‘You have to look at comments like that within the Vietnam political context,’ says a leading conservationist who works in Vietnam, but doesn’t want to be named. ‘People will often say something in a meeting by beginning with the statement: “In my opinion …” In effect that allows them to say anything they want with absolutely no accountability. If the person is ever questioned about the statement, he can simply say: “I made it clear that I was speaking in my personal capacity.” It is something that is very common in the government workshops we do. Often, I have to step in and tell an official that I don’t want to hear their personal opinion and that they are there representing their department and I’d like them to speak on behalf of the department. Usually they then have nothing to say.’
Tuan, who subsequently became Vietnam’s Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, concluded his response with assurances that Vietnam has ‘laws and regulations in compliance with CITES’, and that ‘we are well aware of the importance of biodiversity conservation’. He added that Vietnam’s own ‘rhino population is very small, nearly extinguished … We are making our best effort to conserve wildlife,’ he said. The following month came the announcement that Vietnam’s last Javan rhino was dead.
Tuan made no mention of the fact that Vietnam had been censured by CITES for non-compliance on three recent occasions. Nor did he address the fact that the country’s wildlife legislation is widely regarded as contradictory, riddled with loopholes and poorly implemented. Enforcement agencies are notoriously corrupt, and there is growing evidence that customs agents seize shipments of contraband wildlife not because they are illegal, but because they can make money out of them.
Significantly, the view of animals and plants as commodities that exist to be exploited permeates the country’s conservation laws and regulations. Legislation governing trade in protected species refers specifically to animals that have ‘scientific, environmental or high economic value’.
In effect, to qualify for regulatory protection, an animal or plant must have a quantifiable value. If it has no value – even if it is incredibly rare or endangered – it has little, if any, legislative protection.
Fines imposed for wildlife crime also have virtually no deterrent effect. The enforcers regard the penalties they impose as income generators. The criminal syndicates see them as little more than an irksome business expense – a tax on stupidity for those caught and unable to bribe their way out of trouble.
The port of Haiphong, for instance, saw a series of massive ivory seizures between early 2009 and 2011. The most spectacular occurred in May 2010, when twenty-two tons of ivory was seized from a container that had been shipped from Malaysia. The ivory was being stored in a warehouse. Customs officials began agitating to sell it, and eventually Vietnam approached CITES for clarity. They were told in no uncertain terms that the ivory could not be sold. By then, some of it had already disappeared, supposedly ‘eaten by rats’.
Since then, ivory seizures at Haiphong have ground to a halt. ‘Essentially the customs people have taken a decision that if they can’t make money out of stopping the trade, why should they bother stopping it,’ a conservationist familiar with the matter told me.
At the time of writing, nearly a year after the talks in Johannesburg, the MOU – little more than a formalised ‘gentleman’s agreement’ – had yet to be signed. But there were persistent mutterings that the signing was imminent. Somewhat disingenuously, the Department of Environmental Affairs’ deputy director-general, Fundisile Mketeni, claimed in May 2012 that the signing was merely a ‘ceremonial thing’ and that ‘we [South Africa and Vietnam] are already working together’.
I asked Sonja Meintjes, the department’s deputy director for biodiversity compliance, about the delay and whether the document was worth the paper it was written on. She claimed a draft agreement was currently being reviewed by the Vietnamese. But why had it taken so long to finalise? ‘Well, remember that they must translate everything into Vietnamese,’ she said. And she argued, despite Vietnam’s history of flagrantly ignoring environmental agreements, that the document would give South Africa a ‘platform of engagement’.
‘If it is on the table, we can say: “Listen, the presidents or ministers or whoever agreed on this co-operation. Let’s co-operate.”’
South Africa’s reliance on a diplomatic agreement, which Vietnam was clearly so reluctant to sign, seems naive. Vietnam, today, is without doubt the world’s leading destination and consumer of rhino horn. The rot that has allowed the illicit trade to flourish extends deep into the Vietnamese government and officialdom. There is no political will there to end the trade. Arrests and seizures at Vietnam’s ports occur rarely, if at all. And Vietnamese diplomats still appear to be involved in the trade despite the scandals in South Africa.
