Martijn Ter Heegde

Martijn Ter Heegde

Martijn Ter Heegde is Rainforest Foundation UK's Programme Coordinator for Gabon/Cameroon, which is certainly a big job! Other than his work helping to tackle the destruction of rainforests in these communities, he has recently helped to pioneer a new Education Project in Cameroon, helping Baka families forced to live on the fringes of the forest, have access to education.

When first arriving in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a few years ago my first temptation for me was to look back at the departing plane and see if there was still an empty seat.

Kinshasa is many things but not an inviting city. It seems like a town where a hurricane just laid to waste to most of the buildings, roads, bridges etc, and people are scrambling around to save their belongings. Unfortunately the disaster in Kinshasa is not due to natural forces, but to human forces. Thousands of people walk by the sides of the roads, carrying buckets and bags. The vehicles look like they have just come out of a car dump, most of the airports look like museums of the good old days of propeller aircraft, with many vintage models from the former Soviet Union on display. The roads are a challenging obstacle-course, and water and electricity don't extend much beyond the villas of the wealthy Gombe neighbourhood - and even there generators are preferred. A constant question in Kinshasa is why people would want to live in such a place - and in fact people are still flocking to the city. Part of the answer is: because it is worse elsewhere.

A place where everything is worse is Goma, the capital of the province of North Kivu, in the far east of country bordering Rwanda. Goma was the place where the Rwandan ‘genocidaires' fled after massacring hundreds of thousands of mostly Tutsi people in Rwanda. Subsequently, it was a centrepiece of the ‘First African World War', the fighting that brought at least 6 African nations into a ‘civil war' and a scramble for the DRC's wealth in natural resources. Goma changed hands and was pillaged, its population was subjected to abuse of the various armed factions, and the city became something like an enlarged refugee camp. Then, to complete the destruction brought by man, the town's neighbouring volcano erupted, burying half of the town under lava.

But Goma, Kinshasa and much of the Democratic Republic of Congo as a whole is more functional than would appear. This is partly because the people have proved extremely resilient in the face of all the difficulties they have faced. Goma has good hotels, nice restaurants and shops. The people are friendly and welcoming. The DRC is a testimony to human endurance and inventiveness. There is almost no item that can not be bought in the DRC. With the right information and money, life can be very good. But even without money, most Congolese manage to survive and even enjoy life. Then again the Congolese have had ample opportunity to smile at adversity. The almost fifty years since the country gained independence from Belgium's colonial rule have been dominated by civil unrest and the repressive reign of ‘the African Godfather', Field Marshal ‘papa' Mobutu, who succeeded in robbing the country bare.

Incredibly, most of the harsh living conditions in the DRC are not even apparent when you are in Goma or Kinshasa, but they become apparent once you venture beyond the few tarred roads. Millions of Congolese live in villages and towns deep inside the rainforests in the North, West and East of the country, their only connection with the outside world being dugout canoes or motorcycles. After 50 years of ‘de-development' many of these forest communities were submitted to brutal fighting during ‘Africa's first world war'.
And the DRC has plenty to fight for: the country has been ‘blessed' with ludicrously rich natural resources. There are copper-mines, gold-mines, diamond-mines, cobalt-mines and several other valuable minerals. The forests of the DRC hold a biodiversity almost unrivalled on our planet, from animal species to valuable timber.

Unfortunately, whilst the impoverished people of the DRC always seem to be able to ‘get by', so are the people who seek to strip the country of its natural riches. Both nationals and expatriates have been operating illegally to exploit the countries mineral and timber resources and in fact anything else of any value. These illegal operations mean that day by day the people of the DRC are losing yet more of their country's wealth. Those looting the DRC are not too concerned with respecting the law or local communities' rights.

On the positive side, there has been an outcry about some of this looting, and measures have been taken to put a halt to some of these practices. On the downside, the looting of natural resources in the DRC continues often unabated and surprisingly with the complicity of the international community. The DRC is barely recovering from a long and terrible war and is hardly capable of putting up effective measures to stop the looting or bargain for better deals. It is hard to believe that some of the DRC timber companies with their European owners are really unaware of international norms or do not see that operating in the current vacuum without adequate legislation and law enforcement is plainly unacceptable.

So when I travel through the DRC and feel impressed by the resilience of its people and their resourcefulness, I can't help but feel sorry that less scrupulous individuals and companies are more resourceful still in abusing the sorry state of the country. Forest communities that have survived years of war and mismanagement are now witnesses to a cynical reality: peace does not mean reconstruction of their livelihoods but one final push to rob them of it.

Tonight I spent my last night in Barcelona and I decided to spend this night visiting the landmark Sagrada Familia church. This stunning church designed and initially built by Gaudi is a monument to playfulness, to new thinking. I was certainly surprised to see such a strange design on such a large scale and maybe it's not surprising that construction has been ongoing since 1882 and scheduled to finish in 2026. When I left for my metro ride back I noticed two men suspended high on one of the towers covering it in plastic sheets for further works.

I was in Barcelona for the World Conservation Congress, the world's largest forum discussing environmental issues. I was fortunate enough to be present in Bangkok during the previous conference when I was just starting my work in Central Africa and overwhelmed by the size and the energy. This time around it was still big and overwhelming but my experience was much more mixed.

During the congress the collaboration between local and indigenous communities and the nature conservation community was important enough to warrant several sessions. I went to most of them and was happy to see a reasonable number of indigenous people speaking about their experiences. Their sobering stories about how their communities were excluded even expelled from the lands they lived on and preserved, often for centuries, were certainly impressive.

It is great to see widespread agreement now that communities need to be part of the solution, of saving those final precious parts of our planet that harbor rich biodiversity. Yet this realization does not yet mean solutions are being implemented to rectify the injustice that has so often befallen local communities. In fact most indigenous peoples had to remind the participants of their contribution to preserving our rainforests, rivers and oceans. Sadly the few indigenous peoples from Africa present were easily outnumbered by government delegates from their countries.

So, paradoxically these governments who have often handed out the rainforests to loggers and have consistently failed to protect the rights of their people easily outnumbered the communities that have preserved the world's natural resources for centuries. Environmental organizations' lack of understanding the communities' plight was sometimes painfully clear. Like the man who suggested that the pygmy peoples in the Democratic Republic of Congo were adapting to climate change by looking for shade and wearing lighter clothes (!)

The urgency in saving our planet was felt and many alarming new pieces of information showed how bad things really are and how we need to see radical change in how we treat nature. Though indigenous people cannot provide solutions to all the world's problems they certainly have their knowledge and experiences to share. Their presence on centre stage hopefully means they will truly be seen as equals and be allowed to play their role in managing nature. It seems that increasingly people are listening to them and maybe true solutions can be found.

It brings me back to the Sagrada Familia. The international community has for so long been covering up the inequalities of nature conservation, like those men with their plastic sheets. Yet we must find new different thinking like Gaudi, ideas that might be very different from current practice but that are crucial for a true solution. Such a solution sometimes appears as improbable as the Sagrada Familia, but we don't have more than a century to find such a solution- it's time to act now.