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by George Schaller

During a visit to Rwanda's Parc des Volcans early this year - the first time I had returned there in a decade - I learnt that there are now about 165 habituated mountain gorillas that allow tourist to approach them closely and that all of them are guarded by park and military patrols.

They need to bearable intrusions from the Congo side of the Virunga Volcanoes are a constant threat and serve as a reminder that these forests are never wholly safe.

Not far to the south is the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) Kahuzi-Biega National Park, and there the gorillas' future is less secure. In this World Heritage Site, visitors could once observe gorillas as intimately as in Rwanda. These are Grauer's gorillas, Gorilla beringei graueri, a different subspecies to the mountain gorilla. In the early 1990s, a team from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) estimated there was a population of more than 10,000, a large proportion of all Grauer's gorillas in existence.

But with the war in Rwanda in 1994, thousands of refugees, rebels and fleeing soldiers inundated the region.

The area became a lawless no-man's land, and government officials and park guards were killed, while elephants, gorillas and other wildlife hunted for food.

Tourists used to visit the 250 gorillas that lived high in the mountains in Kahuzi-Biega, but more than half of these have been killed since 1996. On the western side of the rift mountains, where most Grauer's gorillas live, nothing is known about the current status of wildlife.

But there's little doubt that these gorillas are also in trouble. And perhaps the most serious threat is the cell phone.

A basic component of cell phones is a capacitor, which regulates voltage and stores energy and which consists of a compacted powder made from a mineral known as coltan.

The principal sources of coltan are in the eastern DRC and Australia.

With the worldwide use of cell phones rocketing - more than 500 million are expected to be sold in 2001 - the price of coltan has also exploded. In 1990 it was about Sterling Pound 30 a kg, in 1997 about Sterling Pound 63, and now in 2001 more than Sterling Pound 550.

The astronomic rise in the value of coltan has been accompanied by increasing instability in Kahuzi Biega. In 1996, Rwanda and Uganda invaded the DRC and assume military control over an area that included the park. Responsibility for protecting the park while its troops are there lies with Rwanda, but, instead, coltan mining has become a free-for-all and thousands are now digging in and around the park and subsisting on bushmeat.

At the end of 2000, Rwanda set up a company, a monopoly, to which all coltan was to be sold. But the company pays so much below the world price that most coltan is smuggled onto the international market. There are even airstrips near the western edge of the park from which coltan can be flown out. It is in these western parts that most mining takes place.

Kahuzi-Biega is not the only World Heritage Site under threat in the DRC. The Okapi Faunal Reserve (OFR) to the north was invaded by miners at the start of 2000.

Until recently, there were 4,000 panners in the reserve, living in temporary camps and regularly hunting antelope, elephants and monkeys to sustain themselves. Then, at the end of March, the miners left the camps after being ordered out by the Ugandan army.

But, as Terese Hart, who, with her husband John, manages the WCS field research station there, points out, the miners now need to be forced out of the reserve itself, and regular patrols begun to ensure they don't come back. It is not, of course, these miners that make the real money out of coltan but the middlemen. When park staff tried to clear out the miners, it was these businessmen who halted the effort with support from a few local political and military adminsitrators all of whom are gleaning direct financial advantage from the illicit panning.

Rwanda and Uganda deserve praise for protecting the gorillas on their side of the border but the failure of Rwanda to emulate Uganda in protecting the World Heritage Site under its control deserves condemnation. The conservation community needs to be more active in confronting countries and companies that condone ecological vandalism. And cell phone companies such as Nokia and Motorola, should be aware of the indirect but negative impact they, too, are hiving on both wildlife reserves and one of our closest living relatives.

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