‘Vietnam doesn’t have any rhinos,’ a conservationist in Hanoi said to me one day. ‘As far as people here are concerned, why should Vietnam worry about another country’s natural resources when it can barely look after its own environment?’
15
The Kingpin
14 December 2011, The Lao People’s Democratic Republic
The Xaysavang Hotel is easy to miss. A nondescript, $10-a-night flophouse in the small town of Paksan in central Laos, it is situated in a dusty side street that ends in a checkpoint 300 metres further on. Beyond a boom is a slipway leading down to the edge of the Mekong River and the ferry boats that regularly ply the crossing between Laos and Thailand.
A sign outside the hotel advertises beer and karaoke. Stunted palm trees line a driveway leading to a concrete courtyard and a series of cheap clapboard rooms. In a corner is a tacky green-and-gold Buddhist shrine with votive offerings of Pepsi and bottled water that have been left to evaporate in the heat.
By 10 a.m. the truckers, traders and prostitutes that usually frequent the hotel are long gone. We park our car inside the hotel grounds and get out. The door to what appears to be the reception is locked. The interpreter I’d hired for the trip – a sickly hotel desk-clerk with a passable grasp of English – calls out. Nothing. It is oppressively quiet.
I wander across to a carport, where three cars are covered in a thick layer of dust. They seem oddly out of place: a Mercedes-Benz import from the United Arab Emirates, a new-model Mini Cooper and a Toyota Land Cruiser. The tyres are flat.
Finally a man emerges from behind one of the rooms. He’s the caretaker, he says. ‘We’re looking for Vixay Keosavang,’ my interpreter tells him. The man shakes his head. The ‘boss’ isn’t here today. Perhaps we should try his house. It is just a short distance away. He gives us the address and a phone number.
‘Whose cars are those?’ I ask as we turn to leave. ‘They’re the boss’s,’ he says, and grins.
I first saw the name in May 2011, in a file of CITES permits and export paperwork for the Xaysavang Trading Export-Import Company. Among the papers were waybills and permits listing a Mr Vixay Keosavang of No. 174 Ban Anousonxay Rd, Paksan district, Bolikhamxay Province, Laos, as the consignee or importer of at least thirteen lion carcasses and various white rhino trophies. There were three invoices for a total amount of R981 600 (about $120 000), addressed for Vixay’s attention at Xaysavang Trading. The invoices reflected the sale of three trophies – six rhino horns – priced at R60 000 a kilogram. Their combined weight was 16.36 kilograms.
Over the course of several months I accumulated nearly 400 pages of documents, in addition to hundreds of photographs, detailing Xaysavang Trading’s business dealings. In all, Vixay’s name occurs just sixteen times. For the most part he remains a shadow, a distant puppet master manipulating the strings but never dirtying his own hands.
Few South Africans have ever heard of Laos, so much so that a lawyer representing two Xaysavang employees noted their place of employment in an affidavit as the ‘Vichai Company … a company registered in Louse [sic] and operating out of Louse [sic]’.
An early report by investigator Paul O’Sullivan, summ
ing up his inquiries into the company, refers to ‘intelligence [which] indicated that [Chumlong] Lemtongthai’, a key Thai figure who was arrested in July 2011, ‘is No. 2 in the syndicate and that the No. 1 is a Vietnamese resident, by the name of Vixay Keosavang, or Vixay Xaysavang, with (assumed to be Thai) passport no. S0044894’.
Johnny Olivier – the South African fixer who blew the whistle on the syndicate – referred to Vixay as the ‘big boss’ of the operation in his statements, and claimed that he was briefly introduced to him by Chumlong during an internet video chat.
The first public mention of Vixay’s name in connection with Xaysavang’s operations, as far as I have been able to ascertain, was in an October 2007 edition of Vietnam’s Tien Phong newspaper. In one of a series of investigative reports examining the illegal primate trade between Laos and Vietnam, a Vietnamese journalist, Huong Quoc Dung, described meeting Vixay at the Xaysavang Hotel in Paksan.
