The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  On a drive through the park I saw a bushbuck, a few gazelles, a crocodile and some trees uprooted by an elephant. I was told that lions had returned but I neither saw nor heard any. During the night and early morning, the only sounds were birds and the drilling of novice park rangers, dressed in rags and presenting arms with sticks. Many of them, I was told, lived by poaching.

  When I went back in 2009, the American philanthropist Greg Carr, working with the Mozambican government, had begun the long-term restoration of the park. Life there was still hard. In the shed-sized medical centre I found a shirtless young boy, apparently in a catatonic trance, being prodded by a nurse. He looked no older than twelve but his father said he was sixteen. He had had malaria and now had pains in his stomach. The ‘ambulance’ for the three-hour lurch to hospital in Beira would be a filthy Nissan pick-up with a mattress in the back. His father obligingly spelled out the boy’s name but showed no sign of distress. This is just the way it is. A few moments later a park ranger approached the Portuguese manager and asked for time off to bury his baby.

  Since then Chitengo has been substantially rebuilt and once again is open for business. There are luxurious thatched cabins for tourists to sleep in; a new swimming pool, gift shop, restaurant, morning and evening game drives, safari trails and that new essential for survival in the bush, Internet connectivity. The park itself is gradually being brought back to life. Zebra, wildebeest and buffalo have been reintroduced to graze the plains, which they share with elephant, oribi, reedbuck, waterbuck, warthog, sable, impala and lion. It is an odd but interesting reversal of polarities. Once the wildlife brought in the tourists; now tourism brings in the wildlife.

  Other things do not change, or if they do it’s for the worse. Late on a November morning in that same year, 2009, a band of men strolled up to a ramshackle farm on the Kenyan side of the Tanzanian border. Inside, the farmer was sharing a beer with a couple of friends. Outside, a pot of vegetables steamed over a fire, watched by his wife. Children swarmed after a punctured football; hens squabbled in the mud. At first, the appearance of strangers aroused only curiosity. This was poor country where meagre livings were scraped from exhausted soil, but it was peaceful and not unwelcoming. Then the farmer saw the guns.

  The day was wet, the beginning of the short rains, a day that many would never forget. The farmer and his friends did not know it, but theirs was just one small incident in a war growing hotter by the day. For dozens of farmers and shopkeepers spread across six countries, it was a morning of unwelcome shocks. All the Kenyans knew was that they were in big trouble. Outnumbered and outgunned, they had no choice but to let the raiders take what they wanted. This war was not for land. It was not for oil or diamonds or gold. It was, and still is, for an essentially useless commodity over which men fight as if for their lives. Ivory. The command centres in this war are far from the killing fields. They are in Beijing, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok, not in the threadbare shambas of sub-Saharan Africa. It is a foot-soldier’s war being waged with the very best tools the arms industry can provide. Rocket-launchers and AK-47s do their job well, and the world is rewarded with chopsticks.

  The men at the farm were lucky. Their visitors were rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), part of a coordinated anti-poaching operation run by Interpol. The farmer and his friends were suspected of poaching, but their rights would be respected and they would arrive in court with their limbs intact. Such courtesies are not often reciprocated. Poaching gangs are trained to military standard and armed with automatic weapons. Elsewhere in Africa, rangers often have only obsolete Second World War rifles, a hopeless mismatch not much better than pitchforks.

  At an airfield soon after their arrest, the prisoners were photographed with a tusk found in the farmer’s house. It was still bloody, evidently from an animal only recently dead. Locally its value was around £250. In Japan or China it would have fetched forty times as much. It’s a tragedy as old as the bullet. Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming was an heroic slaughterer who perpetuated the cycle of violence by offering muskets in return for ivory. His mortification at failing to find eight or ten ‘first-rate bulls’ which he knew he had ‘mortally wounded’ was not for the animals’ suffering. It was for the loss of £200-worth of ivory. He found it vexing ‘to think that many, if not all of them, were lying rotting in the surrounding forest’. Another day, when tusks were ‘stolen’ from an elephant he had killed, he galloped to the nearest village and offered to shoot the chief. Those days of petty opportunism are as distant from twenty-first-century organised crime as Fagin’s young pickpockets from the Cosa Nostra. Small-scale local rackets have been transformed into well-organised businesses run by international syndicates, and there is enough money in it to warp the politics of half a continent.

