Parque Nacional da Gorongosa Moçambique

Former opponents in Mozambique's long civil war have joined forces to recreate the spectacular Gorongosa national park from a battlefield wilderness.

War closed the wildlife paradise in 1982. But more than 40 of the men who used to try to kill each other in the wooded hills and valleys of the park in central Mozambique are working side by side to partially reopen it by September.

In 1992, the government and rebels of the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) ended a 16-year conflict in which Gorongosa was one of the main battlefields.

The tourist center at Chitengo in the south of the 2,050 square mile park lies in ruins. Bombed huts and walls pocked with bullet holes bear witness to the air raids and hand-to-hand fighting in the many battles for Gorongosa.
Gorongosa is one of four national parks created during the Portuguese colonial era before Mozambican independence in 1975. The park on the Indian Ocean island of Bazaruto off the southern Mozambique coast is also being rehabilitated, while the government considers what to do about the other two.

Baldeu Chande, a conservation technician who heads the Gorongosa rescue mission funded by the European Union, gave up his university studies for the job.

"I can study any time. But this opportunity is not going to happen every day," he said at Chitengo.

"I believe that I am doing something for this country. When the park is functioning again and pulling in the tourists, I will be able to say I was part of that."

Chande and his 47-member team live in dilapidated staff quarters at Chitengo which somehow survived the mayhem of the 1980s.

"We have established that all species that were here before the war are still here. None is extinct, but some are in very small numbers."

Animals spotted by Chande's team include elephants, buffaloes, lions, leopards, zebras, water-buck, kudu, sable antelope and a few hippos.

"We thought the hippos were extinct, but on Dec. 29 last year we had a visit from a hippo here in Chitengo," he said.

Most of his team members are demobilized soldiers from the government and from Renamo, "about half from each side."

"At the beginning they argued among themselves. We had to explain to them that we are not here to squabble about what happened, that our job is to prepare the park to receive people from Mozambique and all over the world.

"Now the relations between them are very good," Chande said. Renamo first attacked Chitengo in 1981. They attacked again the following year, occupying it and seizing British ecologist John Burlison, who was working there.
Control of the park changed hands several times until 1989, and from then until the 1992 peace accord it was held by Renamo.

Afonso Saco, one of Burlison's kidnappers and today a member of Chande's team, recalls with irony that he learned his trade from his captive. "He was a strange man. He was our prisoner for several months, yet he gave us lessons on nature conservation."

Source: Reuters