Gorillas: Kings Of Congo

This segment was originally broadcast on Dec. 9, 2007. It was updated on July 3, 2008.

The mountain gorilla may just be the world's most magnificent animal. But there are only about 700 of them left, and conservationists genuinely fear the entire species might become extinct.

Last year, when 60 Minutes first broadcast this report, at least ten mountain gorillas had been shot to death. This year there's no telling how many have been killed, because a civil war in Congo has kept park rangers from getting to most of Congo's gorillas.

Mountain gorillas live in central Africa in a forest that straddles Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a family of gorillas was massacred last summer. CNN's Anderson Cooper and 60 Minutes went to Congo, a desperately poor country, to see why those gorillas were slaughtered, why the surviving gorillas are in jeopardy, and what can be done to save them.

"They're extremely threatened in Congo. Threatened to the extent that we're worried about the survival of the whole population," Dr. Emmanuel de Merode, head of the non-profit group WildlifeDirect, explains. "The whole population could be destroyed. Could be wiped out."

WildlifeDirect helps pay the salaries of Congo's park rangers, who protect the gorillas. Dr. de Merode was with the rangers in July when they made their most gruesome discovery, finding the bodies of four gorillas who had been slaughtered in the dead of night.

"It was a terrible, terrible scene to witness," de Merode recalls. "It was our whole lives. Everything we were working for-that was shattered in front of us."

The dead gorillas were part of the Rugendo family. They were the first gorilla group introduced to humans. "We had spent time with that group. And it was, in many ways, a strong sense of trust," de Merode tells Cooper.

The first victim de Merode found was a female named "Safari."

"She was quite famous in many ways because she had just had a baby," he says. "And we had taken a photo in the days after she was born and that photo had been you know a real symbol of hope for us. And then to find her dead. And her baby nowhere to be seen, was gutting and for all of us."

Safari, de Merode says, had been shot twice through the chest. Her killers then poured fuel on her and set her on fire.

What was the scene like?

"There was a very, very strong smell," de Merode remembers. "Which for all of us will always remain. It went right through your clothes. Went to the back of your throat. It was everywhere. And it stayed with us physically for days afterwards."

The next day they found the body of the family's leader, a giant silverback named "Senkwekwe."

"We think he may have been shot and then chased into the forest. He had several bullet wounds through his chest," de Merode explains.

Asked if he'd ever seen anything like this, de Merode tells Cooper, "No, I hadn't thankfully. Nothing prepares you for the horror of a whole group that's been that's been massacred."

He calls it the worst day of his life, and so do park rangers.

Augustin Kambale couldn't believe his eyes. "I was thinking that I'm in dream," Kambale tells Cooper. "And still now, it continue to move in my head."

Kambale says he still thinks about the killing. "Still now I don't understand why people can kill gorillas," he tells Cooper.

In silence, rangers and villagers made stretchers and hoisted the gorillas up on their shoulders. They wanted, they say, to carry them out like kings. "It's to show people that you see how this animal is very, very important," Kambale explains.

So why were these kings assassinated? Simply, it seems, for charcoal. More than a million people in this area, practically everyone, use charcoal to cook their food. It's made by burning the trees in the gorillas' forest. They cover mounds of wood with mud and set it on fire, turning the ancient trees into brittle bricks of charcoal.

You can see the fires from the air. Robert Muir of the Frankfurt Zoological Society took 60 Minutes and Cooper for a tour.

"They're cutting down the forest. And they're smoking it out basically," Muir explains. "And they will continue to move further and deeper into the forest cutting down prime habitat."

It's being carried away bag by bag, step by step.

Women carry huge bags of charcoal for miles on their shoulders. Men wheel bigger loads to market on wooden bikes. It's a multi-million dollar business, illegal but backed by powerful interests -- businessmen, soldiers, and corrupt government officials -- a charcoal mafia. When rangers tried to stop the destruction of the forest, Rob Muir says the charcoal mafia killed the gorillas. It was a warning to the rangers to back off.

"First, in June, a female gorilla was found, killed, a bullet to the back of her heart execution style," Muir says. "They want to intimidate and scare the Congolese wildlife authority."

"The message was if you don't stop we can kill all the gorillas," he adds.

But the rangers refused to stop. "Determined not to give in to this kind of blackmail, if you like, continued, even upped their campaign to try and dismantle the charcoal production," Muir tells Cooper. "And then a month later the Rugendo family was decimated. I'm sure that the charcoal mafia were behind this."

Asked how one could solve the charcoal problem, considering it's used by everyone and they have no other source, Muir says, "Provide alternative fuel, butane, for example."