  The ivory trade has been illegal since 1989, when it was banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), after the worst decade for elephants in history. At least 700,000 had been killed, and photographs of their mutilated carcasses provoked revulsion wherever they were published. For a while it looked as if the ban might work. Ivory lost 90 per cent of its value, the trade dried up and poaching declined dramatically. Conservationists began to congratulate themselves on the most successful piece of international wildlife legislation ever enacted. The elephant had been saved!

  But it hadn’t. Some countries simply could not afford to protect their herds, and not all of them wanted a trade ban anyway. Encouraged by the efforts of Zimbabwe and some other countries to subvert it, the poachers began to sneak back in. There was nothing to stop them. Much of rural Africa is more than two days’ trek from a police station. Without an army and blanket air cover, protecting a national park like Kenya’s Tsavo, which is the size of Israel, is not easy. Illegal trade routes quickly reopened and the price of ivory rocketed. By 2004 it was back up to 200 dollars a kilo. Three years later it had more than quadrupled, to 850 dollars. By 2009 it was 1,200, and by late 2011 it had topped 1,400 dollars (£900). And that’s just wholesale. Retail in China, you could be talking about a multiple of five or even more. One law enforcement officer saw a carved tusk offered in a Tokyo market for 250,000 dollars. Against this, human life is cheap. By 2010 the trafficking, and the killing that goes with it, were almost back to where they had been in the dark days of the 1980s.

  Counting dead elephants is not an exact science. Carcasses may be covered with branches so they can’t be seen from the air, and smuggled goods leave no paper trail. The best estimate is that Africa is losing 8 per cent of its elephants every year – at least 38,000 in 2009; maybe 36,000 in 2011. This sounds bad even before you understand that, even in the best of times, the animals’ rate of reproduction is just 5 per cent.

  The killings are brutal. In the nineteenth century, adult elephants would be shot to enable the capture of their calves. Now it happens the other way around. The calves themselves are shot – not for their ivory, for they have none, but as bait for their mothers, who will be picked off when they come to grieve. I never heard what happened to the men from the farm, but they were scarcely big enough to be called even small fry. For possessing ivory they might have faced a fine of maybe 8,000 Kenyan shillings (approximately £64). For a firearms offence they might have seen the inside of one of Kenya’s notoriously unpleasant jails. But their removal from the action would have been of small benefit to the elephants, and of no consequence to the Mr Bigs. Even if it were being done legally, the industrial harvesting of six-ton animals would be far beyond the resources of petty thieves. You need infrastructure, logistics, technology, a skilled workforce, management systems and a solid client base. You also need money sufficient to buy the cooperation of customs and port officers, park managers, civil servants and ministers.

  ‘Operation Costa’, as the 2009 Interpol raids were called, did not touch a hair of the godfathers’ heads. Aimed at small-time poachers and dealers in Burundi, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, it turned up 1,768 kilos of tusks and carved iv
ory. As a mature elephant carries around eight kilos of tusk, that represents at least 220 dead animals and almost certainly more – a mountain of carnage, but still only the barrel-scrapings of a trade responsible for the deaths of 38,000 elephants a year. There were two factors, however, that hinted at the scale of the criminal hinterland. Most of the worked ivory was in the form of signature seals, cigarette holders and chopsticks, obviously intended for export. Even more worrying was the haul of firearms, which included German-made Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifles. These are fully automatic military weapons firing NATO standard 7.62 x 51 millimetre bullets, which can empty a twenty-round magazine in less than two seconds. They are more powerful and more accurate even than the AK-47 Kalashnikov, which is also widely used by poaching gangs. Rocket-propelled grenades have also been recovered, though these are not used against elephants – that kind of firepower would destroy the ivory. Rather, they are reserved for use against rangers. Law enforcement officers have also had to face American-made M-16 rifles supplied originally to the Somali defence ministry.

