A corpse of an elephant killed for its tusks. |
By Jeffery Gettleman, The New York Times, September 3, 2012
GARAMBA NATIONAL
PARK, Democratic Republic of Congo — In 30 years of
fighting poachers, Paul Onyango had never seen anything like this. Twenty-two
dead elephants, including several very young ones, clumped together on the open
savanna, many killed by a single bullet to the top of the head.
There were no
tracks leading away, no sign that the poachers had stalked their prey from the
ground. The tusks had been hacked away, but none of the meat — and subsistence
poachers almost always carve themselves a little meat for the long walk home.
Several days later,
in early April, the Garamba National Park guards spotted a Ugandan
military helicopter flying very low over the park, on an unauthorized flight,
but they said it abruptly turned around after being detected. Park officials,
scientists and the Congolese authorities now believe that the Ugandan military
— one of the Pentagon’s closest partners in Africa — killed the 22 elephants
from a helicopter and spirited away more than a million dollars’ worth of ivory.
“They were good
shots, very good shots,” said Mr. Onyango, Garamba’s chief ranger. “They even
shot the babies. Why? It was like they came here to destroy everything.”
Africa is in the
midst of an epic elephant slaughter. Conservation groups say poachers are
wiping out tens of thousands of elephants a year, more than at any time in the
previous two decades, with the underground ivory trade becoming increasingly
militarized.
Like blood diamonds from Sierra Leone or plundered
minerals from Congo, ivory, it seems, is the latest conflict resource in
Africa, dragged out of remote battle zones, easily converted into cash and now
fueling conflicts across the continent.
Some of Africa’s
most notorious armed groups, including the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Shabab
and Darfur’s janjaweed, are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy
weapons and sustain their mayhem. Organized crime syndicates are linking up
with them to move the ivory around the world, exploiting turbulent states,
porous borders and corrupt officials from sub-Saharan Africa to China, law
enforcement officials say.
But it is not just
outlaws cashing in. Members of some of the African armies that the American
government trains and supports with millions of taxpayer dollars — like the
Ugandan military, the Congolese Army and newly independent South Sudan’s
military — have been implicated in poaching elephants and dealing in ivory.
Congolese soldiers
are often arrested for it. South Sudanese forces frequently battle wildlife
rangers. Interpol, the international police network, is now helping to
investigate the mass elephant killings in the Garamba park, trying to match DNA
samples from the animals’ skulls to a large shipment of tusks, marked
“household goods,” recently seized at a Ugandan airport.
The vast majority
of the illegal ivory — experts say as much as 70 percent — is flowing to China,
and though the Chinese have coveted ivory for centuries, never before have so
many of them been able to afford it. China’s economic boom has created a vast
middle class, pushing the price of ivory to a stratospheric $1,000 per pound on
the streets of Beijing.
High-ranking
officers in the People’s Liberation Army have a fondness for ivory trinkets as
gifts. Chinese online forums offer a thriving, and essentially unregulated,
market for ivory chopsticks, bookmarks, rings, cups and combs, along with
helpful tips on how to smuggle them (wrap the ivory in tinfoil, says one Web
site, to throw off X-ray machines).
Last year, more
than 150 Chinese citizens were arrested across Africa, from Kenya to Nigeria,
for smuggling ivory. And there is growing evidence that poaching increases in
elephant-rich areas where Chinese construction workers are building roads.
“China
is the epicenter of demand,” said Robert Hormats, a senior State Department
official. “Without the demand from China, this would all but dry up.”
He said that
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who condemned conflict minerals from Congo a few years ago, was pushing the ivory issue
with the Chinese “at the highest levels” and that she was “going to spend a
considerable amount of time and effort to address this, in a very bold way.”
Foreigners have
been decimating African elephants for generations. “White gold” was one of the
primary reasons King Leopold II of Belgium turned Congo into his own personal
fief in the late 19th century, leading to the brutal excesses of the upriver
ivory stations thinly fictionalized in Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of
Darkness” and planting the seeds for Congo’s free fall today.
Ivory Coast got its
name from the teeming elephant herds that used to frolic in its forests. Today,
after decades of carnage, there is almost no ivory left.
The demand for
ivory has surged to the point that the tusks of a single adult elephant can be
worth more than 10 times the average annual income in many African countries.
In Tanzania, impoverished villagers are poisoning pumpkins and rolling them
into the road for elephants to eat. In Gabon, subsistence hunters deep in the rain forest are being enlisted to kill
elephants and hand over the tusks, sometimes for as little as a sack of salt.
