Elephants pay price as ivory trade thrives

IN 30 years of fighting poachers, Paul Onyango had never seen anything like this: 22 dead elephants, including several very young ones, clumped together on the open savannah, many killed by a single bullet to the top of the head.

There were no tracks leading away, no sign 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 something for the long walk home.

Several days later, the Garamba National Park guards spotted a Ugandan military helicopter flying very low over the park, 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 US Pentagon’s closest partners in Africa – killed the 22 elephants from a helicopter and spirited away more than a £1 million worth of ivory.

“They were good shots, very good shots,” said 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 militarised.

Like blood diamonds from Sierra Leone or plundered minerals from Congo, ivory is the latest conflict resource in Africa, dragged out of remote battle zones, easily converted into cash and now fuelling conflicts across the continent.

Some of Africa’s most notorious armed groups, including the Lord’s Resistance Army, al-Shabaab and Darfur’s Janjaweed, are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy weapons and sustain their mayhem. Organised 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 US taxpayer dollars – such as 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 per cent – 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 £622 a pound on Beijing’s streets.

High-ranking officers in 
China’s 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 tips on how to smuggle it.

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 epicentre of demand,” said Robert Hormats, a senior US State Department official. “Without the demand from China, this would all but dry up.”

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 fiefdom in the late 19th century, leading to the brutal excesses of the upriver ivory stations thinly fictionalised in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart Of Darkness and planting the seeds for Congo’s freefall today.

Ivory Coast was so named because of 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 ten 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 rainforest 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 (equivalent to the tusks from more than 4,000 dead elephants).

Law enforcement officials say the sharp increase in large seizures is a clear sign that 
organised 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 across the globe, often using 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”.

Richard Ruggiero, an official with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said: “We’re experiencing what is likely to be the greatest percentage loss of ­elephants in history.”