BOMA, Sudan — He grew up here, became a rebel here, and one day recently he was flying low across this vast grassy savannah in southeastern Sudan, now a park warden pointing out big-tusked elephants traipsing across the landscape.

From the window of the small plane, Kolor Pino, who is also a general in the former rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army, could see a few black ostriches and then a skittish mass of yellowish-brown kob, a kind of antelope, that appeared from the air almost like a flock of birds.

In a place where rebels and militiamen trained and fought for decades, where people suffered and fled and died, the sight amounted to a small mercy. “The animals are coming back,” Pino said, a note of satisfaction in his voice.

For years, people here thought of the zebras, giraffes, buffalo, hartebeest and other animals that once roamed this vast, trackless region as just another collective casualty of southern Sudan’s 20-year civil war. Parts of the area made up a main training base for the southern rebels, who dined regularly, along with locals, on an assortment of bush meat. Fighting made refugees out of the more agile creatures, with white-eared kob, gazelles and other species fleeing in massive numbers to Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and northern Sudan.

But since the war ended in 2005, the animals have resumed their old migratory habits, crisscrossing this area east of the Nile River where Pino flew recently with President Obama’s Sudan envoy, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, along with others eager to see what some have called an animal El Dorado.

Wildlife experts say that the area is now the site of one of the largest migrations of mammals on Earth, perhaps even larger than the famed annual movement of wildebeest between Tanzania and Kenya. A 2007 aerial survey by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society estimated that more than 1.3 million kob, tiang antelope and mongalla gazelle were once again running around Boma.

“It’s an absolutely amazing and unique place,” said Albert Schenk, a project manager with the society, which is helping to develop a conservation plan for an area that covers about 125,000 square miles and includes a national park, game reserves and two other proposed protected areas.

For Pino, the return of the animals to Boma is a reminder of what things were like before the war, when he was a student and his father was a farmer. In his ethnic community, boys of the same generation traditionally take the name of a local animal, and his was the white-eared kob.

“There were many, many animals then, but they decreased because of the war,” Pino said. “During the war, we had militias around here — they consumed the animals, and we, as guerrilla fighters, we consumed them. Now we are protecting them. We are making people aware.”

As part of the 2005 peace deal with the Sudanese government, this oil- and land-rich southern region is set to hold a referendum on independence in 2011, and most southerners appear to think that secession is inevitable. During his visit here, Gration, the U.S. envoy, pointed out the need for southerners to develop economic engines for the region — and bringing tourists to Boma could be one of those.

“What the south needs is multibillion-dollar agribusiness, tourism, infrastructure, cement plants, trucking,” said Gration, who has said that some U.S. sanctions against Sudan should be reconsidered to help address those needs.

Southern Sudanese officials and others hope that the Boma area will eventually lure safari companies and tent-toting, Land Cruiser-driving tourists on a scale similar to neighboring Kenya. So far, there has been some interest from a Spanish tour firm. And in an odd, little-scrutinized deal, a safari company connected to United Arab Emirates royalty has leased a vast swath of Boma. It has built an airstrip and begun to fly in equipment for a camp at the foot of a hill sacred to local residents. The deal has raised concerns that wealthy visitors from the UAE, who may come here for big-game trophy hunting, could conflict with locals in several ways.

But getting a tourism industry going will probably take a while. At the moment, the former rebels, now the governing Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, are building the south virtually from scratch. The capital, Juba, an hour’s flight from Boma, was little more than a clearing and some straw huts along the Nile in 2005. Southerners had to haul in trailers for offices, pave roads, build hotels and an airport, and learn how to stop calling one another “comrade.”

But the southern government has had trouble extending its reach much beyond the capital — a failure evident in the Boma area, where tribal clashes and massive cattle raids are almost epidemic.

“There’s a lack of social services out here,” said conservationist Michelle Wieland, who works out of a small camp in Boma. “There’s insecurity. There are ex-combatants with no jobs, not many roads [and] no real monitoring of the area at a state level.”

Part of the conservation area is off-limits for now because of the violence. Though wildlife officers are being trained, only about 200 are on patrol, mostly on foot, in an area slightly larger than New Mexico. Mostly, they are focused on teaching locals not to eat away their national treasure.

“These days, we’re getting used to eating cattle and goat and not wild animals,” said Lutubore Kuju, who lives in a village of straw huts near the new white tents and jeeps of the conservation society. “In the old days, we used to eat so many.” Source: (The Washington Post)