Last year, poaching
levels in Africa were at their highest since international monitors began
keeping detailed records in 2002. And 2011 broke the record for the amount of
illegal ivory seized worldwide, at 38.8 tons (equaling the tusks from more than
4,000 dead elephants). Law enforcement officials say the sharp increase in
large seizures is a clear sign that organized crime has slipped into the ivory
underworld, because only a well-oiled criminal machine — with the help of
corrupt officials — could move hundreds of pounds of tusks thousands of miles
across the globe, often using specially made shipping containers with secret
compartments.
The smugglers are
“Africa-based, Asian-run crime syndicates,” said Tom Milliken, director of the Elephant
Trade Information System, an international ivory monitoring project,
and “highly adaptive to law enforcement interventions, constantly changing
trade routes and modus operandi.”
Conservationists
say the mass kill-offs taking place across Africa may be as bad as, or worse
than, those in the 1980s, when poachers killed more than half of Africa’s
elephants before an international ban on the commercial ivory trade was put in
place.
“We’re experiencing
what is likely to be the greatest percentage loss of elephants in history,”
said Richard G. Ruggiero, an official with the United States Fish and Wildlife
Service.
Some experts say
the survival of the species is at stake, especially when many members of the
African security services entrusted with protecting the animals are currently
killing them.
“The huge
populations in West Africa have disappeared, and those in the center and east
are going rapidly,” said Andrew Dobson, an ecologist at Princeton. “The
question is: Do you want your children to grow up in a world without
elephants?”
‘We Shoot First’
Garamba National Park is a big, beautiful
sheet of green, 1,900 square miles, tucked in the northeastern corner of Congo.
Picture a sea of chest-high elephant grass, swirling brown rivers, ribbons of
papyrus and the occasional black-and-white secretary bird swooping elegantly through
rose-colored skies. Founded in 1938, Garamba is widely considered one of
Africa’s most stunning parks, a naturalist’s dream.
But today, it is a
battlefield, with an arms race playing out across the savanna. Every morning,
platoons of Garamba’s 140 wildlife rangers suit up with assault rifles, machine
guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Luis Arranz, the park manager, wants to get
surveillance drones, and the nonprofit organization that runs the park is
considering buying night-vision goggles, flak jackets and pickup trucks with
mounted machine guns.
“We don’t
negotiate, we don’t give any warning, we shoot first,” said Mr. Onyango, the
chief ranger, who worked as a game warden in Kenya for more than 20 years. He
rose to a high rank but lost his job after a poaching suspect died in his
custody after being whipped.
“Out here, it’s not
michezo,” Mr. Onyango said, using the Swahili word for games.
In
June, he heard a burst of gunfire. His rangers did a “leopard crawl” on their
bellies for hours through the scratchy elephant grass until they spied poachers
hacking several elephants. The instant his squad shot at the poachers, the
whole bush came alive with crackling gunfire.
“They opened up on
us with PKMs, AKs, G-3s, and FNs,” he said. “Most poachers are conservative
with their ammo, but these guys were shooting like they were in Iraq. All of a
sudden, we were outgunned and outnumbered.”
Both of the
rangers’ old belt-fed machine guns jammed that day, and they narrowly escaped
(11 have been killed since 2008 and some of the rangers’ children have even
been kidnapped). Later investigation showed that the poachers were members of
the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel outfit that circulates in central
Africa, killing villagers and enslaving children. American Special Operations
troops are helping several African armies hunt down the
group’s phantom of a leader, Joseph Kony, who is believed to be hiding in a
remote corner of the Central African Republic.
Ivory may be Mr.
Kony’s new lifeline.
Several recent
escapees from the L.R.A. said that Mr. Kony had ordered his fighters to kill as
many elephants as possible and send him the tusks.
“Kony wants ivory,”
said a young woman who was kidnapped earlier this year near Garamba and did not
want to be identified because she was still terrified. “I heard the other
rebels say it many times: ‘We need to get ivory and send it to Kony.’ ”
She said that in
her four months in captivity, before she ran away one night when the rebels got
drunk, she saw them kill 10 elephants, wrap the tusks in cloth sacks and send
them to Mr. Kony at his hiding place.
Other recent
escapees said that the group had killed at least 29 elephants since May, buying
guns, ammunition and radios with the proceeds. Mr. Kony may be working with
Sudanese ivory traders. One ivory retailer in Omdurman, Sudan, who openly sells
ivory bracelets, prayer beads and carved tusks, said the Lord’s Resistance Army
was one source of the ivory he saw.
“The L.R.A. works
in this, too; that’s how they buy their weapons,” the shopkeeper said
matter-of-factly. That made sense, American officials said, given Mr. Kony’s
few sources of income.
