Environmentalists seeking to end logging, smuggling and pollution in DRC’s Mangrove Marine park faced threats, violence and rape

People who have tried to expose unlawful ownership and profit-making from protected land in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have faced threats, violence and rape, an investigation has found.

The DRC government hired the conservation worker Kim Rebholz in 2022 to safeguard the Mangrove Marine park, an internationally recognised nature reserve on the country’s tiny coastline. The Congo basin rainforest, to the east, is the largest rainforest after the Amazon.

Rebholz hoped to extend the protected area across the region. “I was very hopeful that we could do a good job,” he told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa.

The Mangrove Marine park is home to manatees and endangered sea turtles, and is where the River Congo finishes its 3,000-mile journey from the highlands of Zambia to the Atlantic Ocean. It was designated protected in 1992 and subsequently recognised under the Ramsar convention of conservation. It is subject to strict regulations, although those restrictions can be lifted for certain people in certain circumstances, “provided that these remain compatible with conservation objectives”. The inland area allows for some fishing but nothing that would “disturb the natural environment”.

So Rebholz was shocked when, patrolling the park a few months into the job, he came across what...

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