JOHANNESBURG—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—poachers who are slaughtering Africa’s elephants and other wildlife.
Such violence is not confined to Garamba in northeastern Congo, on the border with South Sudan. Farther south, in Congo’s Virunga National Park, assailants killed a ranger last month and another died in a militia attack there in August.
More than 200 elephants have been poached in Garamba since a census in April 2014 counted 1,780 elephants—down from more than 11,000 two decades ago. The park is one of only a handful of sites in Congo with “a viable population of elephants,” despite the loss of many large mammals over the past five decades, said Bas Huijbregts, an expert with the World Wildlife Fund conservation group. Garamba was also once known as home to the last northern white rhinos in the wild, though none have been seen there for years.