But butane requires special stoves and buying that equipment for every family would cost tens of millions of dollars.

"So it would need to be subsidized. I mean, we desperately need donors, the EU, the World Bank, someone like that to really come in and say, 'Hey we've got some money here,' you know, we appreciate this is urgent, you know, if we don't act now, we could lose the gorillas,'" Muir says.

Muir says two babies were orphaned this summer when charcoal makers killed their mothers. One baby was found clinging to its dead mother's corpse; the other had been pulled to safety by an older brother, but was starving without its mother's milk. Rangers rescued both orphans, and vets are still trying to nurse them back to health.

"Have you ever seen these mountain gorillas as under threat as they are now?" Cooper asks Muir.

"Never. I don't think I don't think they have ever been as threatened as they are currently today," he replies.

Just how threatened? No one knows, because the rangers haven't been able to see Congo's gorillas for more than three months.

Almost 200 mountain gorillas live in the Congo along the forested slopes of a volcano. The problem is there're more than a half dozen armed rebel groups fighting government forces in and around those forests, and the rangers who protect the gorillas have had to flee. That means Congo's entire population of mountain gorillas is now left unprotected and they're caught in the middle of a civil war.

Rangers tell Cooper that because they are cut off from the gorillas and cannot get to them, they don't know what is happening to the remaining population.

Congo may be a dangerous county for gorillas, but it's even deadlier for people. There's been fighting for more than ten years and more than a hundred rangers have been killed. At a rangers' post outside the park, their sign is pockmarked with bullet holes.

"Over 300 rebels would surround a patrol post during the night and just shoot it to hell. Heavy artillery, bombing," Muir tells Cooper.

Asked why, Muir says, "With no care for human life and they're after the rangers' equipment. Ammunition, rifles, they see the rangers as a soft target."

Muir says the rangers are outnumbered and outgunned. "This is probably the most dangerous park on the planet," he says.

So dangerous that all the rangers can do now is gaze at the forest from afar and hope for a ceasefire. But in that same forest, just a few miles from the fighting, across the borders in Rwanda and Uganda the rest of the mountain gorillas are safe for the moment, though they face yet another threat. There are so few of them, that Ebola or some other deadly virus could wipe them out. It's a tough trek to get to Rwanda's gorillas, but it is an extraordinary experience.

Cooper and the 60 Minutes team hiked to a location in a Rwandan forest, where a family of 21 gorillas, headed by an adult male silverback named "Agasha," had been spotted.

After a trek through dense forest and over muddy trails, they reached Agasha and his family; the guides grunted like gorillas to assure them that they had come in peace.

While it's impossible not to be impressed by the size of the gorillas -- Agasha weighs more than 400 pounds -- they didn't seem too impressed by their human visitors. They spend their days eating bamboo and other plants and the occasional mound of termites. Agasha eats up to 60 pounds a day. He needs the energy: he has eleven adult females in his family, and tries to mate with each of them every day to keep them from wandering off. The silverback seemed unconcerned by the group's arrival, but he did want to make sure the humans knew who's boss. Twice, when he thought Cooper and the team had gotten too close, he charged right past the 60 Minutes cameras.

You're only allowed one hour with gorillas to limit their risk of catching a disease. Poachers are another problem. Two gorillas in this family have lost a hand because of snares. Even in Rwanda, poachers set snares, usually to catch antelope, but gorillas get trapped in them too. And that pains guide Olivier Nabonimona, who feels the gorillas are national treasures.

"We really love these gorillas. We love them. Because they deserve this right to survive. Also, they bring money in the country. Then it helps in poverty reduction," Nabonimona explains.

In Rwanda, Gorilla tourism has created jobs for guides, handicraft makers, and hotel workers. Each visitor pays $500 to see the gorillas. Rwanda will make $6 million from tourists this year. Part of that goes to villagers who live right next to the park to convince them that protecting the gorillas, and the forest, can enhance their lives too. The government installed ten water tanks so villagers don't have to walk miles to get clean water. They've built a new health clinic, new schools, and planted thousands of new trees.

But back in Congo, all that's new are the graves of Senkwekwe and Safari and the other mountain gorillas killed this year. They're buried outside the forest. It's still too deadly for park rangers to return to Congo's side of the forest to find out what's happened to the animals they feel they can talk to.

A ranger tells Cooper he can speak gorilla. "Means that there is something which is not going well here," he says, after making a gorilla sound.

So much is not going well here: charcoal, civil war, poachers and that these last few kings of Congo are dying.

Produced By Robert Anderson and Casey Morgan