SUDANESE PARAMILITARIES WITH A PASSPORT TO POACH RARE WILDLIFE
They come to Chinko from Sudan and return with bush meat and ivory. Jack Losh reports from the huge reserve
It was not the hippo carcass that troubled the wildlife rangers most. Nor were they especially surprised to uncover a cache of assault rifles in this volatile region awash with uncontrolled arms.
The most unsettling find from their counter-poaching raid in Chinko, a vast wildlife reserve in the Central African Republic (CAR), were identity cards belonging to soldiers from Sudan’s paramilitary forces – a discovery suggesting Khartoum’s fighters are moonlighting as poachers hundreds of miles beyond its borders.
The Sudanese military and its auxiliaries are accused of committing war crimes that range from using scorchedearth tactics to attacking camps housing displaced civilians. The role of government-backed soldiers in the illicit wildlife trade, however, is less known. The evidence found deep in the Central African bush shines a light on the covert, cross-border poaching by Sudanese militiamen to profit from the demand for bush meat, ivory and traditional Chinese medicine.
“They were all in military uniform, they all had automatic weapons, they had military IDs,” says David Simpson, Chinko’s park manager, who oversaw the raid on the poachers’ camp in March. One theory is that their superior dispatched them to the reserve to make extra cash. “Whether they’re current Sudanese army or whether they’ve abandoned their posts, we don’t know.”
Decades in the making, a crisis is unfolding in the heart of the continent as civil wars spill over into the region’s wildernesses. Increasingly militarised, poachers are exploiting porous borders and political chaos to plunder wildlife reserves with impunity.
Almost twice the size of Yellowstone National Park, the little-known Chinko reserve is one of the largest intact wildernesses in Central Africa. Encompassing savanna and tropical forest, this mixed ecosystem in south-eastern CAR supports buffalo and elephant, lion and leopard.
However, located in one of the most underdeveloped and conflict-ridden parts of Africa, this sanctuary is also a battleground between heavily armed groups of poachers and well-trained, dedicated squads of rangers equipped with body armour and belt-fed machine guns. Often backed by wealthy businessmen, poachers caught in CAR can be jailed for up to 10 years. But dysfunctional courts and corruption allow many to evade justice.
“Elephant ivory poaching is no longer solely a conservation issue – it funds a wide range of destabilising actors across Africa,” say Varun Vira and Thomas Ewing, authors of a key report on the militarisation of poaching. “Government-allied militias complicit in the Darfur genocide fund their operations by poaching elephants hundreds of miles outside [Sudan’s] borders.”
The crossover between militants and poachers has a rich heritage. Cold War-era guerrilla groups in Angola and Mozambique forged a sideline career killing elephants, exporting the tusks for extra funds. Janjaweed militias, notorious for atrocities against civilians in Darfur, have made forays into CAR for years, stalking elephants and other animals on horseback, shooting from the saddle. The Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, has put enormous pressure on elephant populations, buying weapons with the profits made poaching in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, Ugandan military personnel in helicopters are accused of slaughtering entire herds of elephants.
“Foreign armed groups are the main perpetrators of poaching and trafficking across the landscape,” says Paulinus Ngeh, the Central Africa office director for Traffic, a non-profit that monitors the wildlife trade. “More needs to be done to support the fight against poaching, which fuels corruption and destabilises the region.”
This multifronted poacher war is driving African elephants to the brink of extinction. Across CAR, the trade in ivory and bushmeat has resulted in a 95 per cent depletion of the country’s wildlife. Experts believe that, at the end of the 1970s, there were about 70,000 elephants in CAR. Within five years, a bustling ivory trade in the capital, Bangui, and the onslaught of Chadian and Sudanese poachers had slashed this population to a third of its size. As a result of this killing frenzy, the local elephant population around Chinko has declined from about 2,600 at the end of the 1980s to just a few dozen individuals – certainly no more than 100. These breed small groups, concealed deep inside the reserve.
Conservationists hope to protect these animals from further attacks, allowing the local population to bounce back. Such efforts are crucial. Thierry Aebischer, a Swiss biologist surveying Chinko’s flora and fauna, says these elephants are likely to be “a genetically-distinct evolutionary unit of global importance”.
The importance of protecting this wilderness was underscored this year when one of Chinko’s bush-plane pilots spotted tracks and other signs of human activity. It later emerged that a couple of dozen gunmen had travelled about 480 kilometres on foot from Sudan, with food, weapons and other supplies strapped to donkeys. These animals would then be loaded with bush meat and ivory on the return leg. “They go out in the bush for long periods of time, up to 12 months, so they go stocked up with everything,” says Mr Simpson.
It took three ranger teams about six weeks to find them, covering about 700km as the poachers split up into smaller groups. The rangers raided the encampment and a fierce firefight ensued. The suspected Sudanese soldiers disappeared into the bush. In their abandoned camp, the rangers found a butchered hippo, a python skin and a stash of pills including antibiotics, anti-malarials and other drugs – all signs the poachers were planning a protracted killing spree.
They also found ID cards and uniforms indicating that the men were members of a militia known as the Popular Defence Forces, an official extension of Sudan’s armed forces.
For Mr Aebischer, the biologist, it is a miracle that any elephants remain in Chinko after decades of poaching. But the survival of these majestic animals cannot be taken for granted.
“It is definitely not yet too late for these last elephants,” he says. “But action is urgently needed.”
It is definitely not too late for these last elephants. But action is urgently needed THIERRY AEBISCHER Biologist