Mother and young rhinoceros killed for their horns. The poaching of elephants and rhinos is becoming “increasingly militarized." Credit: Hein waschefort/cc by 3.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 1 2015 (IPS)

The ongoing military conflicts in the Middle East and Africa continue to be fuelled by the proliferation of small arms and light weapons (SALW), primarily assault rifles, sub machine guns, hand grenades, portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns, rockets and self-loading pistols.

But the latest Small Arms Survey 2015, released Monday, says some of these weapons are also being used to destroy wild life and help misappropriate the earth’s mineral riches."Poor law enforcement and corruption among government officials and security officers facilitate wildlife crime and trafficking." -- Paula Kahumbu of WildlifeDirect

The poaching of elephants and rhinos is becoming “increasingly militarized,” says the report, while the negative impact of climate change is triggering human interactions, including on underlying causes for armed conflicts, as well as on actual fighting.

Besides the killing of thousands of humans in current military conflicts, perhaps the next most devastating impact of small arms and light weapons is on the destruction of wildlife.

As the demand for ivory and rhino horn remains high, both poachers and anti-poaching forces are becoming increasingly militarised using military-style weapons and adopting more aggressive tactics.

In Africa, elephant populations are in decline, and the illicit killing of rhinos has escalated sharply over recent years, according to the survey.

“The actors involved in poaching these animals include armed militias, rogue military officers, commercial poachers and bush meat and subsistence hunters.”

The illegal rhino horn trade reportedly threatens all African species of rhino. But despite some successful efforts to re-introduce rhinos to protected areas in South Africa, which is home to 80 percent of all African rhinos, the rate of poaching continues to accelerate, according to the World Wildlife Fund International (WWF).

Paula Kahumbu, a leading conservationist and executive director of WildlifeDirect, says today’s wildlife crime threatens the survival of endangered and vulnerable species in many African countries.

She said evidence documented by her Kenya-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) shows that legal penalties designed to deter such crimes have had little impact on poachers and traffickers.

“Worse, poor law enforcement and corruption among government officials and security officers facilitate wildlife crime and trafficking,” she warns.

The survey also points out the role of climate change in present and possibly future conflicts.

In tropical war zones, fighting traditionally stops during the rainy season, only to resume when the soil hardens enough for vehicles to navigate unpaved roads.

And even battle tactics are determined and influenced by the state of terrain.

“In some parts of the world, rainy seasons are now shifting in time and intensity. As global warming alters temperature, rainfall and sea levels, as many expect it will, it is almost certain to affect armed violence and armed conflict in ways that for now are predictable,” according to the survey.

The proliferation of small arms is also responsible for the illegal extraction of natural resources, transforming remote outposts into urban hubs virtually overnight.

As a result, it spurs insecurity and violence as different groups compete over spoils and local communities protest perceived wrongs.

The extraction of oil, gas and precious minerals is accompanied by significant urbanisation of adjoining areas and the effort to control and secure resources can attract a variety of armed actors, including security forces and predatory groups.

The survey, produced annually with the support of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and several other Western nations, also focuses on the small arms trade, floating armouries, the increasing number of private security firms, the Arms Trade Treaty and the U.N.’s Programme of Action to track the flow of illegal weapons.

According to the latest available U.N. statistics, the biggest exporters of small arms and light weapons include the United States, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Austria, South Korea, Russia, China, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Norway and Japan.

With weapons continuing to all into the hands of armed groups, the survey says these groups “are better armed (today) than they were a decade ago”.

The arms in their possession include large calibre weapons. And “of particular concern is jihadist possession of man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS), although many of these may be inoperable.”

The weapons used by most insurgent groups consists largely of Cold War-era Soviet and Chinese arms and ammunition, ”but they also use more recently-produced materiel from Bulgaria and China, among other states.”

Focusing specifically on the politically volatile Middle East, the survey says parts of the Middle East and North Africa suffer from high levels of armed violence, armed conflict and political instability, as well as the risk of small arms misuse and diversion.

According to the survey, there is little evidence the “Arab Spring” has had a significant impact on the policies of major exporters of small arms to the region.

Libya is the only state affected by the uprisings to be subject to a U.N. arms embargo.

And efforts to impose such an embargo on Syria have failed, and the option has not been discussed with regard to Egypt.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Rhinos in the Rietvlei Nature Reserve, Tshwane, Gauteng, South Africa. Credit: cc by 4.0

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK, May 13 2015 (IPS)

Thefts, murders and mutilation of Africa’s wildlife, from white rhinos to elephants with their prized horns and tusks, are at an all-time high, say conservationists who are keeping track of the poaching of species by fortune-seeking hunters.

To save the animals from further decimation, the U.S.-based Exotic Wildlife Association (EWA) proposes moving about 1,000 of South Africa’s white rhinos to a comparable climate in the U.S.

Allan Warren of the EWA says the need is urgent as rhinos are being poached to near extinction in southern Africa, and there appears to be no effort to stop it.

“The rhino horn is worth about 90,000 U.S. dollars per kilogramme, and each horn weighs about four kilos so it is more valuable than gold,” Warren said.

Under EWA’s scheme, rhinos would relocate to individual ranches in Texas, with South African ranchers granted partial ownership of the rhinos’ offspring. “It is not about hunting, it’s about preserving, saving the species from certain annihilation in South Africa,” Warren said. “Most of the rhinos to be moved are these baby rhinos whose mothers are slaughtered by poachers who slice off their horns.”

According to an “Elephant Summit” in 2013 held in Gaborone, Botswana, run by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the majority of animal tusks wind up in Asia. The U.S., Great Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands are also cited to a lesser degree on the summit’s map.

In March of this year, world leaders met again in Kasane, Botswana to review progress since the 2014 London Conference on Illegal Wildlife Trade. According to this group, illegal sales of ivory are now a 19 billion dollar business, 1000 park rangers have been killed by poachers in the last decade, and a rhino is killed every 11 hours.

With Botswana having a tough policing policy that has sharply reduced poaching, South Africa earlier this year approved the transfer of about 100 rhinos to that country. In addition to providing more space, Botswana also has a harsh “shoot to kill” policy against the hunters. It’s controversial, but some wildlife conservationists believe it’s the only way to stem poaching.

A different solution was proposed by Rhinos Without Borders which, in partnership with Great Plains Conservation, as well as various government ministries and safari groups, hopes to move up to 100 rhinos (both black and white) from existing high density populations in South Africa, and release them into the wild in various parts of Botswana.

Meanwhile, the plan to move rhinos to Texas faces several challenges: it needs approval from the US Department of Agriculture, it must find enough ranchers in Texas who want to take the rhinos; and it must raise the funds to move the creatures, at an estimated cost of at least 50,000 dollars per rhinoceros.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Some 50,000 elephants are being killed each year in Africa, alongside 1,000 rhinos, leaving perhaps as few as 250,000 elephants in the wild globally. Credit: PJ KAPDostie/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 2 2014 (IPS)

Environmentalists are formally urging President Barack Obama to enact trade sanctions on Mozambique over the country’s alleged chronic facilitation of elephant and rhinoceros poaching through broad swathes of southern Africa.

Investigators say substantial evidence exists of Mozambique’s failure to abide by international conventions against wildlife trafficking, including to back up allegations of state complicity.“We believe that there are ex-military officials who are providing political protection to the [trafficking] syndicates who are arming and funding these poaching teams." -- Allan Thornton

While President Obama last year mounted a new initiative by the U.S. government to tackle international wildlife trafficking, with a particular focus on ivory, some say Mozambique’s actions are undermining those efforts – and threatening these species worldwide.

A new petition, publicly announced Wednesday, now provides evidence on the issue and urges the president to make use of legal authorities to encourage Mozambique to crack down on poachers.

“Mozambique continues to play an ever-growing and uncontained role in rhinoceros and elephant poaching,” Susie Ellis, executive director of the International Rhino Foundation, one of the petitioners, told IPS.

“Although they have been given direction by the international community to enact certain controls, those have been only superficial and have had no meaningful effect. If you look at the large-scale poaching and illegal trade in rhino horn and elephant ivory out of Mozambique, it’s directly undercut President Obama’s [efforts] on wildlife trafficking.”

Increasingly working hand in hand with organised crime, poachers over the past three years have killed record numbers of elephants and rhinoceroses, particularly in Africa. Some 50,000 elephants are being killed each year in Africa, alongside 1,000 rhinos, leaving perhaps as few as 250,000 elephants in the wild globally.

