Life and Death In Garamba

Garamba elephant population

Garamba National Park is a World Heritage site and a free fire zone for the dregs of every country in central Africa.  The parks rhino population was eliminated years ago by these groups.  Once home to 22,000 elephants, today only 1,300 have managed to survive the onslaught of rebels, war criminals and poachers.  The park has been decimated by the various groups each intent on using elephant ivory to help fund their activities. 

 Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army has funded its rampage of rape, kidnap and killing through the ivory trade, but there's a newer, bigger threat.

 The park borders South Sudan, the world's youngest country, which has been tearing itself apart in civil war for more than two years. Disparate heavily armed rebel groups regularly pass through, killing the animals, cutting off their tusks and handing them over to traffickers, who smuggle the ivory across the continent and on to its main markets in Asia.

The 5,500 square miles of Garamba are patrolled by a force of 100 rangers, supplemented by 50 to 100 Congolese soldiers. In a cash starved country, they have few resources and are routinely out-gunned by the armed groups of poachers they manage to discover.

Shot by elephant poachers, the manager of DRC's Garamba National Park asked a ranger for help to bind his leg with a tourniquet to slow blood loss. "While we were doing this, I could hear another person get hit on our right, and then within a few seconds, also hear another person get hit on my left," Erik Mararv said in an interview with The Associated Press in Johannesburg, where he received medical treatment. Three rangers - half of a unit that deployed to the scene of an elephant killing - were killed in the April 23 shoot-out in Garamba, where armed groups poach elephants for ivory in one of Africa's most volatile areas.

So a shop in Hong Kong can sell a carved elephant tusk, elephants and good men are dying.  Still they hold on to hope and do what they can.   

 “We have lost a lot. We are not winning the battle today, but we can win the battle, absolutely," said Mararv, 30, who plans to return to Garamba at the end of the week after getting approval from doctors to fly. Mararv, on crutches, said the bullet that hit his right leg "cut my femur bone cleanly" before tumbling out of his thigh, leaving a "fist-sized hole." 

 "I was very, very lucky," said Mararv, who expects a full recovery. A Swede born in the Central African Republic, he described the rangers who died - Dimba Richard, Anigobe Bagare and Matikuli Tsago - as "some of our best people."

Truly some of our best people.