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The fate of Africa's rarest apes hinges on battles over their territory as well as their taxonomy
HIGH AMONG THE VIRUNGA VOLCAnoes, along the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), there lives a group of gorillas with little interest in international politics. Day by day and week by week they wander through meadows of bracken fern, eating bamboo and nettles, mating in polygynous groups and fastidiously grooming one another. Although there are only around 600 mountain gorillas left in the world-half of them here and half in Uganda's aptly named Bwindi-Impenetrable National Park-the gorillas themselves seem unconcerned about that fact. Their most aggressive, most territorial act toward people is to bite a farmer on the behind now and again.
But if the forest, to a gorilla's eye, seems peaceful and unbroken, from a human perspective it is riven by disputes, crosshatched by historical, political and biological borders. The volcanoes themselves may be dormant, but they straddle three of the most incendiary places on earth: the southwestern tip of Uganda, the easternmost edge of Congo (formerly Zaire and officially known as the DRC) and the northernmost lip of Rwanda.
The first has a history of violent dictatorship; the other two are still shuddering with brutal conflicts. On any given day, therefore, the visitor cannot be sure whether he will run into gorillas or guerrillas on the trail.
The gorillas don't care: every year they walk across the spine of the volcanoes, spend several months in Uganda, then walk back home to Congo. But the camera-laden Westerners who have hiked for hours to watch them have no such luxury. Political instability put an end to gorilla viewing in Congo as well as in Rwanda. Tourists are still free to watch the Bwindi gorillas, but when the Virunga gorillas reach the Congo border the tourists have to stop and watch them disappear into the trees. Then the tourists turn and head back to camp.
This past March 1st, however, that peaceful pattern was suddenly threatened. That morning a group of guerrillas plunged across the Congo border and into Uganda, in violation of international law, in search of unsuspecting ecotourists. Known as the Interahamwe, the guerrillas were Hutus from Rwanda who for years had fought...