Mountain gorillas at mercy of Congo war factions

By Hereward Holland

GOMA, Congo (Reuters) - East Congo's conflict has put more than a quarter of the world's last mountain gorillas at the mercy of armed groups who hunt and camp in their territory, park officials said on Monday.

With no rangers left to protect or care for them, the gorillas face even greater risk of extinction, they said.

Recent fighting between Tutsi rebels and the government army and its militia allies has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province, home to the Virunga Park, Africa's oldest national park.

It has also eliminated all protection and effective conservation monitoring for 200 of the last remaining 700 mountain gorillas in the world, who live in the forested hills of Virunga, on the border with Uganda and Rwanda.

Virunga's Gorilla Sector has been in the hands of rebel General Laurent Nkunda's fighters since September 2007 and the Rumangabo park headquarters, from which conservation operations were run, fell to a rebel assault in October this year.

More than 50 wildlife rangers, who had spent years protecting the gorillas and other animals in Virunga, were forced to run for their lives, joining 200,000 other refugees sheltering around the North Kivu provincial capital Goma.

"It's not possible now to have any news about the gorillas," one displaced Virunga park ranger, Diddy Mwanaka, told Reuters.

"We don't know about their health, their security or if they remain in a secure place or not," he said, speaking at a makeshift camp housing refugee rangers and their families.