The Lord's Resistance Army, a Ugandan rebel force that over the past 20 years has killed at least 12,000 people and kidnapped or enslaved 25,000 more, began terrorizing the southeastern corner of the country earlier this year. Their presence has made life difficult for poachers, who made their livelihood by shooting chimpanzee mothers dead and seizing their babies for sale to zookeepers and private collectors in the capital Bangui or in Sudan. But the hunt has become vastly more dangerous now that killers of humans have moved into the lawless region.
With the Ugandan army in hot pursuit, the LRA fled Uganda to northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo in 2005. This year the Ugandans flushed the LRA into the jungles of CAR. They now hold sway in an area several days' journey from the capital and effectively cut off from the rest of the country. Since arriving in CAR, the LRA has murdered and abducted so many Central African hunters and illegal fishermen that the price of meat has more than doubled, and the number of captured baby chimps has shrunk to almost none.
AFP / Getty Images
The brutal Lord's Resistance Army has frightened poachers away from chimpanzee habitat in the Central African Republic.
Earlier this month, at the biggest market of the year, the regional capital Obo had just two forlorn chimps clutching their vendors' backs and knuckling around on short leashes. Bambi, a timid baby less than a year old, was selling for about $160, seven times the price he would have fetched before the war. Other vendors openly sold leopard skins and carved elephant ivory, despite the market visit that day of CAR President Francois Bozize and several ministers. Hunting animals is illegal under almost all circumstances in CAR, although authorities wink at killing for subsistence amounts of bushmeat.
Jean-Fidel Dayaboulo, 65, a hunting guide and taxidermist in Obo, says adult chimpanzees made bitter captives. "The grown-ups misbehave badly if they are not fed on time," he says. "But the little ones love everyone," even humans who may have killed their parents just seconds before.
The LRA's leader, Joseph Kony, aims to capture the young as well. Inspired by a fundamentalist interpretation of the 10 Commandments, he has directed the mass abduction of villagers -- including not only illegal hunters, but also unlucky farmers and children. The rebels brainwash the children into joining the LRA cult and enlist adults for a variety of tasks, including peanut shelling and sex slavery. Children are taught that Kony's blessings and anointment render them impervious to bullets; then they are sent off themselves on brutal raids.
Villagers know that the LRA are all around Obo, but at times they need food and are willing to risk a short trip to hunt or gather outside the town. But once they go two miles beyond the town limits, they are in LRA territory and in danger of abduction. Since they are barely willing to leave town to fish, dig up cassava roots, and shoot monkeys and boar for bushmeat, they are even less disposed to hunt more challenging and time-intensive game, such as chimpanzee.
Dieudonné Aiba, a 30-year-old peasant from the village Gasimbara, says he was too hungry to resist leaving Obo to search out cassava roots and other vegetables, and the LRA conscripted him briefly as a porter. The Ugandan army found his LRA cell, shot him in the leg, and detained him briefly before figuring out that he was a victim of the LRA and not a rebel himself. His continuing limp, a month after the incident, is a warning to others that any activity in the countryside is perilous.
Bambi, meanwhile, was sold along with the other chimp. (The identity and intention of the buyer were unknown.) In the past week, though, not a single live monkey or chimp was offered at Obo market, for pets or meat.
