Elephant Watch
As poachers grow bolder, Andrea Turkalo records the behavior of a vanishing species.
BY PETER CANBY
In November, 2011, a caravan of poachers—as many as a hundred, by some counts—crossed into the Central African Republic on horseback from Sudan. They rode seven hundred miles along the northern border, and entered Bouba-Njida National Park, in Cameroon. The caravan included a pack train of camels loaded with AK-47s, bags of ammunition, heavy machine guns, and two mortars. The poachers had been in the park before, in 2010, when they killed about a dozen elephants and two park guards. This time, they were shooting elephants in far greater numbers, and in some cases sawing off the tusks while the animals were still alive. Céline Sissler-Bienvenu, a regional director for the U.S.-based International Fund for Animal Welfare, heard about the slaughter, travelled to the park, and notified the authorities in Yaoundé, the capital. Cameroon’s government sent a contingent of Army troops to drive the poachers out. A handful of people on each side were killed or wounded in skirmishes, but the poachers, who were by then better acquainted with the park’s geography, continued about their business.
“They were very well organized,” Sissler-Bienvenu recalled. “Very well armed, very strategic, and they implemented ambushes in military style.” Some of the men were believed to be members of Rizeigat, a nomadic Arab group with ties to the janjaweed and to the Darfuri genocide. They cut pieces from the elephants’ ears to use as gris-gris. The manager of a lodge in Bouba-Njida Park, who encountered a group of the poachers on horseback, recalled, “When you looked at them, they stared straight back at you. They didn’t fear anything from anybody.”
As the killings continued, Sissler-Bienvenu went to the press, and soon Le Monde ran a story featuring photographs of elephants with their trunks missing and their faces cut off. A copy of the newspaper found its way to Cameroon’s President, Paul Biya, who was staying at a hotel overlooking Lake Geneva. He ordered an additional three hundred troops into Bouba-Njida, but they, too, failed to drive out the poachers. In the three months that the poachers were in the park, they killed six hundred and fifty elephants.
After leaving Cameroon, the men split into smaller groups, and four of them apparently detoured north, toward Zakouma National Park, in neighboring Chad, where, just outside the park, they slaughtered nine more elephants before rangers spotted their camp from the air. When the rangers reached the camp, three of the poachers were out hunting; the fourth escaped on foot, and his horse was killed in the crossfire. The rangers found thousands of rounds of ammunition, along with uniforms, documents, and phones linking the men to specific Army and paramilitary units in Sudan. The poachers remained at large. Three weeks later, at dawn, as a group of Muslim park guards knelt in prayer, the poachers shot them all in the back. They seized the guards’ horses and fled to Sudan.
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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/elephant-watch
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In a national park, no less. How can these people (both the poachers, and the ivory consumers who enable them) be stopped?
