, nothing at all, is certain in this country these days - I was finally going to see the gorillas. As I leaned over the veranda, extending my hand held tape recorder surreptitiously to capture what sounded like a musical prayer, and stared out at the “land of a thousand hills”, I realized how relative I had already become in calling the hotel “intact.” There were bullet holes in my doorway, and the windowed sliding door leading to the veranda had been blown away in a bowling ball-sized circle, which was covered now by a New York Times spread announcing atrocities in Chechnya. I remembered wondering who got the bad rooms. The Diplomates was the headquarters of the old Hutu government during the battle for Kigali last June and July, but it is by no means the only part of the city which still shows battle scars. I had been unnerved the moment I stepped off the plane in balmy Kigali alongside Rob Hilsenhoff, Executive Director of the Morris Animal Foundation, to find the customs window shattered, artillery shell holes in the walls of the airport, and damage to the gorilla display in the lobby by the SABENA ticket counter. The sum total of all this, as the days of administrative delays in getting to the Parc National Des Volcans progressed, was a reaffirmation of the legitimacy of a question which has plagued more people than just myself who contemplate the ecological standoff which confronts Rwanda: how are 600 gorillas relevant in a nation of 6 million people the size of Maryland that has lost over half a million non-combatants to senseless slaughter and another million and a half to ethnically motivated exile in the last year?

The short answer is: very relevant. Before the war, gorilla tourism was arguably Rwanda’s third greatest source of much needed foreign currency, after coffee and tea exports. (The last year Morris Foundation figures are available is 1989: $9 million in revenues for Gorilla beringei , not much more for morning caffeine beverages.) And as I was to learn, Gorilla, Inc. was just hitting its stride in Rwanda before the first Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) incursion from Uganda in 1990. In the words of Burundi-born U.S. Ambassador David Rawson, who knew Dian Fossey in the mid-1970s before she hit the big time and the pages of National Geographic (and who spoke to me when I stopped by the Embassy to drop off a macabre U.S. Citizen’s next-of-kin notification form), if Rwanda is to going to begin to recover economically, heal psychologically, and restore its image internationally, “It can’t afford to let the chance to rebuild care of its unique national heritage fall through the cracks. The gorillas are a world treasure. This is vital.” The two massive barriers to achieving that recovery, according to conservation groups active in the region, are the current government’s lack of awareness of the importance of long term sustainable ecological conservation, and, incomparably more significantly, the population pressure in this most densely inhabited country in Africa.

Above the now diminishing and haunting music of the ragtag and impossibly young army recruits disappearing through the trees up the Blvd. de la RŽvolution, thousands of tropical birds, oblivious both to their habitat amid such a heavy human presence and the precariously peaceful locale they call home, couldn’t help but orgiastically greet the day in a cacophony of whoops, quacks, and whistles. Kigali’s population is at about its pre-war 500,000, though a massive influx of opportunists and ex patriots from Uganda, Tanzania, and Burundi ensures that it is certainly not the same 500,000. Through my zoom lens I saw an acre long wall of flowering hibiscus on the hill behind the city from which the soon-to-be victorious RPF troops bombarded the previous government’s strongholds last July.

Even from downtown, this country of intensely cultivated, terraced banana fields, tea plantations, volcanoes and rainforest was so achingly beautiful and fecund, it made me think, “Of course there must be human carnage here. Otherwise it would have an unfair advantage over the rest of the world.” It’s the kind of absurd logic one has to resort to in Rwanda to ensure that the mind continues to function according to pre-Rwanda thinking.

The delay in getting out of the city had been caused by the new government’s feeling that it owed very little indeed to the foreign wildlife foundations which conducted gorilla research under the previous Hutu government of Juvenal Habyarimna. Each day since I arrived on January 20, the Executive Directors of the Morris Animal Foundation and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, two of the three heavy hitters in gorilla research and conservation before the war, had marched down to the office of the ORTPN, the government Parks and Tourism bureau, waited for hours outside as the sun began to warm the day, and generally met resistance to their requests for research permits. A miasma of unrelated issues were involved in the negotiations, including whether an accord signed by the previous government regarding gorilla access should be honored as international law appears to contend; who, if anyone, released a possibly erroneous report about the death of a male gorilla name Makono; whether the many TV crews which wanted to accompany the two groups into the Park should be allowed in and how much they should be expected to pay the broke government; and, not least significantly, whether the Park, especially its Western periphery abutting Zaire and refugee camps which are home to some of the radical Hutu leaders who are accused of perpetuating the genocide, was safe to visit and free of land mines.

