Rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo were reported on Sunday to have seized a national park in the east of the country that is home to more than a quarter of the world’s surviving mountain gorillas.
“Rebels loyal to dissident General Laurent Nkunda took over the headquarters of the Virunga National Park and the sector where the gorillas are to be found after heavy fighting with the DRC army in the early hours of the morning,” a statement from the park said. “More than 50 rangers were forced to flee through the forest.”
“The taking of our headquarters at Rumangabo by the rebels is unprecedented in all these years of fighting,” park director Emmanuel de Merode said in the statement.
PHOTO: AP
The park, which has a rich variety of animal life and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is home to 200 of the world’s surviving 700 mountain gorillas. It lies on the border with Rwanda and Uganda.
Fighters engaged in the fighting in the Nord-Kivu Province regularly take refuge in the park, killing wild animals and chopping down trees for fuel.
“The military camp of Rumangabo is again under the control of the CNDP, as are the localities of Kalengera and Rugari,” a statement from Nkunda’s rebel National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) said earlier.
The camp is an important army base in Nord-Kivu, about 50km north of the provincial capital Goma.
“The CNDP took Rumangabo after fighting Sunday morning and clashes are continuing at Rugari,” a spokesman for the UN’s DRC peacekeeping mission MONUC said.
There were no details of any casualties.
A correspondent in Rugari, 10km south of Rumangabo on the road to Goma, reported that heavy artillery exchanges were continuing.
The rebels said they had taken the Rumangabo camp — which they captured earlier this month and later abandoned at MONUC’s request — as a “riposte” against the “generalized attacks on all fronts by the government coalition.”
They said the coalition was made up of government troops, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a group composed of Hutu former militia fighters who fled Rwanda after the 1994 genocide and local militias.
For its part, the government charged in a statement that “two foreign battalions” backed up the rebels in the attack on Rumangabo.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion