From: Lee 
Subject: Secrets of South Africa's war on wildlife emerge
Message-ID: <199511020237.VAA05285@minerva.cis.yale.edu>
Date: Thu, 02 Nov 95 01:37:53 0400

Secrets of South Africa's war on wildlife emerge


(c) 1995 Copyright Nando.net
(c) 1995 Associated Press

MAPUTO, Mozambique (Nov 1, 1995 - 16:48 EST) -- The endless bush of
Mozambique screams with silence. It stands stripped of wildlife by
three decades of war and what now is emerging as a vast, systematic
slaughter of animals encouraged by the armed forces of apartheid-era
South Africa.

A new judicial inquiry in South Africa reveals that military and
intelligence units trafficked in poached ivory and rhino horn to
finance civil wars the regime fanned in Mozambique, Angola and Namibia
during the 1970s and 80s.

Although South Africa has long boasted of leadership in conservation,
the evidence suggests some in the white-minority establishment cared
nothing about slaughtering elephants and rhinoceroses by the thousands
in neighboring nations.

South Africa kept the wars alive to destabilize hostile black-ruled
neighbors. The chaos allowed armed factions on all sides to massacre
wildlife for food, personal profit and war funds.

In Mozambique alone, half a dozen armies used everything from assault
rifles to aircraft to slaughter animals. Under the cover of civil war,
90 percent of Mozambique's elephants were butchered.

"Helicopters were used to absoutely decimate wildlife,"
conservationist Paul Dutton said. "With a helicopter gunship, you
could annihilate a whole river of hippos." Their teeth would be carved
for decorations in Asia.

Peace returned to Mozambique three years ago and officials rejoice
that some surviving elephants have emerged from hiding. But the legacy
of war grips the countryside, where one can travel for hours and see
nothing larger than a bird.

White rhinoceroses, reintroduced to Mozambique in the 1960s, became
locally extinct during the war. Only a handful of rare black rhinos
are left. The elephant population fell from 66,500 in 1974 to an
estimated 7,000 in 1989.

Environmentalists long accused the South African military of playing a
big role in elephant and rhino poaching -- killing animals themselves
or getting allies to do it, then arranging for tusks and horns to be
transported out of war zones and sold.

"This was an open secret," said Allan Thornton, chairman of the
London-based Environmental Investigation Agency. "Trafficking during
the apartheid era was a formal or informal policy, at least on the
part of some elements in the government."

In 1988, the South African army cleared itself of wrongdoing in an
internal inquiry. That remains the official verdict until a new,
independent commission appointed by President Nelson Mandela's
government issues its report early next year.

Judge Mark Kumleben's inquiry recently heard four weeks of testimony,
mostly from ex-military and intelligence men. Some of the evidence
alleges:

--South Africa set up a front company in 1977 to fly weapons to
Angolan rebels and fly out poached ivory to pay for them. A general
claimed the traffic stopped in 1979 -- a year South Africa issued
permits to import 3,911 elephants tusks and 700 rhino horns from
Angola. But traders testified that South Africa's army kept moving
ivory out of Angola throughout the 1980s. Similar networks existed in
Mozambique.

--South African commandos in Namibia would cross the Zambezi River
into Zambi in speedboats at night and return before dawn. One soldier
said that the raiding parties would leave base with empty wooden
crates. On their return, the crates held elephants tusks and rhino
horns.

--Environmental groups investigating wildlife trafficking discovered
that some dealers were actually members of the South African military,
according to a confidential report in 1989 prepared by the World Wide
Fund for Nature.

South Africa was not alone in poaching in Mozambique. Of the six
armies that fought there from the 1960s until a cease-fire in 1992,
possibly only the Portuguese abstained.

Dutton, a wildlife consultant and former game ranger who has worked in
Mozambique since before independence, described finding a huge pile of
bones at one national park near what was once a military camp.

"A total wipeout for meat," he said. "The only thing left in the whole
park were some small antelope and a couple of hippos. It had been the
only area in Mozambique where there had been giraffes. There's none
now."

The wars in southern Africa, meanwhile, wound down with the end of the
Cold War and South Africa's crawl away from apartheid. Mandela was
elected South Africa's first black president in April 1994 and pledged
more neighborly relations.

Judge Kumleben said at the start of his inquiry he hoped to separate
fact from speculation on South Africa's smuggling -- and to recommend
steps to stop it from happening again.

But the issues of who poached what remains sensitive, at least in
Mozambique, where two local armies, Rhodesian and Zimbabwean fighters
also participated in the brutal slaughter.

Bartolomeo Sotuo, Mozambique's director for wildlife, needs money from
South Africa to restore his parks and the goodwill of his government
and former rebels, now at peace, for whatever funds he can get from a
limited pile.

Instead of pointing fingers, Sotuo prefers to focus on efforts to halt
poaching in the flagship Gorongosa Game Reserve -- once the
headquarters of the anti-Marxist Mozambique Nationl Resistance
(RENAMO) -- and the Maputo Elephant Reserve -- a former base for the
Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO).

He expressed pleasure that 70 elephants had migrated from hiding in
dense swamps to the Maputo reserve, home to hundreds of elephants in
the 1960s but only eight by the time the war ended in 1992.

"The war was just an extension of a decline that started 500 years
ago, thanks to the colonial ivory trade, hunting for sport and the
proliferation of better guns and more people," Sotuo said. "If I can
say we've stopped poaching in Gorongosa -- and we have -- that's
good."

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