Comments on this blog tend to be well hidden but this comment from Andy is worth a repost. Andy, your comment is much appreciated and completely consistent with all our experience with MONUSCO.

Andy is doing some great work himself as per this article: https://www.science.org/content/article/booming-trade-mammoth-ivory-may-be-bad-news-elephants

Hello,

I, along with some of my teammates, have been following your blog for years now. I work for the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime as a wildlife crime investigator/anti-poaching and we have been dealing with the ongoing conflict at the Congolese/Rwandan border for years. Humanitarian crises are wildlife crises and we work alongside the ICCN Rangers of Virunga National Park. It is an unfortunate truth that one of the aspects of dealing with wildlife crime is counterinsurgency.

This speaks volume when UNODC is forced to investigator UN (in which they are under) – we are composed of scientists with former backgrounds in global military Special Operations Forces (SOF)/intelligence and the complacency and cowardice of the MONUSCO forces is embarrassing. A village was being razed and one of the local units failed mobilization because they were cowards and wouldn’t leave 150 meters from their compounds.

It seems that, without going into much public detail, active duty French SOF, Portuguese SOF and a few handful of good people (such as yourself) are trying to do good in a world in which the First World continues to ignore and neglect.

Thanks for the post, always keeping an eye out for more of your updates from your side of things.