La conservation est un devoir de l'homme envers lui-même, non point, sans doute, pour son profit immédiat. Mais il en va comme de la vertu: l'exercice de celle-ci postule un minimum de bien-être. (Lebrun, 1971)
Explorers, writers and naturalists of many nationalities have described the natural landscape of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with its mineral, plant and animal riches as splendid, awesome and grand (Schweinfurth 1874, Stanley 1890, Conrad 1903, and Chapin 1932), but responsibility for the use and protection of those resources has been attributed to a single nation, once the colonizer and now the once colonized. The latter is currently broken up by warring political factions that are themselves divided by internal power struggle, leaving no single authority able to effectively control resource use. Quite the contrary, these natural resources are the main fuel running the combatant political engines (UN Panel of Experts 2001). We propose that an effective international effort adequately supported by Congo's resource ministries, international conservation organizations, and individual conservationists is needed not only to fill the interim but also to build strong national institutions for resource management. What are needed are long-term guarantees of support and training for national conservationists and resource managers as well as long-term maintenance funding for protected areas deemed to be of international conservation value.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly Zaïre, is currently experiencing a trade-off between natural resources of known commercial value and biodiversity of undetermined value. It is not surprising that without a credible national government to protect its natural heritage, the known value of valuable resources—gold, diamonds, timber, and tantalite—becomes the only credible tender for profiteers of all political labels. The profit from these resources can support war and be turned to immediate personal benefit. As a result, natural resources perpetuate the political stalemate and keep a constant high value and unidirectional current flowing across the ambiguously attributed borders (Soudan 2001).
On the other hand, before the war, biodiversity conservation was given strong token support during the long period of national decline under Mobutu Sese Seko, president of DRC, then called Zaïre. During the 1970s and 1980s, the country was a proponent of international conventions supporting biodiversity, and new national parks and reserves were created. Protected areas now cover 180,000 km2 or 7.69 percent of the country (Wolfire et al. 1998). But this apparent support was not backed by national investment; the parks received very little national funding, not even at the level of the national institution, Institut Zaïrois pour la Conservation de la Nature (now the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature–ICCN). Whatever support the parks and reserves did receive came from international conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and bilateral or multilateral projects. Unfortunately the high, immediate cash-in value of natural resources, then and particularly now, endangers the long-term security of the DRC's biodiversity.