Several Sudanese
ivory traders said the ivory from Congo and the Central African Republic moved
overland across Sudan’s vast western desert region of Darfur and then up to
Omdurman, all with the help of corrupt Sudanese officials. There is a well-worn
practice in Sudan called “buying time,” in which smugglers pay police officers
and border guards for a specified amount of time to let a convoy of illegal
goods slip through checkpoints.
But there are many
routes. On Africa’s east coast, Kenya’s port city of Mombasa is a major
transshipment center. A relatively small percentage of containers in Mombasa is
inspected, and ivory has been concealed in shipments of everything from
avocados to anchovies. Sometimes it is wrapped in chili peppers, to throw off
the sniffer dogs.
On the west coast,
in the Gulf of Guinea, “there is a relatively recent phenomenon of well-armed,
sophisticated poachers who load their ivory onto Chinese fishing ships,” one
senior American official said.
Chinese officials
declined to discuss any aspect of the ivory trade, with one representative of
the Forestry Ministry, which handles ivory issues, saying, “This is a very
sensitive topic right now.”
Several Sudanese
ivory traders and Western officials said that the infamous janjaweed militias
of Darfur were also major poachers. Large groups of janjaweed — the word means
horseback raider — were blamed for killing thousands of civilians in the early
2000s, when Darfur erupted in ethnic conflict. International law enforcement
officials say that horseback raiders from Darfur wiped out thousands of
elephants in central Africa in the 1980s. Now they suspect that hundreds of
janjaweed militiamen rode more than 600 miles from Sudan and were the ones who
slaughtered at least 300 elephants in Bouba Ndjida National Park in Cameroon
this past January, one of the worst episodes of elephant slaughter recently
discovered.
In 2010, Ugandan
soldiers, searching for Mr. Kony in the forests of the Central African
Republic, ran into a janjaweed ivory caravan. “These guys had 400 men, pack
mules, a major camp, lots of weapons,” a Western official said. A battle
erupted and more than 10 Ugandans were killed.
“It just shows you
the power of poaching, how much money you can make stacking up the game,” the
official said.
Businessmen are
clearly bankrolling these enormous ivory expeditions, both feeding off and
fueling conflict, Western officials and researchers say.
“This is not just
freelance stuff,” said Mr. Hormats, the State Department official. “This is
organized crime.”
Paul Elkan, a
director at the Wildlife
Conservation Society, said that the janjaweed sweeping across
central Africa on ambitious elephant hunts “goes much deeper than a bunch of
guys coming in on horses. It has to do with insecurity and lawlessness.”
Perhaps no country
in Africa is as lawless as Somalia, which has languished for more than 20 years
without a functioning central government, spawning Islamist militants,
gunrunners, human traffickers and modern-day pirates. Ivory has entered this illicit mix.
Several Somali
elders said that the Shabab, the militant Islamist group that has pledged
allegiance to Al Qaeda, recently began training fighters to infiltrate
neighboring Kenya and kill elephants for ivory to raise money.
One former Shabab
associate said that the Shabab were promising to “facilitate the marketing” of
ivory and have encouraged villagers along the Kenya-Somalia border to bring
them tusks, which are then shipped out through the port of Kismayo, a notorious
smuggling hub and the last major town the Shabab still control.
“The business is a
risk,” said Hassan Majengo, a Kismayo resident with knowledge of the ivory
trade, “but it has an exceptional profit.”
‘Easy Money’
That profit is not
lost on government soldiers in central Africa, who often get paid as little as
$100 a month, if they get paid at all.
In Garamba, the
park rangers have arrested many Congolese government soldiers, including some
caught with tusks, slabs of elephant meat and the red berets often worn by the
elite presidential guard.
“An element of our
army is involved,” acknowledged Maj. Jean-Pierrot Mulaku, a Congolese military
prosecutor. “It’s easy money.”
Congolese soldiers
have a long history of raping and killing civilians and pilfering resources.
According to a report written in 2010 by John Hart, an American scientist and
one of the top elephant researchers in Congo, the “Congolese military are implicated
in almost all elephant poaching,” making the military “the main perpetrator of
illegal elephant killing in D.R.C.”
The Garamba rangers
and a Congolese government intelligence officer said that they also routinely
battled soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the military of South
Sudan. A South Sudanese military spokesman denied that, saying that the
soldiers “didn’t have time” for poaching.
The American
government has provided $250 million in nonlethal military assistance to South
Sudan during the past several years. In May, the Garamba rangers said they had
opened fire on four South Sudanese soldiers who had poached six elephant tusks.
The rangers said they killed one soldier, though they did not seem to think too
much about it.
