The court ruling on the rights of the expelled Batwa people could pave the way for the paradigm shift we need.
In July 2024, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights made an historic decision in favour of Batwa community members expelled from the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The ruling from the African Union’s human rights body recognised the Indigenous group’s rights to their land and called on the Congolese government to return the land to its rightful owners, compensate them, and ensure their full protection.
Acknowledging decades of land theft, oppression, and injustice faced by Indigenous Peoples, the decision could radically transform the face of conservation in the DRC and beyond.
The DRC has 41 Protected Areas (PAs) – 9 national parks and 32 reserves of various types – covering 32 million hectares or 14% of national territory. The Kahuzi-Biega National Park is managed by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), a prominent international environmental organisation that also runs zoos and aquariums in the US.
In 2022, the NGO Minority Rights Group (MRG) revealed that egregious abuses had occurred in the park during a military campaign mounted against the Batwa by ecoguards and Congolese soldiers from July 2019 to December 2021. They uncovered a wide range of horrific abuses: torture, murder, gang rape, shelling of villages, burning children alive, decapitation, and the taking of body parts as trophies.
These findings were shocking but sadly not new. Since 2018, international and local NGOs have documented similar abuses committed by security forces and ecoguards in Salonga, another Congolese national park managed by a prominent international organisation, in this case the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
In response to revelations of abuse, international environmental organisations, donor agencies that finance the parks, and national conservation authorities have reacted in different ways.
In the US, congressional hearings and official investigations have been held, funding to certain Protected Areas under WWF management has been frozen, and new legislation has been developed that places stricter requirements on the financing of PAs. These include the addition of social safeguards, human rights training of security forces, and the development of grievance mechanisms.
WCS meanwhile has announced a change of paradigm and investment in human rights training and safeguards. And WWF has unveiled plans to improve safeguards and management following an independent review that found the organisation had failed to prevent, investigate, and respond to abuses and violated its own human rights protocols.
Unfortunately, these public commitments to address abuses and foster community-led conservation are largely window-dressing. They mask the fact that the plight of Indigenous Peoples continues through dispossession, economic hardship, and violence committed by park authorities, state security forces, and local militias. None of the announced measures address the systemic problems with a conservation industry whose core strategy involves removing local people in order to create a Protected Area. The conservation NGOs simply hope to reduce the collateral damage produced by what they presume to be an otherwise sound strategy for wildlife protection. International donors continue to support the models and methods put in place by those large conservation NGOs, who receive 85% of global conservation funding, while Indigenous Peoples and local communities receive just 1%.
In a report released last month, From Abuse to Power: Ending Fortress Conservation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Oakland Institute details how this model of conservation has come at a high cost for local communities and Indigenous people, who have been excluded from their ancestral land, lost their livelihoods, and been subjected to horrendous violence. The report finds that the measures put forwards by large NGOs and Western donors are inadequate to address abuses. What’s more, it argues that international conservation efforts have produced the exact opposite of their stated goal – protecting biodiversity.
In the DRC, many Protected Areas have been emptied of their human presence, leaving them unprotected and open to resource extraction. In and around Kahuzi-Biega, local militias are actively involved in extracting minerals such as coltan. Violence is used by militias and state security forces to keep locals off the land and allow this illicit extraction to proceed unhindered. For John Knox, former UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, the situation in the DRC makes “a mockery of the whole concept of protected areas”.
The alternative to this militarised “people-free wilderness” approach – advocated for by local communities and civil society groups – is a model of conservation based on local communities’ human rights and customary land rights. A new path for conservation in the DRC must be rooted in such a radically different model in which Indigenous communities are no longer excluded from their ancestral land but fully participate in conservation efforts and continue to be stewards of their lands.
In 2022, the Congolese government passed a new law on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This is a step in the right direction, which the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights ruling on the Batwa called for. Other important legislative changes demanded by the court remain. The most challenging, however, will be implementation, which requires the support and participation of all stakeholders, including international actors. Influential and well-funded conservation NGOs must take meaningful steps in this regard and, beyond the specific case of Kahuzi-Biega, put in place the community-led conservation that they have repeatedly promised. Such a shift is of ever greater urgency in the wake of recent global commitments to the 30×30 plan – promoted by the same organisations – according to which 30% of the Earth’s surface would be placed under some form of protection by the year 2030 to protect global biodiversity.
A change of conservation paradigm would be momentous, though unfortunately not enough to end abuses against local communities in the eastern DRC. In this region, violence and corruption in PAs – intrinsically linked to the extraction of natural resources – involves not just the conservation industry and Congolese government but neighbouring countries and corporations. Protecting people and biodiversity her will also require an end to Rwanda and Uganda’s destabilising activities and decisive measures to prevent the trade in conflict minerals.
