Welcome to Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda’s top tourist destination.

2,000 square kilometers of near-pristine nature that’s home to 600 bird species and 95 mammals.

But behind the safaris here, there are hard truths.

I waited but my husband did not return from the park.

The issue is that a park ranger beat me up.

My name is Ashoka Mukpo, and I’m a reporter for Mongabay.

In October 2023, I came to this park to look at human-wildlife conflict.

But while I was reporting, I heard allegations of physical abuse and extrajudicial killings by wildlife rangers.

We decided to investigate.

Queen Elizabeth is one of ten national parks in Uganda.

Sergeant Bob Bernard of the Uganda Wildlife Authority is one of 160 rangers in charge of protecting its wildlife.

I accompanied him and his four-man team on one of their patrols.

We aren’t scared of poachers.

Most of the time, most of these poachers, you see them with spears and at times they also move with dogs.

Bob and his team are looking for anyone who’s inside the park illegally.

They’ll never stop that work… that’s the habit they inherited from their parents, if maybe their grandfather was a poacher, that means even the son will also be poacher, it’s in the family.

The rangers are outfitted like soldiers in a war.

That’s not uncommon in this part of Africa.

Waves of elephant and rhino poaching have turned agencies responsible for protecting nature into well-trained paramilitary forces.

This type of military-style conservation has both critics and supporters.

And rangers here can point to real successes they’ve had.

In Queen Elizabeth, there are now 5,000 elephants, up from only 300 in the 1970s.

But the harsh tactics employed by some rangers have created a difficult relationship with communities around the park.

The tensions have deep roots.

Like most national parks in Africa, Queen Elizabeth was created by a colonial power, in this case the British, who ruled Uganda before its independence.

When it was turned into a national park in 1952, people suffered a lot, because they were forced to leave the areas where they were doing grazing, fishing, and to stay in small enclaves as camps.

Even their economic activities changed… very many of the population died, mostly the elderly because of the changes to the environment and economic activities.

Before British rule, what’s now called Queen Elizabeth Park was home to the Basangora and other Indigenous people.

It’s strictly forbidden to hunt here now, but that doesn’t stop everyone.

Poachers still slip into the park to kill animals like hippos, which they’ve done for generations.

Hippo meat is also a delicacy that can be sold illegally in local cookshops.

More than 2,000 people per year are arrested for wildlife crime in Uganda, and since a 2019 reform, the penalties have been stiffened.

In the hills overlooking the park, we talked to this man, who’d just gotten home from serving ten years in prison for possessing hippo meat.

I lost everything in life from being in prison for ten years.

It was an injustice. If they’d given me a shorter sentence and I could have come back to help my family, my life would be better now.

But from what people here told me, there are worse fates than a long prison sentence.

My elder brother and I went [in the park] together and killed a hippo.

When we were gathering the meat, the park wardens saw us and started shooting.

My brother died on the spot, and I lost my leg.

The Uganda Wildlife Authority is responsible for all the national parks in Uganda.

During the week I spent in and around Queen Elizabeth, local people here told me their interactions with the agency’s rangers can be very violent.

People are caught, and they confiscate their fishing gear, their boats and engines, even people are beaten.

In Hamakungu, a village inside the park, one fisherman told us he’d been brutally beaten for fishing in the wrong area.

In other towns, I heard disturbing stories of disappearances.

People who go into the park to hunt illegally often just don’t come home, people told me.

According to his relatives and local officials in the area, this man was shot to death by rangers inside the park, just two weeks before my visit in late 2023.

The debate over violence by wildlife rangers isn’t new.

In 2019, Buzzfeed News broke a story about murder, tortures, and sexual assault by rangers in the Congo Basin.

The US Congress later held hearings on the issue.

That same year, when four suspected poachers were gunned down in Queen Elizabeth, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni tweeted:

After having heard these allegations in the communities that I visited, I contacted the Uganda Wildlife Authority, to give them a chance to respond.

So far, I haven’t received a response, and have been left with difficult questions.

How common is it really for rangers to kill people?

What happens to their bodies and why aren’t they found?

Can the world tackle wildlife crime without violating human rights?

And who should be held accountable when they are?

Sergeant Bernard and his ranger team were not the subject of any specific allegations that I heard.

And during the time I spent time with him, he told me he’s trying to safeguard nature for the next generation of Ugandans.

Some of us will be aged and our kids will come here.

They want to see an elephant, they want to see a hippo.

This is Kitabu, a town up in the hills that overlook Queen Elizabeth, that’s known as a hotspot for poachers.

Kids here are just leaving school for the day… But this isn’t a normal school.

63 of the children here lost their fathers, most allegedly killed by rangers in the park.

It was put in place to help the orphans, whose parents – mainly the fathers – were killed due to poaching… so this school is helping those orphans get education.

In 2018, this school was set up by a group of former poachers.

Back in Hamakungu, Wilson Assimwe is an elected official who’s represented towns inside the park for about three years.

He says the communities he represents here aren’t against conservation.

They’re conserving for future generations, they are conserving those animals…