Newsweek 3/1/08: Extinction Trade Endangered animals are the new blood diamonds as militias and warlords use poaching to fund death.

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<http://www.newsweek.com/id/117875>http://www.newsweek.com/id/117875

 

Extinction Trade

Endangered animals are the new blood diamonds as

militias and warlords use poaching to fund death.

By Sharon Begley

 

NEWSWEEK

 

Updated: 1:25 PM ET Mar 1, 2008

 

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 Š

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.

 

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/117875

 

 

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