Dung had unearthed a set of CITES documents, including a permit, which had allowed Xaysavang to export more than 80 000 wild animals to Vietnam, among them 7 000 monkeys, 13 000 snakes and 60 000 turtles. The monkeys went to Trung Viet, a Vietnamese company that reportedly shipped thousands of supposedly ‘captive-bred’ animals to the United States. The company also had links to a controversial Miami-based clearing house that imported monkeys from around the world and sold them off to animal research laboratories.
Dung’s investigations suggested that the CITES documents had been forged to conceal the real origins of the animals and cover up the fact that they were not ‘captive bred’ but had been caught in the wild. When the Vietnamese journalist confronted him, Vixay claimed ignorance, saying he knew nothing about the shipments or the documents. He also denied that Xaysavang had ever exported wild-caught animals to Vietnam or any other country.
The interview did shed some light on the company’s dealings with Vietnam ese and Chinese businesses. Vixay told Dung ‘there are very many Vietnamese companies dealing with us in … timber import and export and consumer products’.
Laos’s timber industry – which sees an estimated 90 000 hectares of forest cut down each year to meet a growing demand for raw materials from neighbouring countries – is notoriously corrupt. The London-based EIA says ‘flagrant violation of Lao law is the norm’ in a timber industry driven by ‘powerful vested interests profiting from the illicit trade in logs from Laos to Vietnam’.
Vixay also told Dung that he had partnered with a Chinese businessman, whom he identified only as ‘Mr Chen’, in a primate-breeding venture on a 22-hectare farm just outside Paksan. The animals, predominantly long-tailed macaques, would be bred for export to China. Mr Chen had invested $1 million in the project, he said. The initial contract was for ten years, ending in 2016. He claimed that in a little over a year since 2006, 300 macaques had been bred on the farm.
‘Our plan is to breed 10 000 individuals,’ he said. Within five years the farm would descend into a horror show.
Laos is one of Southeast Asia’s poorest nations and one of the world’s few remaining one-party communist states. Since 1975 it has been led by the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP). No other political parties are tolerated, and the Laotian constitution refers to the LPRP as the ‘leading nucleus’ of the political system. Corruption and cronyism are rife. The international corruption watchdog, Transparency International, routinely lists the country near the bottom of its annual Corruption Perceptions Index.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its long-time benefactor, Laos has struggled to find its feet among Asia’s rapidly rising dragons. Today the country remains heavily dependent on foreign aid. Economic reforms have been slow. Laos applied to join the WTO in 1997, but it has taken more than fifteen years for its membership to become a reality. In 2011, a stock market was opened in the capital Vientiane in the hope of attracting foreign investment. But 80 per cent of the country’s 6.5 million people still eke out a living from subsistence agriculture. And only about 5 per cent of the land is considered arable.
In part, this is due to the fact that Laos has the dubious distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in history. A deadly harvest of cluster bombs and unexploded munitions still litters the countryside nearly forty years after the end of America’s ‘secret war’ there. From 1964 until 1973, B52 bombers saturated the forests and fields along the length of Laos’s border with Vietnam. Their target was the Ho Chi Minh trail, a 1 600-kilometre-long spider’s web of jungle paths and mountain paths that criss-crossed the Laotian and Cambodian borders and served as a key supply route for the North Vietnamese in their war against the south and its US allies.
The statistics are staggering. Bombers flew 580 344 sorties, dropping 2.4 million tons of bombs, more than all the bombs dropped on Germany and Japan combined during World War II. Cluster bombs sprayed 260 million ‘bomblets’, slightly smaller than tennis balls, across the countryside. It is estimated that 80 million of them didn’t explode on impact. Every year 300 people on average – many of them children – continue to be killed or maimed. The decade-long bombing campaign cost the US $2 million a day (about $17 million in today’s currency). In the seventeen years since 1995, the US government has provided a little over $59 million to fund projects aimed at removing unexploded ordnance.
The Vietnam War, and the French Indochina War before it, left another legacy: a complex network of smuggling routes running between Laos and the five countries that share its borders: Myanmar (previously known as Burma), China, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Historically, the mountains and forests on Laos’s north-west frontier formed part of the infamous ‘Golden Triangle’, a vast region of opium production that straddled borders with Thailand and Myanmar.