It’s very easy, especially for the personalities whose careers depend on research and funding, when becoming embroiled in the specifics of the gorilla debate, to forget that at stake is the fate of the last 600 members of the species closest genetically linked to Homo sapien. When you arrive a half hour early for a 10:00 a.m. meeting in a jacket and tie, and, sweating, check your watch to find it’s nearly 1:00, and you haven’t yet been seen, it begins to get personal. Even easier to forget, to the express chagrin of many members in Rwanda’s government who have themselves lost a score or more family members to last year’s slaughter, is that an almost unparalleled human tragedy has unfolded around the also-critical ecological situation created by a war, which has, miraculously, appeared to largely bypass the gorillas. The result is a paradoxical tension which is unlikely to be resolved completely as long as two very different cultures embody very different priorities for a very small piece of land.

Perhaps it is a sign that the government is indeed aware of the potentially lucrative nature of gorilla ecotourism, that it had, just prior to my arrival, posted signs in the Diplomates and the Hotel Mille Collines (next to maps detailing known mined blocks) that one-day tourist excursions to see one visitor-acclimated gorilla family in the center of the Park near the Northern Rwandan town of Ruhengeri were being reinstated, at the same $126 cost per person as before the war. The only problem is, Rwanda is not a big tourist destination these days. I decided to become one. In truth, the government was probably wisely attempting to restore the impression of normality in its modus operandi, as much as it was shooting for brave souls from the scores of foreign relief agencies which go about their business in Rwanda to take a day off from healing a society to see the Gorillas in the Mist (a publicity poster of the film of the same name hangs in ORTPN headquarters). A nice ORTPN officer named Cyprien gladly accepted my money, making sure the $100 bill was of the acceptably difficult-to-counterfeit post-1990 variety.

So I decided not to cast my lot with the fate of the gorilla foundation bureaucracies. I had been included on the Morris Animal Foundation press list, along with a German film crew that was scheduled to arrive the following week, but I didn’t want to leave Rwanda without having visited the subject of my story, and, mines be damned, I was going to see them. As it turned out, my driver - a Kigali-native named Andrew who spent the first half of the ride agreeing with my gee-whiz declarations about what a stunning country he lived in, and the second half detailing the story of his six months in prison under the old regime, and his whole family being hunted down and killed while he hid at the Mille Collines last April - was in fact the closest thing to a tourist among the group this turned up at the Park Conservator’s HQ in Ruhengeri. We arrived at nine a.m. after a windy three hour, two roadblock, sunrise drive from Kigali. On his cassette player, though he spoke almost no English, we both knew every word to every Bob Marley song on my tape.

Our group consisted of a two-man National Geographic Team, there “to capture the tourist experience” of gorilla viewing as part of a longer survey, (so I promised to smile and hide my press pass), and Jose Kalpers, the 34-year-old Executive Director of the International Gorilla Fund. This subset of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), the third and wisest gorilla group, was in closest with the new ORTPN hierarchy. But rather than sit around and wait for even the greased wheel to cease squeaking, Kalpers recognized, as I did, that the person who signed up to pay cash for a trip as a tourist was very likely to get to see gorillas well before loaded down press junkets scrambling to come up with $3000 per camera would. Rounding out the group was a 26-year old South African independent TV producer, unarmed, meaning without her camera crew, which was waiting patiently in the Fossey-fund posse, and myself. I sent a grateful Andrew home, as Kalpers offered to give me a ride back.

