Fortress Conservation: Can a Congo Tribe Return to Its Forest?

The U.K.-based Forest Peoples Programme has estimated that Indigenous peoples and other forest dwellers have lost more than 400,000 square miles across Africa — an area the size of Texas and California combined — as a result of these “green grabs.”

The Minority Rights Group, an international advocacy organization that helped bring the case to the commission, calls the ruling a “huge win” against “fortress conservation.” For the first time, the group notes, the commission’s ruling “recognizes an Indigenous Peoples’ crucial role in safeguarding the environment and biodiversity.”

Joshua Castellino, the group’s co-executive director, says the ruling “hopefully establishes a new standard of African protection that can be extended to other instances across the continent and the world.”

But Joseph Itongwa, the executive director of ANAPAC RDC, a Congolese alliance of local organizations advocating for Indigenous rights, urges caution, noting there is no guarantee the ruling will be implemented. “This is an important step for the promotion of our rights,” he says. “But it is not binding. We have not seen, or yet know, of any official reactions from the government.”

Some observers question whether decades after being forced off their lands, the Batwa are prepared to manage the park for conservation and protect its critical species, including one of the world’s last populations of eastern lowland gorillas.

And some key players are biding their time. The New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which has been helping to manage the Kahuzi-Biega National Park area since before its inception and has been effectively in charge since 2022, says it “takes note” of the ruling. But it declined to answer questions from Yale Environment 360 about whether it supports the ruling or will help to implement it.

But a Batwa elder now based in Bukavu near the park, who answered on condition of anonymity, explained why the ruling was so important to the tribe. “Our traditional lands in the park are numerous, because each clan has its own hills. Among these hills, there are sacred sites where we communicated with the ancestors and communed with the forest, which we consider to be the nourishing mother. These lands our are identity. To deprive us of them is to exterminate us.”

The African Commission’s ruling is legally significant. It finds that the DRC government has violated 11 articles on human rights in the African Charter, to which it is a signatory. These include the rights of the Batwa to life, property, natural resources, development, health, religion, and culture. And it calls on the government to adopt into law as soon as possible “an effective mechanism for the delimitation, demarcation and titling of the territory traditionally occupied by the Batwa and the various natural resources attached to it in accordance with their tradition,” and to annul all laws “prohibiting the presence of the Batwa on ancestral lands and the enjoyment of the fruits of these lands.”

The African Union has endorsed the commission’s decision, but it is far from clear how the Congolese government will respond. According to an attorney based in Bukavu, who is part-Batwa and has been following the case closely, the government has all along attempted to thwart the commission’s investigation. “It has never responded to correspondence addressed to it by the Commission, nor appeared before it, even though it is a signatory member of the African Charter.” (Neither the commission nor the DRC government has responded to requests for comment.)

The attorney, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, says the commission “does not have the power to enforce its recommendations,” but two other courts on human and peoples’ rights linked to the African Union do have such powers. “If the DRC government continues to show bad faith, we will ask them to issue binding decisions,” the attorney says.

The forced eviction of Indigenous people, such as the Batwa, from their ancestral lands across Africa has been widespread for decades. Usually carried out in the name of conservation, it has in the past often been planned, helped, and funded by Western conservation groups such as the WCS and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The Batwa of Central Africa have particularly suffered.

Physical violence has been frequent. In 2020, the U.N. Development Programme concluded that WWF had for years funded park guards that it knew inflicted violence on Baka people in the region’s parks. The U.S. government subsequently withdrew funding for the organization’s work in the region.

The exposure of such atrocities has come at the same time as evidence has accumulated globally that Indigenous Peoples, often denigrated as forest destroyers, are more usually forest guardians — more effective conservationists than the park managers who often replace them.

The benefits of their custodianship should not be exaggerated. U.N. agencies and others claim that 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity is in Indigenous territories. A commentary in the journal Nature this month — signed by Indigenous people and rights activists as well as ecologists — contends there is no evidence to support this claim. But the authors say their questioning of the statistic should not “detract from the essential, and verifiably considerable, part that Indigenous Peoples play in the conservation of the planet’s biodiversity,” noting “their lands include more than a third of the world’s intact forest landscapes.”

So the ruling by the African Commission on the land rights of the Batwa in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, an epitome of attempted fortress conservation, is being seen by many as a wider adjudication.

Leaving aside its symbolic importance, the Kahuzi-Biega park is an important biodiversity hotspot. Named after the two extinct volcanoes at its heart, it sits within the world’s second largest rainforest, covering the Congo Basin and highlands around the Great Lakes of Central Africa. It covers 2,300 square miles and is home to 14 species of primates, including chimpanzees and one of the last groups of eastern lowland gorillas. UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site and calls it “one of the ecologically richest regions of Africa.”