In the 19th century, demand for opium in China grew to insatiable heights. It was driven by unscrupulous British, American and European traders, who traded opium grown in Bengal and India in exchange for silks, teas and other Chinese goods. By the 1900s, it was said that a third of China’s population was addicted to opium.
This mass addiction prompted rapid expansion of opium cultivation. To meet the demand, traders from China’s Yunnan province, just north of Laos, also extended their operations into the Golden Triangle. Fields of lilac poppies flourished in the highlands and inaccessible jungle-covered mountains. Opium production became the ‘mainstay’ commercial crop for Laos’s Hmong hill tribes. Eventually, in the 1940s, the French cornered the trade. Between 1946 and 1954, during the French Indochina War, cash-strapped French intelligence agencies seized control of opium traffic and used the profits to finance covert operations in the region.
In a ground-breaking book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, a US historian, Alfred W. McCoy, wrote that by 1951, the French ‘controlled most of the opium trade from the mountain poppy fields to the urban smoking dens’. Insiders dubbed it ‘Operation X’. According to McCoy, this clandestine opium traffic produced ‘a legacy of Corsican narcotics syndicates and corrupted French intelligence officers’, many of whom would later become ‘key figures in the international narcotics trade’.
The CIA’s subsequent secret war was also dogged by allegations that its Laotian operations were funded with the proceeds of heroin trafficking. Many of the claims centred on Air America, a passenger and cargo airline that was covertly owned and operated by the agency in Laos. Its motto was ‘Anything, Anywhere, Anytime, Professionally’. In addition to flying spies, soldiers, diplomats, civilians and casualties all over Southeast Asia, the airline provided key logistical support to CIA-backed Hmong guerillas. As for drugs, the agency has consistently denied any ‘knowing’ involvement in the trade. A recently declassified ‘secret history’, published by the agency’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence, does concede that ‘narcotics production [in Laos] continued in sometimes uncomfortably close proximity to the irregular [Hmong] forces managed by the CIA’.
There were no laws in Laos prohibiting the trade in opium and heroin until 1971, and personal use o
f the drug was legal up to 1996. Until a government crackdown in the late 1990s, Laos remained the third largest producer of opium poppies in the world. Since 1998, however, the amount of agricultural land that was used for opium production is reported to have fallen by 98 per cent. An aggressive anti-drugs campaign, fuelled by the government’s desire to increase its international credibility, saw the poppy fields systematically eradicated. But the smuggling routes remained, old networks that now carried new ‘products’: timber, people, animals, ivory and, sometimes, rhino horn.
The ground floor of the Joma Bakery next to the Benoni Cafe in the heart of the Vientiane’s tourist quarter is packed with expats and travellers gulping down lattes, turkey sandwiches, smoked salmon bagels, tuna melts and salads. At a table upstairs a man is showing me photographs of brutalised pangolins; bundles of them trussed up in blue nylon sacks.
Also known as scaly anteaters, they are today among the most threatened animals in the world. There is massive consumer demand for them in China and, to a lesser degree, Vietnam. In restaurants, their flesh is sold as a delicacy. Despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence to support the claim, the blood and scales are said to be imbued with medical properties that promote weight loss, enhance lactation in pregnant women and, like rhino horn, supposedly cure cancer.
They are killed to order in restaurants. The animals are knocked unconscious and their throats are slit to drain the blood. Then, sometimes still half alive, they are thrown into a pot of boiling water to remove the scales before being chopped into small pieces, which are braised and added to soups and a variety of other dishes.
The photographs show sacks of pangolins crammed into a rusted cage on the back of a Toyota. Shot on a cellphone camera, the images were taken in a village somewhere near Route 8, one of the highways linking Laos and Vietnam. On the side of the vehicle is a circular blue-and-white company emblem featuring stylised images of snow-capped mountains, forests, a highway, the Mekong River and the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge that spans it. Two trucks, a cargo ship and aircraft complete the logo. Lettering in Lao and English reads: ‘Xaysavang Trading Import-Export Co., LTD’.
Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade Page 34