We bumped past the looted Park Entrance buildings 18 kilometers north of Ruhengeri, a spot which a well-known guide book describes as a delightful place to camp out the night before heading to see gorillas in the Sibinyo Group. It became increasingly clear that the conservation groups’ best-case issue, that of habitat restoration in the Park, whose size was halved due to an ill-conceived European community agriculture project in 1969, and a correlative increase in gorilla numbers, is not even on the table. The children who crowded around us as we waited over an hour and a half, in an admitted idyllic mountain-flanked setting, for the soldiers who are required to accompany all excursions into the Park’s forest, looked tattered and unhealthy: Hutus who likely returned to their homes not too long ago. Snot plugged noses, wheezy coughs and rags for clothes were the norm. Some adults were smiling, but many had that patented vacant look of mildly catatonic trauma which spells out as clearly as any graveyard Rwanda’s recent past. When our AK-47-armed escort did turn up, on foot, even the guides, porters and trackers who had been chatting with us in French while we lounged lazily in the shade, broke into smiles: even by Rwandan standards, one of the two soldiers was young; not over fourteen, his camouflage was limited to his pants. The top was a Chicago Bulls T-shirt and the footwear by Converse or a Taiwanese company trying to imitate the Converse symbol. He was heroic in attempting not to smile back at us.

As for the trackers themselves, some of theirs are incredible stories, again, even by Rwandan standards: a good portion of the anti-poaching patrol around the Karasoke Research Station at which Dian Fossey lived and studied for so many years returned from Zairian exile immediately after the war, and at least one man suffered a harrowing beating at the border upon his repatriation. Another man, Noah, who worked for veterinarian John Cooper of the Volcano Veterinary Center (VVC), which is funded by the Morris Animal Foundation, shuttled family and friends to safety across the border when the war broke out, finally fleeing himself only when he returned to his village to find his house destroyed. He, too, is back again, ensuring somewhat ironically that though the VVC headquarters at a Park station called Kinigi are thoroughly looted, the gardens are well tended and flowering and the Copper’s dogs are fed. It is still thought safest not to print his real name. On one side of the issue is the tension - justified or not - some returning Hutus feel with regard to the new Tutsi-led government of “Vice-President” Paul Kagame, and on the other side is the concern one conservation official from a different part of Rwanda confided in me that if and when things return to what can be considered a calm and normal state of affairs, he would have to ask quite a few questions about who took part in what during the war.

While it would be foolish not to realize that the people we met who live in and around the Parc National Des Volcans are among the lucky ones, to be alive and in their homes, it would also be lax not to remark on the reality that very little of my $126 was going to local communities. Gorilla, Inc., largely care of the Morris, Dian Fossey, and WWF Foundations, was the greatest employer in the region before the war, and probably still is, but such statements are intensely relative. The trickle down effect of tourism and research dollars, to those not in the hospitality, tourism, and research businesses, doesn’t go a long way toward rationalizing an obsession with apes over refugees, Everyone connected to the three countries in which mountain gorillas remain, Rwanda, Zaire, and Uganda, agree that the country in which ecotourism is being done right is the last. You can almost put a price on Uganda’s newfound stability in tourist dollars.

In Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, part of the same mountain range and ecosystem as the Parc National Des Volcans in Rwanda, and home to half of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas, as well as a thriving community of chimpanzees, other primates, and even some rare forest elephants, the communities surrounding the park are directly remunerated by the government from the funds taken in for gorilla visitation fees (roughly the same as Rwanda’s at $140). But this well-planned-out system goes further than that. Visitors who stay at the immaculate Bwindi park headquarters at Buhoma sleep in native bandas with bunk beds which can be rented for 6000 Ugandan shillings (or $8) per night, payable directly to the campground manager, a community elder. In several years of ecotourism journalism on four continents, I have rarely seen a better planned low-impact camp, with showers, compost heap and pit toilet tastefully hidden from the three - soon to be four - bandas of eight bunks each. A delectable and restaurant with ample stocks of Zairian beer and Fanta abuts the campground, also community owned. You need only walk through a century plant and flame tree-lined hilly path past several tropical bird nests to get to it. It is simply not possible to miss the positive, healthy outlook the people in this part of Uganda almost unanimously possess. I visited Bwindi the week following my Rwanda trip and interviewed the community liaison to the park, a 40-ish man named Enos Komunda, whose official title is Chairman of the Buhoma Community Campground Development Association. He told me that they are not fooling about with the 8 million shillings they pulled in last year. “Our priorities are education, health, and maintenance of facilities and roads, in that order,” Komunda said. I saw a new primary school a dozen miles outside of the park’s entrance. His main competition, Komunda says, is the swank bungalows that international tour agency Abercrombie and Kent has built up the street, and its resulting marketing- although certainly not price - advantage.