  Against all this, rangers in some places still carry the ancient French MAS-36 bolt-action carbine, which comes complete with bayonet. ‘With which,’ an Interpol official told me drily, ‘the entire French army lost every battle of 1940.’ The defenders don’t have body armour. Often they do not have tents, or ponchos or sleeping nets to keep off the mosquitoes at night. Even water bottles are in short supply so men have to drink river-water and take their chance with dysentery as well as malaria. The enemy are heavily armed units schooled in military tactics and paid to kill. In a typical twenty-year career, a park ranger has a higher than one-in-twenty chance of death in action. By 2010, a monument at the Nairobi headquarters of the KWS, which had been established in 1990, already had forty-two names on it. Another ranger recently had been murdered, and two wounded, in an ambush. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 100 rangers are killed annually. Similar stories come from Senegal, Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, Chad . . .

  Like many African countries, Chad held an official stockpile of ‘legitimate’ ivory accumulated through seizures, natural deaths and the culling of rogue elephants. This was stored in the Zakouma National Park, where poachers kill many hundreds of elephants every year. In 2007 it was attacked by the infamous Sudanese Janjaweed militias. They were repelled, but three rangers died and four more would be killed later in the year. To prevent a repeat, the Chadian government burned the stockpile. But this, of course, brought little benefit to the surviving elephants. In 2006 Zakouma had a healthy population of 3,880. By 2010 it was 617 and falling.

  Some other countries, including Tanzania and Zambia, took a rather different view. Rather than destroy their stored ivory, they wanted to sell it. Somehow they managed to convince European governments that legalised trade could actually save the elephant. Well-meaning but naive, the Europeans misunderstood what they were up against. At the most conservative estimate, the amount of ivory being illegally traded each year is 100 tonnes, or approximately 12,500 elephants’ worth, but that is a calculation based on seizures. The Interpol veteran I spoke to – a man with twenty-five years’ experience of wildlife crime – reckons the likelier toll is the 38,000 I have already mentioned. In a market as greedy as this, a limited amount of ‘legitimate’ ivory was hardly likely to permanently depress the price to a level that would make poaching unviable. Indeed, it might have the opposite effect. And that is just the economic case, quite apart from the stick-in-the-craw notion that body parts from vulnerable species are legitimate items for trade. To believe that ivory, from whatever source, should be exposed to market forces requires something more than pragmatism. It is the province of the cynic.

  The problem with big numbers is that they come at us every day in a plethora of contexts and their reality is literally unimaginable. They slide across our consciousness and barely register, like miles to Mars or the number of fleas on a hedgehog. But we should pause. On the day before I wrote this paragraph, two well-supported teams in the English Premier League, Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle United, played a match at Tottenham’s White Hart Lane stadium in north London. The crowd numbered 36,176 – not quite 38,000, but near enough. Imagine this number of people dead, and the size of the heap they would make. Now imagine they are not eleven-stone humans but elephants weighing up to six tonnes each. For my own benefit, I make a poor sketch of an elephant and add the dimensions of the converted cart-lodge in which I work. If a big bull stood up, it could wear the building like a shell. I do my best to visualise 38,000 of them decomposing with their tusks hacked out, but it’s beyond me. And what is it all for?

  The principal use for ivory in China and Japan is for hankos – carved cylinders engraved at one end with the owner’s seal, used for stamping documents. Like all the other artefacts – chopsticks, calligraphy accessories, cups, bowls, jewellery boxes – they could just as well be made from any one of dozens of other materials, none of which would involve shooting elephants. The killings that supply the raw material are not random chance events. From trigger-finger to cash register, the process of production and supply is carefully organised. A forensic technique developed at Washington University’s Center for Conservation Biology exploits the fact that elephants in different populations vary slightly in their DNA. By analysing dung samples, scientists have been able to draw a ‘DNA map’ of Africa, against which samples of recovered ivory can be matched. The results are unequivocal. Attacks are carefully targeted and made to order. This research has enabled Interpol to build a much clearer picture of the way the business is run. The kingpins are dealers in the Far East, who place their orders with middle-men in Africa, who control the gangs, many of which are supplied by militias, Somali warlords or rebel armies. It is probable that the poaching itself funds the militias and thus ensures the continuance of violent tribal and political strife.

