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Pour avoir sauvé le peu d'Okapi qui nous restent, Le Panorama Congolais choisit le jeune botaniste Corneille Ewango comme héro Congolais de l'Année 2005.
19.04.2005
Award for brave DR Congo botanist
Source: BBC
As a boy, Corneille Ewango helped his uncle poach elephants
A botanist who stayed in a nature reserve throughout the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo is to receive an award for his bravery.
Corneille Ewango stayed on after most other staff fled for their lives.
He helped discover new species of tree and protect the endangered okapi, or forest-giraffe, from rampaging gunmen.
"It's my contribution to advance science. Even if I die, I would be happy," he told the BBC before being given the Goldman Environmental Prize.
Forest
"I was afraid but I didn't have a choice," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme. Years of effort would have been destroyed by "soldiers who knew nothing of conservation", he said.
The 14 okapi at the reserve zoo survived the war
At the height of the fighting, he hid in the forest for three months.
The winner of the 2005 Goldman Environmental Prize for Africa also managed to persuade the militia commanders to order their men to stop poaching elephants and primates. And yet, as a young boy, he used to help his uncle poach elephants in the same forests.
"If no-one had taken care of the reserve nothing would have been left," said John Hart of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
In addition to the 14 okapi at the reserve zoo, Mr Ewango, 41, also managed to save the institution's computers, and data on 380,000 trees.
Havoc
The reserve was named a World Heritage Site in 1998 after it came under threat from illegal miners of gold and coltan - a mineral used to make mobile phones.
After five years of war, in which up to three million people died, a peace deal was signed in 2002.
However, ethnic militias continue to wreak havoc in the Ituri region near the Okapi reserve.
Mr Ewango is currently doing a master's degree programme in tropical botany at the US University of Missouri. He plans to return to the reserve after graduating later this year.
PATRIMOINE MONDIAL EN R.D. CONGO
Par Joseph M. Kyalangilwa
Président du Great Lakes Forum International (Suisse)
Je ne crois pas que tous les compatriotes soient au courant de l’importance du patrimoine mondial dans notre pays ; la République Démocratique du Congo. Et pourtant, il existe plus de 20.000 (précisément 20.200 à ce jour) pages de littérature sur ce patrimoine. Ci-dessous je vous en donne un avant-goût. Plus tard je compléterai cet article par les considérations historiques et scientifiques. Dans l’ordre de l’importance de leurs étendues, voici la liste actuelle de ce patrimoine (parcs et réserves) :
- Salonga 3.656.000 ha ou 36.560 km²
- Upemba 1.173.000 ha ou 17.000 km²
- Maiko 1.083.000 ha ou 10.830 km²
- Virunga 809.OOO ha ou 8.090 km²
- Kahuzi-Biega 600.000 ha ou 6.000 km²
- Garamba 492.000 ha ou 4.920 km²
-Kundelungu 213.000 ha ou 2.130 km²
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