The influential NGO African Parks, based in Johannesburg and created by a Dutch billionaire, recognized “human rights violations” in the Congo, after accusations of murder, rape and torture targeting his guards of the Odzala-Kokoua National Park, of which Brazzaville entrusted him with management.
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In January 2024, an article in the British daily Daily Mail and a press release from the NGO Survival International had reported violence, including sexual, on members of the Aboriginal people Baka (formerly called Pygmies), on the part of African Parks guards, long chaired by Prince Harry, still a member of his board of directors.
“A woman describes her rape. A banana planter shows scars on his back after being tortured by means of torches, according to him, “also wrote the German media Tagesschau after an investigation around the village of Badekok, at the edge of the Odzala-Kokoua National Park, located in the northwest of the Congo.
“African Parks acknowledges that, in some cases, human rights violations have been committed, and we deeply regret the pain and suffering caused to the victims,” admitted this NGO managing 22 parks in Africa in a statement released late Thursday, after a survey entrusted to a law firm.
“This is a responsible reaction,” Treasome Nzila, director of the Center for Development Action (CAD), told AFP, one of the main human rights organizations in the Congo. “Hiding the abuses committed by eco-eating in the name of the fight against wildlife crime has only strengthened the committee of other abuses,” he said.
The Omnia cabinet indicates in a press release to have invested “21 incidents”, some of which “concerned several alleged victims”. They “involve allegations of serious physical and sexual violence (including rapes) assimilated to torture or other ill -treatment, homicide, arbitrary arrests and detention”, according to the text.
But “in agreement with African Parks, this document does not approach the results of our survey,” said the firm.
– “fortified” parks –
In Odzala, African Parks provides taking “measures against the members of the staff involved”.
Recognizing “failures”, the NGO, criticized for its sometimes paramilitary methods according to local actors, undertakes to “remedy the identified gaps”.
Present in 13 countries on the continent, African Parks is an animal conservation giant on the budget of $ 122 million (108 million euros) in 2023, according to its annual report.
The organization receives funds from the European Union and the US government, but also the Grande star Taylor Swift, for example. The American singer paid her all the income of her clip “Wildest Dreams”.
An investigation book released in 2024 also accused African Parks of “neocolonialist practices” in its management of the parks that local governments have delegated to it.
In this book entitled “In the name of nature”, the Dutch journalist Olivier Van Beemen, who interviewed nearly 250 people in the NGO environment, documented the “conflicts with local populations who see their rights and their harsh cuts”, tensions often focus on access to land and the sampling of game.
“Under cover of preserving fauna and flora, white decision -makers and billionaires maintain the Western myth of virgin and wild African nature to better sell it to tourists,” said the notice of its publisher in France, rue de l’Échiquier.
An emblematic project of the organization is Zakouma park, in Chad. When African Parks took the reins in 2010, only 450 elephants existed there. The population of Pachyderms had melted by 90% because of the poachers, including Janjawids, Milicians of the neighboring Darfur long torn apart by the Civil War.
Protected by rangers equipped like soldiers and parading like soldiers, the herds were saved from the disappearance and the hemorrhage arrested.
