On 7 April 1994, the assassination of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana triggered a hundred days of organised mass killing that left between 500,000 and 800,000 Rwandan Tutsi and moderate Hutu dead. The genocide was one of the fastest and most complete acts of mass murder in recorded history, and its consequences extended far beyond Rwanda’s borders. For the conservation of mountain gorillas in the Virunga Mountains and Bwindi Impenetrable Forest — ecosystems straddling the borders of Rwanda, Uganda, and the DRC — the genocide and its long aftermath posed an existential threat that the mountain gorilla population survived only through a combination of geography, fortune, and the extraordinary commitment of a small number of researchers and rangers who refused to abandon their posts.
The Virungas in the genocide period
The Virunga volcanoes — the mountain range shared by Rwanda, Uganda, and the DRC that hosts one of the two mountain gorilla populations — sat at the centre of the region most severely affected by the genocide and its aftermath. Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, where Dian Fossey had established her research station, was temporarily overrun by refugee movements and military activity. The Karisoke Research Center was abandoned in April 1994 as staff evacuated.
Within Rwanda, an estimated 100,000 people took temporary refuge in and around Volcanoes National Park during the genocide and the displacement crises it generated. Forest resources — firewood, bushmeat, agricultural land — were exploited at rates far beyond what the ecosystem could sustain in normal times. Several gorillas were killed during this period, either deliberately as food sources or incidentally as communities cut deeper into previously protected forest zones.
The collapse of the Rwandan state briefly eliminated the institutional framework that had been protecting the gorillas. Rangers abandoned posts, park boundaries became irrelevant in a landscape controlled by militias and refugee movements, and the international NGOs that funded conservation work in the region withdrew their personnel for security reasons. For several months in 1994, the mountain gorillas of the Virungas were essentially unprotected.
Bwindi’s relative insulation and the Uganda difference
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda was geographically separated from the worst of the violence by the international border. Uganda in 1994 was a relatively stable country under Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement government, which had itself emerged from a guerrilla conflict in the 1980s but had by 1994 consolidated control and was implementing economic reforms. The Uganda Wildlife Authority, established in 1996 from the earlier Uganda National Parks institution, maintained ranger operations throughout the genocide period on the Ugandan side of the border.
This institutional continuity was not incidental — it was the result of deliberate decisions by the Ugandan government and by the international conservation organisations that had invested in the Bwindi ecosystem through the 1980s. The World Wildlife Fund, the African Wildlife Foundation, and the International Gorilla Conservation Programme had all made long-term commitments to the Uganda programme that proved resilient even as the regional crisis unfolded across the border.
The gorilla families of Bwindi, which included four habituated and several non-habituated groups in 1994, were monitored throughout this period. The habituated Mubare family — the first to be opened to tourists in 1993, just one year before the genocide — continued to be tracked, and the tourism programme that had just begun was suspended only briefly before resuming with increased international attention as the region stabilised.
The aftermath: two million refugees and a forest under pressure
The end of the genocide in July 1994 — when the Rwandan Patriotic Front captured Kigali and ended the killing — was followed by a massive secondary crisis. Approximately two million Hutu, fearing retribution, fled Rwanda into eastern DRC (then Zaire), creating refugee camps of extraordinary density around Goma and in the forests bordering the Virunga National Park. Virunga, the oldest national park in Africa and home to mountain gorillas in its high-altitude sector, was overwhelmed.
Estimates suggest that over a million people were camped in and around Virunga National Park during the peak of the refugee crisis in late 1994 and 1995. The demand for firewood from a population this large was catastrophic: studies estimated that refugees were cutting approximately 1,000 tonnes of wood per day from the park. Forest cover in the eastern sections of Virunga was stripped. Poaching for bushmeat increased dramatically as camp populations needed protein. Several gorillas were killed during this period — some by snares set for other species, some deliberately.
The international humanitarian response to the refugee crisis — among the largest ever mounted — focused almost entirely on human survival and gave almost no attention to the ecological catastrophe occurring simultaneously. Conservation organisations working in the Virungas found themselves in an impossible position: arguing for the protection of gorilla habitat while hundreds of thousands of people were dying of cholera and dysentery in the adjacent refugee camps required a moral calculus that most international institutions were unwilling to make explicit.
The rangers who stayed
Among the most remarkable aspects of this period was the behaviour of the Congolese and Rwandan park rangers who remained at their posts through the crisis. In Virunga National Park, a small number of rangers continued to monitor gorilla groups and deter poaching even as the park was surrounded by armed camps and the institutional authority that employed them had effectively ceased to function. Several rangers were killed in this period — murdered by militias or caught in crossfire — but many continued working, motivated by a combination of duty, community connection to the animals they protected, and the material support of international NGOs that maintained salary payments even when government payrolls had collapsed.
This period established a pattern of ranger resilience and sacrifice that has continued in the eastern DRC into the present. Virunga National Park has lost over 200 rangers to violence since the early 1990s — the highest ranger death toll of any national park in the world. The ongoing instability in eastern DRC, rooted in the long aftermath of the 1994 genocide and the resource conflicts it accelerated, continues to threaten both the gorillas and the humans who protect them.
Recovery and the gorilla population rebound
Despite the severity of the disruption, the mountain gorilla population of the Virungas and Bwindi did not collapse during the genocide period. Numbers in the Virungas held at approximately 320 animals through the mid-1990s before beginning the recovery that has taken the combined population to over 1,000 animals today. Several factors explain this resilience: the gorillas’ small range and familiarity with their habitat meant that displacement was limited; the continued monitoring by committed rangers prevented the worst poaching scenarios; and the relatively short duration of peak forest disruption — months rather than years — meant that habitat recovery was possible once the refugee crisis abated.
Rwanda’s own recovery from the genocide has been one of the most remarkable state-rebuilding stories of the post-Cold War era. The country that in 1994 was the site of one of history’s worst atrocities is now one of Africa’s most stable and well-governed states, and its Volcanoes National Park is once again one of the premier gorilla trekking destinations in the world. The revenue from Rwandan gorilla permits flows into a conservation and community development programme that has become a model for protected area management across the continent.
For visitors to Bwindi or Mgahinga, the 1994 genocide is recent history rather than distant past. The guides and rangers who take you into the forest grew up in a region shaped by that violence. The communities who benefit from gorilla tourism revenue were communities that survived proximity to regional catastrophe. The mountain gorillas you spend your hour with survived because enough humans — rangers, researchers, international supporters — decided that their survival was worth protecting even in the worst conditions. That context does not burden the encounter, but it does deepen it.
