The eight suspected poachers stood under a tree, apparently unaware they were being tracked by 10 rangers from Congo's Garamba National Park. But as the rangers approached, gunfire rang out from the tall grass nearby, where other heavily armed men were hidden. The dragnet swiftly turned into a desperate fight for survival. The shootout last month, in which three rangers and a Congolese army colonel were killed, highlights the challenge of protecting parks in a part of Africa plagued for decades by insurgencies, civil war, refugee flows and weak governments. It shows how some conservation efforts resemble a kind of guerrilla warfare in which rangers and soldiers stalk — and are stalked by —...
↧