Enlarge Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images Tanzania
has been identified as the leading exporter of illegal ivory in recent
years. An estimated 10,000 elephants are being slaughtered in the
country annually. Here, elephants walk in the Serengeti National Reserve
in northern Tanzania in 2010.
"The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it." — Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
Conrad
wrote more than a century ago, when there were no laws against shooting
elephants. If anything, today's restrictions on the ivory trade have
only increased its value.
The slaughter of
elephants and the seizure of illegal ivory have soared to their highest
levels in decades. A voracious market in Asia and chaotic wildlife
protection in much of Africa have put elephant herds at risk throughout
the African continent, particularly in Central and East Africa. Poachers
are gunning down whole families, oblivious to game scouts.
A
key battleground is Tanzania, one of the world's last great
repositories of elephants. Perhaps 70,000 to 80,000 elephants roam this
nation's immense sanctuaries, amounting to perhaps a quarter of all
African elephants.
In colonial times, the
Tanzanian island of Zanzibar held the largest ivory auctions in the
world. Today Tanzania has regained that infamy. Those public auctions
have been replaced by underground networks of smugglers, but Tanzania
remains a leading source of ivory.
From 2009
to 2011, the country was the leading exporter of illegal ivory in the
world. Thirty-seven percent of all elephant tusks seized by law
enforcement came from Tanzania, with neighboring Kenya a close second.
On
Saturday, customs officials in Hong Kong announced the seizure of
nearly 4 tons' worth of ivory hidden in two containers shipped from
Indian Ocean ports in Tanzania and Kenya.
Whether the ivory is merely transshipped through Tanzanian ports or plundered from its parks is a point of contention.
Few Protections For Elephants
Conservationists
say Tanzania has for years been one of Africa's worst elephant
slaughterhouses. They blame authorities who are unable or unwilling to
control poaching and trafficking. The government acknowledges there is a
problem and says reforms are under way.
"There's an enormous
slaughter of elephants going on in Tanzania right now. Things are out of
hand," says Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who has been studying and protecting
elephants in Africa for 47 years. "There's no protection in numbers for
elephants any more than there was for bison in the last century when
they were all wiped out in America. So people shouldn't kid themselves."
Enlarge Courtesy of African Wildlife Trust Wildlife
rangers in Tanzania came across this elephant that had been killed for
its ivory. Tanzania says it wants to prevent the slaughter of elephants,
but rangers are poorly paid and are responsible for monitoring vast
game reserves in the East African country.
Tanzania had been curiously mute over the
massacre of its elephants. But recently, an avuncular, white-haired
member of Parliament offered this grim assessment.
"Thirty
elephants per day. At the end of the year, you're talking about 10,000
elephants killed," says James Lembeli, chairman of Parliament's Natural
Resources Committee and a former National Parks official. "Move around
this country where you have populations of elephants: carcasses
everywhere."
In Search Of Dead Elephants
I decided to go see for myself.
Two
Masai tribesmen in tire-tread sandals use elaborate whistling to herd
their cattle. They know this landscape of dry thorn brush and tawny
grass intimately. So they lead us to a recent elephant kill on the
Tanzania-Kenya border.
We walked up on the
carcass of a dead elephant. It was killed sometime last month. All
that's left is a great leathery hide, gray on the outside, pink on the
inside, decomposing on the savanna.
The
poachers hauled off the tusks. The villagers came and cut away all the
meat, and took the head and bones. The scene is being repeated again and
again across Tanzania.
The poachers come in
all types in Africa these days. The Democratic Republic of Congo
recently accused Ugandan soldiers of machine-gunning elephants from a
military helicopter. Some poachers track jumbo elephants on foot for
days like big-game hunters. Others use high-tech shortcuts.
Robert
Waltenburg manages Lake Chala Safari Camp, a small, private game
reserve where we found the carcass. It's one of eight elephants killed
here in recent weeks.
Social Media Help Poachers
Waltenburg
believes his clients unintentionally guide poachers to their targets by
posting photos of elephants with big tusks on social media, which are
monitored by resourceful poachers.
"It's so
easy to research on the Internet, just type in 'elephant sightings' in
this region. Things will pop up," Waltenburg says.
There's an
enormous slaughter of elephants going on in Tanzania right now. Things
are out of hand. There's no protection in numbers for elephants any more
than there was for bison in last century when they were all wiped out
in America.
- Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a longtime advocate for the protection of elephants
Reliable numbers of killed elephants are hard to come by. According to the MIKE program —
Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants
— poachers are responsible for 60 to 90 percent of elephant deaths in
Tanzanian wildlife reserves. National parks like the Serengeti are
better protected.
Like other African countries, Tanzania is losing its elephants to poverty, poor administration and corruption.
First, a pair of big tusks is a year's income to a subsistence peasant.
Second, wildlife rangers are ill-paid, and punishment for a convicted poacher can be as little as a $13 fine.
Third,
individuals inside the Tanzania Ministry of Natural Resources and
Tourism have been selling out the nation's heritage that they were
supposed to protect.
Wildlife Officials Implicated
In
the past few months, the minister and top officials in the Wildlife
Department were sacked for their roles in two scandals: taking bribes
for the assignments of hunting blocs and allowing 116 live wild animals
to be loaded onto a jumbo jet and smuggled out of the country to Qatar.
The
new minister, a former diplomat named Khamis Kagasheki, gets high marks
from wildlife advocates. In his office in Dar es Salaam, Kagasheki is
asked whether people in this building helped the poachers.
"You know," he says with a deep sigh, "there has been, of course, there's been corruption."
His concern is echoed by an outspoken tour operator, Pratick Patel.
