KEY POINTS:
Outside the headquarters of Virunga Park, three men with determined expressions are loading camping equipment into two pick-up trucks.
Watching from the steps of the station are two park rangers carrying assault rifles.
These men are the last line of protection for the most important population of mountain gorillas in the world.
They have just had the order for which they have been waiting for nearly 15 months.
In the midst of the war in eastern Congo a deal has been brokered to let the park rangers back into the mountain range, where they have been prevented from going since September last year when it was overrun by the rebel army of Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda.
Since then, there has been only one recorded sighting of a silverback - an adult male - by the staff whose purpose is to protect one-third of the world's remaining mountain gorillas. Africa's oldest park, and arguably the most important nature reserve in the world, has also become a war zone.
The series of conflicts that spilled across the border from Rwanda after the genocide in 1994, have worsened dramatically in the past year and a half, driving Virunga's rangers out of one station after another until finally over-running the park headquarters at Rumangabo, on one side of which rises the 4500m tall volcano Mikeno, where the gorillas live.
Only now have the rangers been able to return. Diddy Mwanake was one of the first to come back and is impatient.
The 46-year-old knows more about Virunga's great apes than almost anyone alive but he has been cut off for too long from the creatures he has been observing, cataloguing and fighting for since joining the service 17 years ago.
His mind is alive with imagined horrors. "Of course we're afraid of what we're going to find. It's now been more than year where we can't take care of them."
He reels off a list of infectious diseases and hunters' snares that might have befallen the apes. Then his thoughts turn to the war. "With artillery shells and high-powered weapons I have to wonder if they have been hit. They could be out there wounded."
Emmanuel de Merode, a conservationist who was made chief warden at Virunga, says: "The rangers were the first victims of this war."
Sitting in his empty office in the ransacked headquarters, the 38-year-old Belgian says the fighting and abandonment of the park's headquarters has marked the lowest point in its history, capping a traumatic period which began with the killing of seven gorillas in June and July of last year.
The shocking pictures of a murdered 227kg silverback, named Senkwekwe, being carried on wooden poles by grieving villagers sparked a global outcry. They also revealed the vicious and lucrative charcoal trade that de Merode describes as the "greatest threat to the park".
THERE ARE an estimated 720 mountain gorillas left in the wild. More than half of these are in the Virunga volcanoes bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.
The remainder are 24km north in Uganda's Bwindi impenetrable forest. The 800,000ha of Virunga forms a corridor stretching 250km.
Some one million people displaced by a decade of war live in nightmarish camps on the fringe of the park. They rely on charcoal for their cooking and heating, creating a trafficking industry thought to be worth $56 million a year.
That money is enough, with illegal mining operations, to sustain the two main rebel armies: General Nkunda's CNDP and their sworn enemies, the FDLR, made up of Hutu guerrillas, active in the 1994 genocide, who fled Rwanda to regroup. Added to the mix is the corrupt and chaotic Congolese Army, which has used military trucks to transport charcoal.
For once, it was not poachers who were to blame for the gorilla murders - Senkwekwe's hands and feet had not been lopped off for trophies. The darker truth was that the gorilla families had been murdered as a warning to one brave faction of rangers still doing their job by a rival faction who had sold out to the charcoal dealers.
More than 100 rangers have been killed in the line of duty in the past 10 years, some arrested and tortured to death by militiamen.
Those who wanted to protect the gorillas knew they had to save the forest.
Already a huge section of Virunga's hardwoods have been eaten by this voracious industry. Former chief warden of the park Honore Masharigo is now in jail awaiting trial on charges of charcoal trafficking and killing gorillas.
Although he won't say as much, that is why an outsider such as de Merode has been made chief warden by the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature.
SINCE TAKING over, he got permission from the Government in Kinshasa to stage private talks with Nkunda and has succeeded in regaining access to the vital Mikeno sector of the park.
The Belgian conservationist has led a posse of rangers back to their former patrol post at Bukima, inside the Mikeno sector. Outside, Mwanake is talking to Innocent Nburanumwe, another veteran ranger. They remain fretful about the situation and aware that the crisis could get worse.
"When there is a war there is no certainty, no security. We are not sure when we go to sleep if we will wake up in the morning."
Another nagging worry remains: the gorillas simply won't be there any more. But de Merode is refusing to think that. Over the next month he and his staff will conduct a census of the mountain gorillas, hoping to find the population of roughly 200 unaffected by the problems around them in the past 18 months.
He says: "We've not had reports of any gorilla killings. It's incredibly exciting and any day now we're expecting good news."
- INDEPENDENT