Own the way out of Bwindi I gave Komunda a ride to Kabale, a big town near the Rwandan border, during which he told me that things are indeed good in Uganda now. During a petrol stop, we picked up a copy of the Ugandan daily, New Vision, both frowning at a news headline recounting an army atrocity in another part of the country. He shook his head at Uganda’s lingering legacy, pointed out that that type of thing is nonexistent in his part of the country, and added that it’s a sign of the way things are that we are even reading about such a thing in an official newspaper.

Of course, Uganda has an unfair administrative edge over Rwanda just now, in that its days of ethnic slaughter are a decade behind it, but John Cooper of the VVC, who with his wife Margaret in August was by far the first of the Western gorilla researchers to return to Rwanda, is very clear in his views that Rwanda’s tourism infrastructure was never allowed to mature along the path established in Uganda care of Kalpers’ WWF, the Peace Corps, and an astutely cooperative Ugandan Government. It is ludicrously early to speak of such things in Rwanda these days, but both Cooper and Kalpers hope that the day will come when Rwanda’s gorillas will provide as much of an impetus for an improvement in the human standard of living as do Uganda’s. “It has to, if the Park’s habitat is to be thought of locally as important enough to be allowed survive,” Cooper said in an interview at his Kigali home.

* * * * *

Ballooned to a group of twelve (five visitors, three trackers, two porters for the National Geographic cameras, and two soldiers) after a brief speech by some sort of plainclothed Tutsi security liaison warning us not to touch the gorillas; they are extremely susceptible to human cold viruses for which they have no natural antibodies or immunity, we shed our train of village children and set off across fallow fields and banana plantations toward the forest from what seemed an arbitrary spot to abandon the Land Rovers. Kalpers - who has been around gorillas for a decade - and the National Geographic crew, who are not used to day trips or taking wilderness advice from bureaucrats, rolled their eyes at the tour group-type policy speech, but they knew better than to speak or appear rude: one of the photographers had nearly cashed his chips when the security liaison had caught him taking a picture which the former thought included the elder soldier within its scope.

It took less than an hour and a half of hacking through the forest vines and following dung heaps to find them. As I watched the trackers’ blades come down alternately casually and savagely on offending vines and creepers, I conjured at times a skin crawling sensation, wondering briefly where else these machetes - or those forged from the same mold - had been coming down since they were crafted. The feeling dissipated the instant we found them. A group equal in number to ours. And the moment my eye caught a fluff of matted black contrast to the ubiquitous jungle green, all my carefully constructed logical arguments about the causes of the Rwandan war became moot - insane. Those who have seen them will understand how overwhelming the peacefulness of these massive vegetarians appears as they munch on bamboo shoots at close range. I was suddenly and completely forced to reevaluate everything I had been taught in high school biology about “evolution”. I watched a mischievous toddler named Kagu flip and tumble in branches from not quite five yards, his mother Jisho scolding only when he landed on her shoulder: she was trying to shield herself from the steady drizzle which had begun to penetrate the forest canopy. Inyunma, the bashful mother of the first Post-war infant, Insinzi, hid her face in her paws as if to say “Leave us alone. Encroach on us no more.” But Insinzi would have none of it. He kept poking his tiny head out of her bosom and staring at the intruders with disproportionately huge brown, and unmistakably human-like eyes.

It was then that our junior military protector tried to walk closer toward one of the two feeding silverbacks in the Sibinyo group, before he was reminded by an alarmed grunt from one of the trackers that this was an unwise maneuver. He seemed for a moment to have forgotten about his gun.