"I
think a lot more firing needs to be done. We know for a fact, the whole
industry knows for a fact, that a lot of the wildlife department are
involved, very much involved in poaching in the game reserves," Patel
says. "Unfortunately, the Wildlife Department has, to some extent, been
operating like an independent company."
Kagasheki
admires his northern neighbor, Kenya, where anti-poaching laws and the
Wildlife Service are much tougher on elephant killers. Kagasheki says he
is trying to turn around the culture of the ministry he took over five
months ago.
"What I'm saying is we have to be stringent. We
have absolutely no choice. These people are killing innocent animals
with impunity. And when you look at these elephants, beautiful beasts,"
he says.
Conservationists are dubious of Tanzania's commitment to elephants.
This month, Tanzania notified the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species that the country would like to sell off its 100-ton stockpile of confiscated ivory and downgrade the protection of elephants.
The
government says a one-off ivory sale will raise millions for wildlife
protection. Conservationists say ivory sales just fuel the slaughter of
more elephants.
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/25/163563426/poachers-decimate-tanzanias-elephant-herds?ft=3&f=1001&sc=nl&cc=nh-20121025
In A Tanzanian Village, Elephant Poachers Thrive
Enlarge John Burnett/NPR Poaching
is rife in Tanzania game reserves. This elephant was killed, and its
tusks taken, at the Lake Chala Safari Camp, a small, private reserve
near Mount Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania.
An insatiable demand for ivory in Asia is
fueling a massive slaughter of elephants across Africa. As NPR's John
Burnett reports, one of the worst poaching hot spots is Tanzania. In this story, he visits an ivory poacher's town that sits next to a major game reserve.
It's
midday in Mloka, a cheerless village that is the gateway to one of
Africa's greatest nature sanctuaries, the Selous Game Reserve, which is
larger than Switzerland and has vast numbers of giraffes, zebras and
hippos in addition to elephants. The sun is stultifying, and the streets
are lifeless, but business is booming for the poachers in Mloka.
Two
poachers agreed to talk about their illegal work in the courtyard of a
low-cost guesthouse in Mloka, where laundry hangs on a line and
prostitutes slip in and out of rooms.
A 46-year-old elephant killer who gives his name as Mkanga slouches in a plastic chair.
"Ivory
buyers come to Mloka and look for us. They say they want 200 kilograms
[440 pounds] of ivory, can you arrange for that? The businessmen are
mainly Chinese," he says.
"After getting a
down payment, I look for some boys to hire as porters. We bring flour,
sugar, beans and water with us," he adds. "We cross into the game
reserve at night, but after that we can move in the daytime because
there is no one there."
Tracking Elephants To Watering Holes
The second poacher, who gives his name as Salma Abdallah, is 35 and wears a dirty Dallas Cowboys jersey.
"Elephants
fear for their lives so it's not easy to spot them," he says. "We'll
walk for five days or more. We find them when they go to drink water in
the afternoon or go to a forest to feed."
Abdallah says he goes out with about 10 guys, each with a different role.
"I am the shooter," he says.
Enlarge STR/AFP/Getty Images Asian
demand for ivory fuels the illegal poaching of elephants in Africa. A
leading source of ivory is Tanzania, including these tusks confiscated
in 2009 in Haiphong, Vietnam.
"While we're out, we'll shoot an impala or
wildebeest for food, dry the leftover meat and bring it back to the
village to sell," he adds.
Both poachers have poisoned elephants with pesticide-spiked pumpkins or other fruit, but they said that method is inefficient.
They
use large-caliber hunting rifles. After the kill, they hack off the
tusks with an ax. They usually take six to eight elephants per trip.
Scientists
tell us that elephants have death rituals. They will, for instance,
cluster around a dead individual and touch the carcass with their
trunks, and then return much later to caress the bones.
Mkanga,
the first poacher. is asked if he knows that elephants mourn their
dead. He shifts in his chair, adjusts his Safari Beer cap, and smirks.
"Sometimes
when they have a funeral, it's like a party for me," he says. "You
shoot one, and before he dies the others come to mourn for the one who
is injured. And so I kill another one, and kill another one."
Big Money In A Poor Place "Sometimes
when I finish my business and I'm back at my house and I've gotten
paid, I do feel like I've done something bad," he adds. "But when I
don't have money to pay for my children's school fees or anything to
eat, I say, 'Yeah, the game reserve is my shop. Let me go to the shop
and kill.' "
Local sources say elephant tusks
fetch about $60 a kilo (2.2 pounds). That's $12,000 for a 200 kilogram
(440 pound) consignment of ivory in a country where the per capita
income is $125 a month.
Wildlife activists, government officials, safari
operators and poachers say the elephant herds of the Selous are being
systematically wiped out.
They confirm a 2010
report by the Environmental Investigation Agency, in London, which
points to the Selous as one of Africa's worst elephant killing fields.
DNA tests conducted on nearly 1,500 tusks seized in 2006 at seaports in
Taiwan and Hong Kong traced them to elephants in the Selous and
neighboring Niassa Reserve in Mozambique.
Tanzania's
natural resources minister, Khamis Kagasheki, was brought in five
months ago to clean up his notoriously corrupt agency, strengthen
protection for game reserves and crack down on poachers. He says Mloka
will be one of his first targets.
"The
biggest poaching community is protected by the leadership in Mloka, this
I know," he says. "And believe me, I sent them a message, I'm going to
move after them."
In the first week of
October, rangers reportedly shot two poachers inside the reserve. Mloka
residents were so furious they temporarily blocked the road and wouldn't
let tourists in or out.
Meanwhile, Mkanga,
the poacher, insists he has given up poaching and gone back to farming.
He's asked if he cares whether his four children might not be able to
see a wild elephant.
"Yeah, sure," he says distractedly, "that would be very sad."
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/25/163629043/in-a-tanzanian-village-elephant-poachers-thrive