But almost since its designation in 1970 and the subsequent expulsion of its Batwa inhabitants, the park has been in trouble. Park guards have been unable to repel repeated incursions from non-Batwa people. These have included Hutu refugees from the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda, and militias hiding there during the two civil wars in eastern DRC later that decade. It was during this period that a rapid decline in gorillas and elephants occurred, resulting in UNESCO in 1997 putting the park on its list of endangered World Heritage Sites, where it remains today.

Many armed groups stayed on after the civil wars, setting up crude mining operations for coltan (used in cellphones and personal computers), cassiterite (tin ore), and gold. Park guards failed to evict them. Fergus O’Leary Simpson, a researcher at the University of Antwerp’s Institute of Development Policy, who regularly visits the area, reports local people say that some senior officials of the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN), the government agency that controls the park, are themselves involved in mining and that senior military figures provide weapons to armed groups.

In 2005, the chairman of a Congolese mining company, Cosma Wilungula, was appointed director-general of the ICCN. After 16 years, he was removed from office in 2021 amid allegations of embezzlement. Two years later, the U.S. State Department barred him from entry to the United States on grounds of “significant corruption.”

Through all this, says Rogers, “the Batwa are used as scapegoats when illicit activities are discovered in the park.” And when in 2018, after years of failed negotiations with the ICCN aimed at restoring some of their land rights, some 2,000 Batwa returned in family groups to their old villages, there was a fierce reaction from park guards and the military, including the shelling and burning of villages. A subsequent report for the Minority Rights Group concluded that at least 20 Batwa were killed and 15 women raped in attacks over three years.

An international outcry after the report’s publication triggered a change in management at the park. In 2022, WCS secured a public-private partnership agreement with the DRC government that gave it effective control of the park. WCS set up a management board that included Batwa representation and formally recognized “the legitimate claims of the Batwa to their remaining ancestral land inside the Park” and the need for “finding a durable land solution.”

But there is little sign of that solution so far, critics say. “There is a vast discrepancy between what WCS puts out in public relations statements, and what WCS actually does,” says Rogers. Simpson says the main change since the agreement [WCS was substantially managing before, but with less authority] is that “park guards have largely ceased patrolling this region for at least two years.”

Simpson resists the idea that restoring Batwa land rights offers a ready conservation solution. “While the Batwa have suffered a great injustice, they are no longer living as forest guardians.” He says that some Batwa chiefs within the park collude with the militias, taking money in return for letting them cut trees for firewood and charcoal to sell in nearby urban areas. The result, he says, is “thousands of hectares of deforestation,” visible in satellite images.

Simpson accuses human rights lobbyists of having an “overly idealized image of the Batwa as ecologically noble savages.” Even so, he says the Batwa are minor players in a wider economy of ecological destruction. The problem, he says, is that the park is full of lootable resources and provides “ideal hideouts” for illegal activity. In such a lawless environment, he says, militarized conservation is “the only feasible form of enforcement.”

But advocates for the Batwa push back strongly against that. They argue the Batwa are the primary victims of the lawlessness, which arises from a corrupt and militarized system of park management. They say the obvious solution — as concluded by the African Commission — is the restoration of land rights for the Batwa. But they will need help, agrees Rogers.

“Does the [commission ruling] mean that the Batwa could step back into Kahuzi-Biega and take over as conservation managers tomorrow? Of course not,” she says. “They will need lots of expert research and consulting, just as do the current managers. They will also need help in dealing with the militias, mining operations, and refugees.” But, Rogers says, “I am completely convinced that their objectives and worldview give them a much better shot at protecting nature.”

Ironically, Rogers points out, the DRC already has a system for establishing community management of forests. Since 2016, communities outside national parks have been allowed to take formal control of up to 120,000 acres of forest around their villages from the government. They are then allowed to exploit those forests according to an agreed management plan.

These concessions have been widely applauded by both conservationists and land-rights NGOs. So far, 200 have been granted, covering more than 11 million acres, including 23 in South Kivu, the DRC province that contains most of the Kahuzi-Biega park’s highlands. But Batwa communities made homeless by exile from the park have so far not been able to benefit. “The concessions are the best and still probably the only available basis for the Batwa to obtain their rights,” says Joe Eisen, director of the Rainforest Foundation U.K., which runs a database on the community forests.

Rogers agrees that forest concessions are a potentially valuable tool. “But this doesn’t absolve the government agencies, donors, and NGOs of their responsibility to implement the African Commission’s ruling,” she says. “In the long run, righting the wrongs done to the Batwa is the only way to obtain justice, restore their culture, and protect nature.”