Driving this illicit market is increased consumer demand in Asia, particularly in China and Vietnam. According to a U.N. report from last year, large seizures of ivory bound for Asia have more than doubled since 2009.

The new petition focuses on the central international agreement around wildlife trafficking, known as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and warns that Mozambique’s outsized role in African ivory poaching is diluting the convention’s effectiveness. The CITES standing committee is meeting next week in Switzerland.

“Available evidence indicates that Mozambican nationals constitute the highest number of foreign arrests for poaching in South Africa. Organized crime syndicates based in Mozambique are driving large scale illegal trade in rhino horn and elephant ivory,” the petition states.

“Given the scope and depth of the illegal killing and trade in rhino and elephant products by Mozambican nationals, we urge the United States to … enact substantial trade sanctions.”

High-level complicity

Supporters say that strong action by the Mozambican authorities would have a significant and immediate impact on the global supply of illicit ivory.

Officials reportedly estimate that 80 to 90 percent of all poachers in South Africa’s massive Kruger National Park are Mozambican nationals. Local groups say that on most nights more than a dozen separate poaching parties can be prowling the park, most from well-documented “poaching villages” located across the border in Mozambique.

Meanwhile, enforcement of wildlife-related legislation in Mozambique is said to be essentially non-existent, with penalties for poaching and trafficking thus far not effective. Yet changing that situation has been complicated by what appears to be state collusion.

“It’s impossible for that level of illegal activity to be going on without high-level complicity,” Allan Thornton, president of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a watchdog group based here and in London that co-authored the new petition, told IPS.

“We believe that there are ex-military officials who are providing political protection to the [trafficking] syndicates who are arming and funding these poaching teams. There is substantial evidence implicating both the police and military.”

Mozambique keeps strict control over the types of weapons used by the country’s poachers, Thornton notes, yet such weapons are available to the military. Similarly, police and military uniforms have repeatedly been found in poaching camps.

Thornton says that putting together the new petition took several months, due to the mass of evidence available.

“If all Mozambican citizens were prevented from illicitly crossing over the border, poaching would drop significantly. But there has been no enforcement on the Mozambique side, despite legal obligations under CITES,” he says.

“We believe that the Mozambique government should be held accountable for their activities and act rapidly against these poachers, criminal syndicates and those protecting them. They could close this trade literally in a week.

Unparalleled scope

Thornton says his office is not yet clear on whether the Obama administration has exerted diplomatic pressure on the Mozambique government over the issue of wildlife trafficking. But in filing the new petition, these groups are highlighting the fact that the president does indeed have the legal backing to act on the issue.

Under U.S. legislation known as the Pelly Amendment, the president is allowed to impose trade sanctions if a country is certified to be “diminishing the effectiveness” of an international conservation programme. (U.S. officials could not be reached for comment for this story.)

Further, there is notable precedent under which past determinations – set in motion by EIA petitions – have met with particular success. Two decades ago, for instance, a similar petition was lodged around the trafficking of rhinoceros and tiger parts through Taiwan into China.

That effort resulted in U.S. trade sanctions. Over the following two years, both the Taiwanese and Chinese governments engaged in a broad crackdown on these trades.

“This had a huge impact on reducing demand [for ivory] and reducing the poaching of rhinos virtually around the world,” Thornton says.

“We saw rhino populations stabilise worldwide, because two of the biggest markets had closed for demand. This is the same thing we’re now looking for in Mozambique.”

He continues: “And we’re hoping for a particularly prompt response, because the scope of illegal activities we’re currently seeing – where one country is sending hundreds of poachers into another country – is almost unparalleled.”

A white rhino at a sanctuary in South Africa’s Limpopo province. Credit: Jennifer McKellar/IPS

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, May 15 2013 (IPS)

At first glance, the poster appears to be a typical advertisement for an African safari: a large rhinoceros set against a rugged, open terrain. Then you take a closer look and realise something is amiss.

A cluster of human hands has replaced the two horns that distinguish this African animal from the single-horned Indian and Javan rhino. A message over the creature’s head reads: “Rhino horn is made of the same stuff as human nails. Still want some?”

Produced jointly by the wildlife watchdogs TRAFFIC and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), these posters are soon to appear on the walls of public places in major Vietnamese cities including the capital, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City.

Offices, apartment buildings and even airports are all set to become sites in the campaign to end the illegal international trade in rhino horns that is threatening the ungulate to extinction.