  From the killing zones the ivory moves quickly into intricate distribution networks. It will not be shipped from the country of origin. One consignment from Zambia was found to have travelled via Malawi and Mozambique to be exported from South Africa. My Interpol contact spoke of a ‘shell-game shuffle’ of multiple exit ports and indirect routing via Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand. So complex is the system that consignments sometimes pass through the same port twice. In the rare cases of seizure, the smugglers want their supply bases to be untraceable. But the risks are small. For police forces preoccupied with murder, robbery and drug-running, wildlife crime is not a high priority. At the ports even honest officials pay scant heed to what is crossing the dock. They are intent on intercepting guns and drugs coming into the country. What goes out is not their problem.

  At the receiving end a port official may be encouraged to take an early lunch-break, but it hardly matters. Ports in the Far East daily move tens of thousands of containers, and less than 2 per cent of them are inspected. The ivory is waved through, usually hidden beneath some innocent cargo such as timber, soapstone or sisal, to end its journey at a factory where craftsmen with power saws, lathes and polishing machines turn it into merchandise. All of this, says the Interpol man, bears the fingerprints of well-run syndicates. ‘The factory needs a management team. There has to be control of inventory, a production department, a marketing department, delivery vehicles and a sophisticated finance department capable of providing payment for illegal workers and laundering millions of dollars in criminal profit.’

  Every so often the investigators get lucky. They had a notable run in the summer of 2006 when they recovered 1,094 tusks at Kaohsiung in Taiwan, 390 tusks and 121 pieces of cut ivory at Hong Kong, and 608 pieces of raw ivory, equivalent to 260 tusks, at Osaka. The raw tusks alone represented 872 elephants. DNA showed that all were from East Africa, and that the Taiwanese haul was from Tanzania. To say that the criminal business was booming is to understate the case by an order of magnitude. CITES’ official monitoring service, the Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS), reported in 2009 that trafficking had doubled in a year.
Hauls included 6.2 tonnes from Hai Phong, Vietnam, in March 2009; 3.5 tonnes from the Philippines in May 2010; 2 tonnes at Bangkok international airport in August the same year, and the 1,768 kilos recovered in Operation Costa. In November, poachers extirpated the entire elephant herd in Sierra Leone’s Outamba-Kilimi National Park.

  I am writing this on 14 February 2012. To check the trend, I look up the figures for January. Early in the month two Chinese men in South Africa were caught with ‘several elephant tusks and ivory goods’. On the 6th, customs in Port Klang, Malaysia, seized 494 kilograms of raw tusks, bubble-wrapped and hidden among used tyres and flooring materials in a container shipped from Cape Town. On the 14th, the UK Border Agency found ten carved ivory ornaments and a hippo’s foot in the luggage of a woman arriving from Zambia. On the 26th in Polokwane, South Africa, police arrested a man in possession of four tusks, three rhino horns and firearms. There were reports of widespread poaching in Zimbabwe, where thirty elephants had been found dead in Mana Pools National Park. Worldwide, more than a hundred elephants were being killed every day.

  All businesses involve an element of risk, usually based on calculations of supply and demand. For criminal enterprises that can switch commodities – drugs, firearms, ivory, people – with a click of the fingers, the orthodoxies of market economics are not an issue. Profit is balanced against the risk of jail, not the risk of bankruptcy. And this is what makes ivory so attractive. Smuggling tusks instead of drugs earns similar profits for a fraction of the risk. In April 2000, a Japanese government official was caught smuggling 492.3 kilograms of ivory – at least fifty-five elephants’ worth – into Osaka. He was fined 300,000 yen, equivalent at the time to 2,700 dollars, or less than 2 per cent of the value of the ivory. By contrast, in the same city two years later a British man was jailed for fourteen years for smuggling 10 pounds of ecstasy and cocaine.