AT THE 26TH CONFERENCE OF THE PARTIES held in Glasgow late last year, our world leaders spat out in severe tones the grim realities of climate change amid calls for greater innovation and investment to address the crisis. In what was lauded as a landmark move, 137 countries representing more than 85 percent of the world’s forests — including the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Russia, China, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) — pledged to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030, backed by more than $19 billion in public and private funding, all to preserve “those great teeming ecosystems, those cathedrals of nature,” as the UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson put it.

But to delve into the pledges made at the conference is to navigate through a world of smoke and mirrors. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is home to much of the world’s second largest rainforest, the Congo Basin, yet activists are fighting to protect their forests from being exploited for its wealth of resources even amid recent climate pledges. This includes expanding oil development, as well as mining for diamonds, gold, copper, and now minerals like cobalt, tin and coltan, which are critical for electric vehicles, solar panels and other clean energy technologies — while the vast majority of the people live in poverty and scarcely benefit from these resources.

“There is a huge gap between what our leaders claim at international climate conferences and the ground reality of solutions,” says Remy Zahiga, a young Congolese climate activist and advocate for Indigenous rights who founded the #SaveCongoRainForest Campaign in 2019. “For example, countries like DRC are signing pacts to ban new fossil fuel extraction. But at the same time they are also auctioning blocks of land for oil extraction overlapping with protected areas.”

This May, the cabinet of ministers in the DRC approved 16 new oil blocks — with reserves estimated at 16 billion barrels and worth more than $650 billion at current prices — for auction. Nine of the blocks have been revealed to overlap official protected areas, which include irreplaceable biodiversity hotspots, complex peatlands that serve as the world’s largest carbon sink, and Virunga National Park, home to endangered mountain gorillas. But to maximize DRC’s economic opportunity, the government increased the number of blocks to 30 before putting them on tender at the end of July. American and French oil giants Chevron and TotalEnergies may be regarded as contenders for the blocks, gleaning from the government’s announcement.

As this auction shows, in the DRC, terms like “protected land” and “conservation concessions” can be Orwellian doublespeak — much of Congo’s concessions are owned by foreign investors with an intent to make a profit. Meanwhile, according to recent reports, the demonstrable protectors of the land — forest-dwelling communities such as the Batwa, Bambuti, and Bacwa, Congo’s Indigenous tribes — are being expelled from their forest homes, including through torturous tactics including rape, murder, and mutilation, under the guise of conservation.

IN ADDITION TO BEING the world’s second largest rainforest, the Congo Basin also holds the world’s largest tropical peatlands, which alone lock away more than 30 billion metric tons of carbon in the soil. So far, the peatlands have remained relatively undeveloped, but that may be poised to change: 80 percent of the peatlands are covered by concessions for agriculture, logging, and oil and gas, a figure that stands to increase with the new oil block auction.

Given the significant role the DRC’s rainforests and peatlands play in climate mitigation, it is easy to see why the European Union and the UK pledged 1.3 billion euros for conserving Congo’s forests at COP26. The Central African Forestry Initiative (CAFI) — funded by Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, South Korea, and the EU — also announced a ten-year agreement and unlocked investments of USD 500 million to fund REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) projects.

While these pledges may seem positive on paper, they don’t come close to matching the estimated value of oil and other resources buried underground. They also ignore the recent history of illegal operations in DRC’s conservation areas, and the granting of so-called conservation concessions — essentially carbon credit projects — to companies more interested in exploiting the land than conserving it. For example, the largest owner of logging concessions in the DRC, Portuguese-owned business Norsudtimber, struck illicit deals with the outgoing environment minister Claude Nyamugabo in 2020, and converted former logging areas to conservation concessions after harvesting the most valuable timber from over a million hectares of forests. Such conservation efforts do more harm than good, since preserving mature trees sequesters more CO2 than immature trees. What’s more, Norsudtimber has been found to operate illegally on 90 percent of its sites.

Nor do these pledges address significant evidence of human rights violations in the country’s national parks, and in association with UN-affiliated REDD+ projects.

