Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Administrative General Director (ADG) of the ICCN wasn't aware of any international NGO parti-
cipating in Sankuru, and that his goal was to create not a reserve, but a park. Unstated in this corres-
pondence is that the Harts had wished to establish a national park that included the eastern section
of the Sankuru reserve. In response, Sally explained that she had been working with the ADG, and
that he was fully aware of BCI. Over the next few emails, Hart questioned ACOPRIK's role, and
whether Sankuru's boundaries had been properly established.
In 2008, Terese Hart wrote a blog post, suggesting that villagers in Sankuru wanted to kill André
for selling their forests. It begins: “We had been hearing rumors for almost 7 months that in a series
of isolated villages, the Djonga villages, something had gone wrong for conservation. We had to
find out what.” What Terese Hart doesn't acknowledge in the blog is that she had email correspond-
ence with BCI for months before the entry, and that she had been opposed to the creation of Sankuru
for other reasons. Instead, she asks rhetorically if ACOPRIK had stolen chickens and goats, or made
off with a village woman, before saying that the villagers claimed that ACOPRIK had manipulated
their signatures in order to “push through” the reserve.
Her reference to villagers believing that André had sold their forests—an accusation that she
doesn't fully address or resolve—is odd. While community reserves allow people to stay and par-
ticipate in conservation, her plan to create a national park would require inhabitants to leave. The
Harts' current maps show their projected national park just to the east of Sankuru, hugging the
boundary, with a surrounding “community conservation zone” that overlaps with the eastern section
of the Sankuru Nature Reserve.
Hart presents one other argument for the conflict between ACOPRIK and the villagers, stating
that it stems from a “murderous opposition” that developed between the Tetela of the Savanah and
those of the forest. As proof, she cites a historical event from the 1960s, and though I tried to con-
firm such ethnic tensions, everyone I spoke to—from the presidential spokesman Lambert Mende
Omalanga, who is from Sankuru, to Michel Kitoko, André Tusumba, and others in the region—said
that they were aware of no such “murderous” tensions. They said that while there were occasion-
al rivalries between politicians from different districts, this was standard across the Congo, if not
across Africa and the world, and that no conflicts among the Tetela kept them from working to-
gether. André pointed out that if such murderous tensions did exist, Hart wouldn't have had to read
about a fifty-year-old event to learn about them. He and those he worked with insisted that any
conflicts in the area were the result of the Harts' polarizing local people against ACOPRIK, using
money and influence to create divisions so they could justify creating a park. I tried to contact Ter-
ese and John Hart to get their side of the story, but John never responded, and Terese declined the
interview.
In Kinshasa, when I spoke with Benoît Kisuki, he presented a stark view of the Harts. He had
worked for more than twenty years in conservation, first on the Okapi Wildlife Reserve that the
Harts themselves helped establish in the Ituri rainforest, then as the administrative technical direct-
or of the ICCN and now as the national director for Conservation International.
“The Harts,” he told me, “were doing biological prospecting in the zone of Sankuru and toward
Maniema and Orientale Province. They thought the biological prospecting would lead them to cre-
ate a national park in the interior of the DRC, in that particular zone. They really wanted to be the
first to establish that protected area. At the same time, when they hadn't yet achieved their object-
ive, BCI was in the process of working on the politics of the Bonobo Peace Forest and with local
organizations, Vie Sauvage in Kokolopori and ACOPRIK in Sankuru. . . .
