Much of the constant fighting in Eastern Congo is about control of this region’s rich mineral resources but also about control over land and people. Suffering for decades and made worse when in 1994 Rwanda’s genocide militias sought – and were obviously granted – refuge in Eastern Congo, has the population in this part of the Democratic Republic of Congo struggled to survive in an undeclared war where the frontlines have often been shifting like quicksand.
The Virunga National Park, the oldest conservation area in Africa, has itself repeatedly been targeted by militias. Rangers were regularly targeted or else caught in crossfire in the past. An Okapi sanctuary was brutally destroyed in 2012 in the nearby Ituri Forest. Attacks of this kind are thought to create space not only for the poaching of mountain gorillas and other game but also to allow militia leaders and government army bosses in cohorts with them to use locals as slave labour in their makeshift mines often located inside the park or in essential buffer areas around it.