“I’ve killed too
many people to count,” said Alexi Tamoasi, a veteran ranger.
But the suspected
helicopter poaching is something new.
Mr. Onyango said
the strange way the elephant carcasses were found, clumped in circles, with the
calves in the middle for protection, was yet another sign that a helicopter had
corralled them together because elephants usually scatter at the first shot.
African Parks,
the South Africa-based conservation organization that manages Garamba, has
photographs of an Mi-17 military transport helicopter flying low over the park
in April and said it had traced the chopper’s registration number to the
Ugandan military.
Col. Felix
Kulayigye, a spokesman for the Ugandan military, acknowledged that the helicopter
was one of its aircraft. But he said that the poaching allegation was a
“baseless rumor” and that he knew “for sure” that Lord’s Resistance Army
members were “well known” poachers in that area.
John Sidle, an
American from Nebraska who works as a pilot at Garamba, said, “What bothers me
is that it’s probably American taxpayer money paying for the jet fuel for the
helicopter.”
The
United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in recent years for fuel and
transport services for the Ugandan Army to hunt down Mr. Kony in central
Africa, while training Congolese and South Sudanese to help. But the State
Department said it had no evidence that the Ugandan military was responsible
for the Garamba killings, nor knowledge that any of the African soldiers
involved in the Kony hunt had engaged in poaching. It did not address the
broader history of poaching by American-supported militaries.
In June, 36 tusks
were seized at the Entebbe airport in Uganda. Eighteen of the 22 elephants
killed in Garamba in March were adults that had their ivory hacked out, which
would usually mean 36 tusks. The little stubs of ivory on the dead calves had
been left untouched.
In 1989, the Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species passed a moratorium on the
international commercial trade of African elephant ivory, except under a few
rare circumstances. No one knows how many elephants are being poached each
year, but many leading conservationists agree that “tens of thousands” is a
safe number and that 2012 is likely to be worse than 2011.
The total elephant
population in Africa is a bit of a mystery, too. The International Union for
Conservation of Nature, a global conservation network, estimates
from 472,269 to 689,671. But that is based on information from 2006. Poaching
has dramatically increased since then, all across the continent.
Some of the
recently poached elephants had been sexually mutilated, with their genitals or
nipples cut off, possibly for sale — something researchers said they had not
encountered before.
“It’s very
disturbing,” said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of Save the
Elephants, who recently testified at a Senate hearing on ivory and insecurity.
‘Like the Drug
War’
Mr. Arranz,
Garamba’s director, has an exhausted look in his eyes. History is against him.
Garamba was founded more than 70 years ago, in part to protect the rare
northern white rhinoceros, which used to number more than 1,000 here. But many
people in Asia believe that ground rhino horn is a cure for cancer and other
ills, and it fetches nearly $30,000 a pound, more than gold. In the
past few decades, as Congo has descended into chaos, rhino poachers have moved
into Garamba. The park’s northern white rhinos were among the last ones in the
wild anywhere, but rangers have not seen any for the past five years.
Garamba faces a
seemingly endless number of challenges, many connected to the utter state
failure of Congo itself. Some of the rangers are poachers themselves, killing
the animals they are entrusted to protect, saying their salaries are too low to
live on.
“I was hungry,”
explained Anabuda Bakuli, a ranger jailed for killing a waterbuck.
It does not help
that many Garamba rangers are, by their own admission, alcoholics and run up
debts at the bar not far from park headquarters. Mr. Onyango, the chief, is
known to drink several liters of beer in a single sitting. He talks about “the
stress.”
Poaching rates are
now the highest here in central Africa, a belt of some of the most troubled
countries in the world. In Chad, heavily armed horsemen, who many
conservationists say were janjaweed, recently killed 3,000 elephants in just a
few years.
Garamba once had
more than 20,000 elephants. Last year, there were around 2,800. This year,
maybe 2,400.
Every morning, if
the skies are clear, Mr. Arranz flies above Garamba in a small two-seat plane,
the equivalent of a Mazda Miata with wings. The emerald green savanna stretches
out below him, a breathtaking sight at dawn.
But the other day,
he saw something that furrowed his brow: vultures.
The next day, after
a hike through the tall grass, the stench grew unbearable and the air
reverberated with the sizzle of thousands of flies. “Poached,” Mr. Arranz said,
as he discovered a dead elephant, its face cut off.
Nearby were the
ashes of a small campfire.
“These guys were
out here for a while,” he said. “If they were willing to do this for one
elephant. ...” His voice trailed off.
“It’s
like the drug war,” he said later. “If people keep buying and paying for ivory,
it’s impossible to stop it.”
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