By Kudra Maliro
Nearly 10,000 indigenous Batwa people in South Kivu lost access to their homeland, after it was transformed into a conservation area with the authorities promising to pay them a compensation.
In 2019, the Ministry of Environment and the provincial government, agreed to grant the Batwa of the Kahuzi-Biega region, long-awaited compensation as well as provide farmland, clinics and schools in their current settlements.
Following unfulfilled promises from the Congolese government, the Batwa, a hunter-gatherer community, are now threatening to return to the forest to resettle. The place has already been made a gorilla sanctuary.
The community had lived there before the Kahuzi-Biega National Park was created in the 1970s.
The governor of South Kivu, Theo Ngwabidje Kasi, says efforts were underway to prevent these returns to the park.
He also stated that the local authorities did not have the necessary funds to remedy the socio-economic causes of the problem.
Jean-Marie Kasula, president of the pygmy community in Muyange area, said they were still in shock that the government has yet to deliver on the promises made in 2019 saying the villages where the Batwa people now live lack basic social amenities.
"I am very concerned to see our people dying of hunger and disease without legal access to their traditional livelihoods or the alternatives that were promised to us," Mr Kasula, told TRT Afrika.
UNESCO heritage
Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) is the agency in charge of running the conservation area. Efforts by TRT Afrika to get comments from its officials were unsuccessful.
However, the provincial authorities say they were looking into the community's plight.
"We are currently investigating the land dispute between the indigenous Batwa community and nature conservation organizations, and the reports will be published," Jérémie Zirumana, provincial minister of South Kivu, told TRT Afrika.
"For the moment, it is the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) that manages the Kahuzi-Biege Park, which UNESCO declared a world heritage site," Zirumana reckons.
Wildlife sanctuary
According to a United Nations report published in 2009, over 90% of the 87,000 indigenous Batwa people across the DRC have lost legal access to their original territory, which has been turned into a conservation area.
The Kahuzi Biega National Park is a vast area of tropical rainforest dominated by two spectacular extinct volcanoes, Kahuzi and Biega, and is home to a rich and diverse fauna.
One of the last remaining groups of Eastern Lowland Gorillas (graueri), now numbering just 250, live at altitudes of between 2,100 and 2,400 m in the region.
The area attracts tourists from other parts of the country and from abroad. As the Batwa community continue to struggle for what they described as their rights, conservationists say protecting the wildlife is really crucial.
Members of the Batwa community believe the most balanced approach is to pay them the promised compensation in order to rebuild their lives and observers say resettling in the forest by members of the community after many years of absence could prove tedious.
