One dead gorilla is news – a guerrilla war is not

It was one of the most arresting images of last year. A majestic male mountain gorilla, his body flecked with blood, splayed out lifeless on a stretcher that 15 park rangers were struggling to bear through the jungle of eastern Congo.

The massacre of the silverback Senkekwe, along with five other rare apes, made the cover of US magazine Newsweek under the headline “Gorilla Warfare”. In Britain, the “Murders In The Mist” prompted The Sun to launch its own campaign, and around the globe people wrote in to media outlets, telling of the sleepless nights and trauma the images had caused.

For Anneke van Woudenberg, the Congo specialist for Human Rights Watch, it was a case of gritting one’s teeth. “Kill a mountain gorilla in Congo and it gets much more coverage than five million dead,” she says. “It irks me every time.”

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