“At the end of the day, these are easy tokenistic solutions to the climate crisis for these governments. If you’re Germany or the US, a real solution would be to restrict or hurt the bottom-line of companies relying heavily on fossil fuels — but they won’t do that,” says DRC-based investigative journalist Robert Flummerfelt. “The Congolese government has recently lifted a massive moratorium on industrial logging concessions, justifying the move by expanding ‘protected areas and national parks, encouraged by international money flowing in for such conservation projects”

In Kahuzi Biega National Park (KBNP), a UNESCO world heritage site largely funded by the US and German government and one of Congo’s largest protected areas, Flummerfelt and his research team documented a systematic program of violent forced expulsions targeting the original human inhabitants of the park — the Indigenous Batwa of Kahuzi-Biega — in the name of conservation. Congolese tribes like the Batwa, who evolved distinctively with the rainforests over millennia, consider the forest as a living being with their own rights. They have nurtured a symbiotic relationship with the forests, and depend on it for their food and medicine.

The investigation documented on-ground evidence and recorded more than 550 eye-witnesses accounts revealing that between July 2019 and December 2021, joint contingents of park guards and army soldiers burned entire villages to the ground, employed heavy weapons such as mortars and rocket-propelled grenades to shell villages, killed and maimed unarmed civilians, and subjected dozens of Batwa women to group rape at gunpoint, among other horrific abuses. They presented their findings in an April Minority Rights Group (MRG) International report.

What’s more, Flummerfelt’s team documented that the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) brought in Israeli private military contractors who, along with WCS-affiliated staff, provided military-style training to the park guards. This included combat tactics and weapons handling. “And [WCS officials] were made aware that these atrocities were happening, repeatedly, in writing,” Flummerfelt says.

WCS has vehemently denied being complicit in any of the documented abuse, and instead claim that the greatest threat to the land rights of the Batwa are local actors. In response to the investigation, they acknowledge supporting the park guards and the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN) in KBNP, but state that their support is for enhancing transparent and effective management of DRC’s natural resources, and combating illegal exploitation and trafficking of those resources. WCS asserts that developing ways for the Batwa to re-establish a connection with their ancestral forests will require “innovative approaches in protected area management.” It warns that “inaccurate reports like MRG’s draft will only serve to destabilize the area and ultimately make the situation worse for the region’s inhabitants.”

Flummerfelt, who felt forced to leave DRC after receiving multiple death threats, asserts that KNPB is far from the only internationally-funded protected park where the true stories of the Indigenous people are missing. “The media blackout is crucial in continuing the internationally-funded genocide against the Batwa. What has hurt the community the most is the press silence about the campaign of violence against them; that they stood against an entirely indifferent world.”

“The real stories of Congo’s Indigenous people are missing in mainstream media,” adds Zahiga, who himself has been the target of multiple death threats due to his activism, and in July was forced to flee the country with his family. “Tribes are driven out of the forests and become beggars in the nearby towns, without any means for resilience. Indigenous people live for free in the forests. In the towns they face language barriers, discrimination, and the stigma of being ‘small people.’ Many want to return to their forests.”

Activists like Zahiga and groups like the National Alliance for Support and Promotion of Indigenous and Community Heritage Areas and Territories in the DRC (ANAPAC-DRC) — a nonprofit that helps Indigenous peoples maneuver the slow bureaucracy and long legal processes necessary to assert their land rights — are working to support these communities. ANAPAC-DRC has helped the Bambuti Indigenous community win land titles in the forest territory of Kisimbosa Chamsaka (5,572 hectares) in the province of Nord-Kivu, and the Bolombi community in the forest territory of Ikulua Loleke (40,507 hectares) in the province of Mai-Ndombe.

Yet even for these communities, there is cause for concern. “Even though the Congolese state has granted these land titles, there is no guarantee they will not eventually reclassify it with due industry and economic pressure,” says Blair Byamungu Kabonge, a Kiswahili- and French-speaking Congolese native descended from the Batwa people who has been working as a community facilitator with ANAPAC-DRC since 2017. He adds that communities are often “forced to redraw their maps or lose land title” entirely when faced with industry pressure.

“Put yourself in the place of these communities that have no water, no schools, no hospitals while their lands are plundered and their ecosystem destroyed,” he says. “You cannot imagine the level of threats that they are exposed to by denouncing these companies.”

He points to Canadian-listed Alphamin Resources, one of the world’s largest tin miners, as an example, noting that Alphamin operates multiple mining operations that infringe on Indigenous lands. “Companies like Alphamin exploit resources from the land without giving any royalties to Indigenous people. There is no transparency in their processes for communities. Only the business and the national mining cadastre know the areas they operate,” he says.

Kabonge worries about the grim reality facing DRC. “Indigenous communities here fear that one day they may wake up, and all their forests have become the quarries of Alphamin.”