The #1 source for news about monkeys and apes

[Andrew Hund <andrew.hund AT cwru.edu>]

http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Feb/02082004/sunday/136026.asp

By Tom Maliti 
The Associated Press 

    AKAGERA NATIONAL PARK, Rwanda -- As part of an effort to present Rwanda 
as an attractive vacation destination after the 1994 genocide, President Paul 
Kagame wanted to offer foreign tourists something in addition to a trek to 
see rare mountain gorillas in the tiny African nation. 
    But the baboons wouldn't move out of the lodge in the Akagera National 
Park. 
    The baboons and black-faced vervet monkeys were the shattered lodge's 
longest -- and nonpaying -- guests. They stubbornly refused to vacate the 60 
rooms, bar, stairway and wherever else they had made themselves at home since 
the state-owned establishment was abandoned by staff during the 100-day 
slaughter in which at least a half-million people were killed in a campaign 
to wipe out minority Tutsis. 
    Kagame, the leader of Tutsi rebels who ended the killing in July 1994 and 
later became president, decided the solution was to privatize the lodge 
overlooking Lake Ihema on Rwanda's eastern border with Tanzania. 
    Led by banker Alfred Kalisa, a group of Rwandan businessmen bought the 
Hotel Akagera, renamed it Akagera Game Lodge and approached South 
African-based GDB Hospitality and Leisure Management Services to run it. 
    Managing director Gert Brumme first took a helicopter ride over the park 
that lies 43 miles east of the capital Kigali to see what he was getting 
into. He saw "a good investment." 
    "We saw about 50 elephants, these big, big pockets of water with hippos 
and crocodiles in them. We saw giraffe here, buffalo there. So we decided: 
no, this has got to happen," he said. 
    Between last July and December, the new management got rid of the 
unwelcome guests and spent $2 million replacing the roofing, reinstalling 
electrical and other fittings that had been looted and hanging banana leaf 
collages in the rooms in time for the grand opening of the lodge on Dec. 19. 
Akagera National Park was established in 1934 by the Belgian authorities who 
ran Rwanda, then a U.N. trust territory. The northwestern corner was reserved 
for licensed hunting of mature male buffalo and antelope. Fishing in the 
park's lakes and bordering Akagera River was also by license; no licenses 
have been issued in recent years. 
    Hills that rise over 5,000 feet offer panoramic views of rolling green 
hills and valleys and lakes winking in the sun. Elephants browse in marshes, 
and reddish-brown antelope called topis graze confidently. 
    Grunting and snorting hippos bask in the sun in the park's eight lakes. 
Storks, Egyptian geese and dazzling white egrets poke through the shore 
waters for food. High above in the branches of a dead tree, an African fish 
eagle keeps a look out. 
    The park and its 25-year-old lodge are a proving ground for the 
government's efforts to deal with the country's immeasurably painful recent 
past and to move the economy beyond its reliance on subsistence farming and 
cattle herding, done by 80 percent of the country's 8 million people. 
    It's a daunting challenge. 
    More established and better-known grassland animal reserves including 
Tanzania's Serengeti National Park, Kenya's two Tsavo national parks or South 
Africa's Kruger National Park already rake in the tourist dollars Akagera is 
aiming for. 
    Furthermore, the park lost thousands of animals to heavy poaching in the 
early 1990s, a period of great instability in Rwanda when Kagame's Rwandan 
Patriotic Front rebels began an insurgency from neighboring Uganda. 
    Warden Benjamin Mugabo said research by the Office of Tourism and 
National Parks and the German development agency, GTZ, indicated some animal 
species are down to little as one-thirtieth of their 1990 populations. 
    Buffalo, estimated to number 491 in 2002, are down from 10,000 in 1990; 
impala, another member of the antelope family whose population was estimated 
at 1,890 in 2002, are down from 30,000 in 1990. 
    To further complicate matters, the crush of land-seeking Tutsi refugees 
returning home in 1997 after decades outside the country led the government 
to hive off about two-thirds of the park's 1,000 square miles to resettle the 
returnees from Congo, Tanzania and Uganda who now graze their cattle near -- 
and often inside -- the unfenced park. 
    Few Rwandans have experience running or working in game lodges, and the 
Rwandan owners wanted experienced staff hired from Uganda or Kenya. But 
Brumme said that's not how his company does things, so he hired Rwandans and 
trained them.