One of the trackers pointed out in French that Inyunma had a severely sliced paw, which looked as if it was healing OK. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in the Park’s forest, where local poachers set primitive but effective snares in search of precious duiker meat. Gorillas are not the primary target these days, but they frequently get caught in the wire and vine contraptions: they’re smart enough to try to pull and rub them of, but often wind up making the wire tighten around their caught limb or digit, and the gangrened result is dozens of gorillas with an injured foot or even a missing finger. The trackers report an increase to twelve snares found per week these days, up from that many a month before the war - another sign that economic forces are dictating other means of support from the park besides abandoned tourism.

The rain had picked up to that unbelievable tropical ferocity on the way out - after an hour with the gorillas - which even the canopy couldn’t completely shut out. We got briefly lost, and were all thoroughly soaked. The South African producer, borderline miserable, was glad to see I was joking about things as I wrung out my bandanna. Then, after loading up, moving out and just after we pulled into the Kinigi research area, it suddenly all cleared to reveal Sibinyo - the gorilla family’s namesake and the third largest volcano in the Virunga chain. This alpine backdrop to thatched huts, banana plantation, some kind of fire red bird-of-paradise-like blossoms and tea plantations, is one of the finest spots I have yet seen or seen photographed on earth. We walked to the stripped roof and bullet-riddled windows of the entrance house and the wet soldiers, used to lower altitudes, shivered unabashedly. The smartly painted Park welcome sign, of no value to any looter, seemed a joke in bad taste. It was at Kinigi that I met Kiragi, the deaf and mute boy, whose name means deaf and mute, and who is an unsung hero of research in the Park. With amazing visual acuity that far surpasses any researcher, he is able to find at will a certain chameleon which Cooper says is an indicator species for the health of the forest. Before Ph.D. candidates get published with the results, this young man scoops up lizards and provides a crucial link in research studied all over the world. Kiragi led me inside one of the Western style houses that had been home to the old conservator of the Park, and I saw charred scholarly papers in an absolutely trashed foyer.

The sun was getting low, and Kalpers talked of recent problems getting past the final road block near Kigali, and he had another stop to make at Ruhengeri: at the new conservator’s house. There I met the Park’s chief mine sweeper, a colonel and senior military man of the day at 27. He told me he and his crew had found two mines that day in the Western side of the Park - they’re easy to spot - and that the prefecture was all but clear. Other sources have since confirmed that for me. Kalpers was paying some fees in stacks of Rwandan francs which he pulled from a briefcase in a manner that evoked Miami Vice, and about which I decided not to ask questions, while he finalized plans for a March summit meeting with the park conservators of the three abutting nations which host mountain gorillas. It was clear an awesome scheduling and logistical miracle would be necessary to pull such a meeting off. I laughed inside when I thought of a gorilla family scampering oblivious across a frontier, sending bureaucratic shock waves among the human beings who track them. Though it’s not as if all species flirted with danger during the War: Cooper says the Park’s golden monkeys did well, feeding on fields planted and left fallow by fleeing people.

We did indeed go through some rigorous searches at road blocks on the drive back. The few Kinyarwandese words I had learned during the Kigali waiting period wound up hurting me in these situations. After muraho (hello), ama kuru? (how are you?), nimeza (I’m good) and murakoze (thank you), an exchange which would often elicit a smile and handshake from the soldier who had approached the car, the interrogator would often think this muzunga could rap with him in the vernacular. The resulting confusion after it became apparent that I had exhausted my Kinyarwandese vocabulary arsenal would often translate into a thorough search of me and my vehicle. For what, I don’t know. They weren’t alarmed at my syringes or knife.

Back in Kigali and hitching a ride with Andrew to the drab five story Ministry of Rehabilitation a few days later, the Nature City image of squawking birds and flowering hills wore off when we passed the rather Gothic city prison a few blocks off the main Blvd. de la R’volution. The unofficial count as of the beginning of February is 5500 in a fortress - complete with flying buttresses - built for 1220. Many foreign aid groups put the number of children incarcerated at 120. I had almost stopped noticing nearly every third car in Kigali had multiple bullet holes in the driver’s side windshield as its probably recent owner tooled around town without an apparent care in the world. I was heading to my interview with Christine Umutoni, the erudite English speaking Assistant Chief of Cabinet, Ministry of Rehabilitation (In Rwanda, it is often the “assistant” in a bureau or ministry who has the RPF connection, and who is really in charge). She, in speaking about bringing the guilty to justice, summed up the problem, which is that, tea, coffee and gorillas are fine, but the real #1 industry in Rwanda has always been foreign aid.

