Renegade General Laurent Nkunda’s fighters seized Virunga National Park headquarters at Rumangabo on Sunday, overtook the town of Rutshuru yesterday, and continue to advance on the regional capital of Goma, facing little resistance from either Congolese government troops or MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force. Thousands of local residents have fled the fighting, including 53 gorilla rangers who were in the park when it was taken by Nkunda’s rebels. Twelve of the rangers made it back to the relative safety of Goma today, after more than two days dodging bullets in the forest with no food or water, but the rest remain missing. Almost nothing is known about the condition of the park’s mountain gorillas, which represent half of the world population of 700.

The last time the rebels controlled the park’s Gorilla Sector, in March 2008, they set up a parallel gorilla tourism industry, charging tourists to view the gorillas. They were blamed in the killings of 10 mountain gorillas in 2007.

Approximately 4 million people died because of conflict in the DRC between 1998 and 2004, mostly due to war-related disease and starvation. The latest spasm of violence threatens to lead to a similar pattern; in the camp in Goma where the families of gorilla rangers have been living for the past several weeks, there has already been a cholera outbreak. Medical supplies and emergency services are nearly nonexistent, as many UN and NGO staff have been evacuated.

In Congo: Securing Peace, Sustaining Progress, Anthony Gambino, former director of USAID’s DRC mission, provides an incisive analysis of the problems plaguing eastern DRC and the country as a whole, and outlines policies the United States and its allies can implement to help strengthen security, tamp down on corruption, boost economic growth and alleviate poverty, and protect DRC’s globally significant environmental resources. For more insight into the tensions between the needs of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in eastern DRC and the need to preserve the natural resource base upon which they all depend, listen to this recent podcast interview with Richard Matthew of the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs at the University of California, Irvine.