Experts say there is no better place than this Southeast Asian nation of 87 million to drive this stark message home. Vietnam has long been singled out by international groups monitoring the illicit wildlife trade for the dramatic rise in domestic demand for African rhino horns.

Close to 290 of the 20,000 rhinos left in South Africa have been killed for their horns since the beginning of this year, according to conservationists worried that such a deadly spree could see the death toll match the record number of 668 rhinos killed by poachers in 2012.

“We are in the midst of a rhino poaching crisis,” Mark Jones, a British veterinarian who heads the London-based Humane Society International, told IPS, adding that Vietnam has recently emerged as the main market for rhino horns.

The spike in demand has been shaped by a belief among locals that has taken root over the past five years: that rhino horn has special medicinal powers, including the ability to treat cancer, cure hangovers, and act as an aphrodisiac.

According to Naomi Doak, coordinator of the Greater Mekong Programme at TRAFFIC, the graphics for the new campaign poster were developed after experts realised that a “large proportion of the Vietnamese public” were not aware that rhino horn, a mass of agglutinated hair, is comprised of keratin, the same basic substance that constitutes human finger and toenails.

She hopes that bringing this fact to light will make people “think twice before consuming rhino horn.”

Yet driving home this message will be “a long and difficult campaign,” Doak admitted in an interview with IPS. “With very few penalties and consequences people really aren’t that concerned about the impacts the consumption of rhino (horn) has either on the animals or on people.”

A status symbol

To understand what wildlife protection groups are up against, one need only take a stroll through Hanoi’s famed Old Quarter, a colourful network of 36 streets where crafts and local products have been hawked for centuries.

Here, shops specialising in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) attract scores of customers seeking remedies made from wild animal parts, including rhino horn.

In his latest documentary ‘Bad Medicine – Illegal Trade in Rhinoceros Horns’, conservationist and filmmaker Karl Amman traces the routes of illegal traffickers from the Africans wilds to the streets of Vietnam, where “rhino horns have also become a status symbol,” he said.

This explains why gold, once the favourite gift among the communist-ruled country’s expanding class of wealthy citizens, has been dethroned by rhino horns, which currently fetch 65,000 dollars per kilogramme.

This is “more than gold, gram for gram,” according to Jones. Though the weight of rhino horns vary, an individual horn can fetch upto 150,000 dollars.

The pressure on Vietnam to curb the demand for illegal rhino horns is expected to grow following the resolutions passed in March at the Bangkok meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The strong language at this 16^th global gathering of 178 member countries fell just short of imposing sanctions on Hanoi.

The Vietnamese government, meanwhile, has consistently denied allegations that it is a major market in this global trade. It often points an accusing finger at its powerful northern neighbour, China, which is also under scrutiny for boosting the illegal wildlife trade, particularly the demand for tiger parts.

But activists have proof, and are not prepared to remain silent.

Do Quang Tung, deputy director of CITES Vietnam, who headed his country’s delegation to the Bangkok talks, told a Vietnamese newspaper in late March, “From 2004 until now, 13 (individuals) involved in rhino trafficking were arrested, with a total of 150 kg of rhino horns.” Two of these cases, he said, occurred in early 2013.

“Illegal trade in rhino horns involves highly organised, mobile and well-financed criminal groups, mainly composed of Asian nationals based in Africa,” a report published by TRAFFIC and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) revealed early this year.

“These networks have recruited pseudo-hunters including Vietnamese citizens, Thai prostitutes and proxy hunters from the Czech Republic and Poland to obtain rhino horns in South Africa,” added the report.

“Pseudo-hunting has significantly reduced as a result of a decision to prevent nationals of Vietnam from obtaining hunting licenses and changes to South African law in April 2012.”

Another embarrassment for Vietnam has been scandals involving its diplomats at the South African mission who were accused of smuggling rhino horns in 2006 and 2008. When confronted about these incidents at the recent CITES meeting in Bangkok, a Vietnamese government official said that the errant diplomats had received “punishment” for their actions.

Hopes are running high that the impending poster campaign will do its part to educate the public and bring an end to the thriving trade. But it will take more than two animal rights groups to halt rising demand.

Nguyen Thuy Quynh, of WWF Vietnam, said recently, “We are seeking support and cooperation from many businesses, celebrities, universities, international organisations and mass media who all have an important voice in reaching and influencing the community.”