Frustrated by a double edged sword that has the UN protecting and foreign air groups feeding both refugees what she sees as murderers, Umutoni wishes that outsiders had never moved in and made the legitimate internal refugees reliant on delivered food and water “after we (the RPF) stopped the genocide and the French abandoned us.” But now, broke and faced with a mass exodus situation unlikely to end soon either because huge numbers of Hutus are afraid to, or are being kept from, returning to their homes, her government is angry that money isn’t coming in fast enough to rebuild. And while it sounds cynical to many Westerner’s ears to think that the fate of our furry cousins and so many people depend on such bottom line reasoning, it’s worthwhile to consider the sentiment of a source connected with Rwanda’s infrastructure, who told the Morris and Fossey gorilla people at a meeting by the Mille Collines Hotel’s pool, “There is a strong sense that what the government really needs is your money, not you. They feel they could run the country themselves if they could just get the cash.”

. When I mentioned that I had read something in the Ugandan paper about a senior Rwandan official promising amnesty for most ordinary Hutus, Umutoni said, “You want to see another massacre? Talk about amnesty. I lost 40 family members to the killers. We will bring the guilty to justice, believe me. Only the guilty have anything to fear.”

Then I said that the longer the world waited to see action on tribunals and a return to normal in Rwanda, the harder it might be to bring in tourists and their dollars. Her response was basically, “give us the money, we’ll set up a justice system.” But she was clearly offended by the thought of gorillas being more important than people. “That land is for Rwandans,” she said angrily, referring to the Park National Des Volcans. “When the time comes for it to be used by the people, it will be.” She wasn’t just making gratuitous threats or being vengeful: the populations pressure in Rwanda is severe, the war notwithstanding. Rwandan women give birth to an astounding 8.6 surviving babies each. All over the country you see toddlers carrying babies on their backs. Every inch of arable land is thus cultivated to feed the nearly self-sufficient nation, including steep terraces in the hills leading to higher and higher altitudes. Kalpers says one of the non-tourist gorilla groups has been spotted by trackers higher up than anyone had ever seen them, perhaps in search of undisturbed feeding areas. If the government doesn’t fully support conservation with resources and manpower, poaching and agricultural incursion will no doubt continue.

Perhaps thinking she had gone too far, before I left, Umutoni told me, “I’m a politician, and I’m supposed to be guarded in what I say. You can see that I am personally affected by what happened here. The truth is, as long as the Park proves to be valuable to Rwandans, it will continue to exist.” In other words, if a restoration of order and peace means the gorillas can be a source of income for the county, Rwanda’s gorillas can continue to put on a Arabian Nights-type show for the world.

As Umutoni’s comments make clear, Rwanda’s government would like nothing better than to bring the murderers to justice and go about the business of governing while the society heals. However, relying on Zaire - which is the UN strategy du jour- to get the former leaders extradited to Rwanda, is a bit like relying on Jim on Taxi to keep your appointments for you. But as a return to what can be called a normal way of life is the only pot of gold under a faint rainbow, there are few who question that the fate of Rwanda’s gorillas is intimately enmeshed with the fate of Rwanda’s long-suffering people.

I heard before I left that both the Fossey and the Morris groups sliced through their various walls of red tape and got their permits approved. I was glad to hear it. As George Girod, a Belgian who has lived in Rwanda for year, put it, “this battle now is beyond political or even ethnic issues. Such a small amount of land and resources are left for gorillas. Saving the gorillas is a separate debate from saving Rwanda. But one cannot happen without the other.”

EPILOGUE: On March 27, Inyuma died of pneumonia. As a result of abandonment, Insinzi, her infant and the first Post-war gorilla baby, died as well. John Cooper called these common phenomena.

In Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, four gorillas were found dead of spear wounds on March 18. In a March 27 statement, The International Gorilla Conservation Programme said that one of the gorillas was a lactating female, that the gorillas were killed by poachers and that the motives appears to have been the capture of one or more infants. At this writing, one infant appears to be missing.