Newsweek
By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK
Mar 10, 2008 Issue
Original
Article
The marauders galloped into Zakouma
National Park in Chad, the last refuge of that
country's once thriving elephant population.
Rather than bother with the few remaining elephants,
the attackers last May were after the 1.5 tons
of ivory—worth as much as $1.3 million—that
Chadian officials had seized from poachers over
the years and stored in a strongroom at park
headquarters. Neither the audacity of the attack
nor its brutality—the raiders killed three
park rangers—shocked wildlife officials:
some 100 rangers, outgunned and outmanned, are
killed every year defending Africa's wildlife.
Rather, the shock was the identity of the attackers.
In an ominous sign of how the killing of endangered
animals has evolved from a crime committed by
small bands of unorganized, mostly poor operators,
these attackers were Janjaweed, the militia that
has carried out genocidal attacks in Darfur.
Lured by easy money, the Janjaweed have expanded
their killing fields to endangered species. In
the past two years, they have butchered hundreds
of elephants around Zakouma, say Chadian authorities,
carrying the tusks back to Sudan, where they
are secreted on ships bound mostly for Asia—or
traded for weapons.
For the Janjaweed, killing elephants
is the least of its atrocities. But the militia's
move into ivory poaching signals a terrifying
turn in the world's efforts to save vanishing
species. The battle is no longer just about the
elephant's trumpet never again echoing over the
African savanna, or the Bengal tiger's roar being
heard only in memory. The threat posed by the
contraband wildlife trade is now also about the
money it generates—wave upon wave of it—that
is being used by very bad people to do very bad
things. "Earnings from the ivory trade is
sustaining the Janjaweed," says Michael
Wamithi, former head of the Kenya Wildlife Service
and now director of the elephant program for
the International Fund for Animal Welfare. "It's
untraceable money," much like the "blood
diamonds" that bankrolled brutal wars in
Sierra Leone. On March 5, the House Committee
on Natural Resources will hold a hearing on the
new twist in illegal wildlife trade.
Three nights after the Janjaweed
killed the Chadian rangers in their assault on
the ivory (the surviving rangers drove them off
before they got their hands on the stockpile),
heavily armed Somali poachers marched in lockstep
so precisely that a dozen men made the sound
of a single footfall. Reaching the bank of Kenya's
Tana River, they fired 300 rounds from their
assault rifles and killed three Kenyan rangers
before losing four of their own and fleeing.
The poachers, says IFAW's Wamithi, were traced
to a Somali warlord, one of many whose private
armies have destabilized that nation for decades.
The link didn't surprise experts. If you have
to equip, feed and pay a few thousand soldiers,
asks William Clark, who chairs Interpol's Working
Group on Wildlife Crime, "where does that
come from? You need money to pay for civil war."
The State Department estimates that the market
value of illegal ivory (the most commonly trafficked
contraband, at $400 a pound), tiger parts ($7,000
for a set of bones), rhino horn (up to $25,000
per pound of bone), shark fins, exotic birds
(up to $90,000 for a Lear's macaw), reptile skin,
bushmeat and other illegal wildlife products
has reached $10 billion a year and possibly twice
that. China is the largest market, with the United
States a close second.
The tip-off that contraband wildlife is being
moved by organized syndicates is in the pattern
of the seizures. Authorities intercepted an average
of 92 illegal shipments of ivory every month
in 2006, found Tom Milliken, director of the
Africa program for Traffic International, a global
network formed in 1976 to monitor wildlife trade.
That is not much changed since the 1990s, but
one thing is: the number that weighed one ton
or more doubled from 1997 to 2006. That rise,
says Traffic's Richard Thomas, "is certainly
evidence of increasing organized criminal gangs … Moving
a ton of ivory is not a trivial undertaking." Recently
seized shipments of coral, snakeskins, conch
shells, ivory, shahtoosh (the hair of endangered
antelopes) and abalone have all been the largest-ever
of their types, says Interpol's Clark, another
sign that this is not the work of small-time
crooks.
It is not size alone that points
to the involvement of large syndicates, but the
sophistication of the smuggling. In a 2006 seizure
in Hong Kong, a ship that had sailed from Cameroon
was found to have three containers with false
compartments, each filled with ivory. The compartments
had been deftly made and camouflaged with sophisticated
metallurgy. The suspected trafficker, a Taiwanese
man, has not been extradited because of Taiwan's
diplomatic isolation; prosecution is unlikely.
But an investigation by Hong Kong authorities
revealed that he had shipped at least 15 containers
along the same route with the same declared contents—timber
planks—in the past few years. All 15 got
through with what Interpol suspects was 40 tons
of contraband ivory.
That represents 4,000 killed elephants, an indication
of how brutally effective the new poachers are.
A DNA analysis revealed that the ivory in the
Cameroon shipment all came from elephants in
eastern Gabon and the neighboring Congo, which
suggests that contractors "receive a 'purchase
order' for a specific quantity of ivory," says
Clark. They organize teams of poachers to kill
a set number of elephants in a specific area,
then arrange for transport to the coast.
The consequences for wildlife have
been devastating. The highly endangered northern
white rhino was making a comeback in Garamba
National Park, on the border of Sudan and the
Democratic Republic of Congo. A population of
13 in 1983 had rebounded to 32 by 2003. But late
that year Janjaweed militias armed with AK-47s
began arriving, and the slaughter began. In a
typical raid, says conservation biologist Emmanuel
de Merode, who has worked in East Africa for
two decades, some 20 horse-mounted militiamen
do the killing, while scores of others camp on
the edge of the park with large caravans of donkeys
providing supplies for the days-long journey
from Sudan and back. The poachers remove the
rhino horns, which are prized as dagger handles
in the Middle East and for purported medical
properties in Asia. As of last year, there were
two rhinos left in Garamba, a death sentence
for that population. "There may have been
some local poaching, too," says de Merode, "but
it was the Janjaweed that killed them off." In
another case of militias' financing atrocities
through poaching, armed men believed to be members
of the FDLR, Hutu extremists tied to the Tutsi
genocide in Rwanda, abducted and killed two baby
gorillas from Congo. Although some black-market
buyers prefer the primates alive, stuffed ones
can bring enough for a nice haul of assault rifles.
The State Department and some
members of Congress suspect a link between illegal
wildlife trafficking and terrorism, but admit
that "the evidence
is anecdotal," says Claudia McMurray, assistant
secretary of State. "But with the amount
of money it would provide terrorist groups, even
anecdotes are a huge cause for concern." One
focus: domestic separatist groups and Islamic
militants based in Bangladesh. Indian wildlife
officials suspect them of sponsoring the poaching
of tigers, rhinos, elephants and other vanishing
breeds in India's Kaziranga National Park to
support terrorist activities, police sources
in India tell NEWSWEEK. One group is suspected
of carrying out a string of bombings in India
beginning in 2004.
Just as the ultimate blame for drug lords who
murder the innocent lies with users, so the blame
for a wildlife trade that sustains organized
crime and genocidal militias lies with the buyers. "There
is a vague awareness in America that some things,
they shouldn't be buying," says McMurray. "But
the psychology seems to be that if it's in a
store [or online] it must be OK." Americans
who buy ivory carvings (easily available online),
Japanese who collect the ivory signature seals
called hankos and Chinese who clamor for "medicines" made
from tiger bone are not supporting some lone
poacher who's trying to feed his family. They're
putting money into the coffers of the Janjaweed,
warlords and possibly even worse actors. With
the new wildlife traffickers, it's not only animals
whose lives are at stake.
With Scott Johnson in Nairobi, Jeneen Interlandi
and Jason Overdorf in Delhi
© 2008
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