His second hunt was conducted at the luxury Lalibela Game Reserve near Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape in June 2010, seven months before the uprisings that saw the eventual overthrow of his father’s regime.
A colourful diplomatic cable sent by the US embassy in Tripoli to the State Department in 2009 provides a rare profile of Saadi Gaddafi. Its subject heading: ‘Black sheep made good?’ A former professional footballer who enjoyed a season with Perugia, Saadi owned a significant share in one of Libya’s two main soccer teams and had briefly served as an officer in a Special Forces unit. His focus later ‘drifted’ to movies, and he set up a film production company. According to the cable, he had a ‘troubled past, including scuffles with police in Europe, abuse of drugs and alcohol, excessive partying and … profligate affairs with men and women. His bisexuality was reportedly a point of extreme contention with his father and partly prompted the decision to arrange his marriage.’
Following the fall of the Libyan capital Tripoli to opposition fighters in August 2011, Saadi Gaddafi fled to Niger, where he remains. An Interpol red notice in September 2011 calls for his arrest on charges of ‘misappropriating properties through force and armed intimidation when he headed the Libyan football federation’.
Another controversial hunt took place in July 2009 at the Mkuze Falls Private Game Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal and involved Henry Ross Perot Jnr, the son of the Texan billionaire and former US presidential candidate Ross Perot. Accompanying Perot Jnr on his African safari was his twenty-seven-year-old son, Hill. Hunting permits had been issued to both of them. Records indicate that Hill Perot shot and killed one rhino. His father, however, either missed or wounded a rhino, which escaped into the bush. For two days trackers followed the animal’s spoor and then lost it.
Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife’s position is that if a trophy animal is wounded and not found during the hunt, the trophy is forfeited. An ugly legal battle ensued. Perot Jnr – who was featured on the 2010 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires at No. 721, with an estimated net worth of US$1.4 billion – got his lawyers to fire off a letter of demand. If the animal was found, they insisted, it had to be killed and the trophy shipped to their client.
‘I’ve paid for it and I want it,’ was Perot’s blunt demand. Ezemvelo dug in its heels. Jeff Gaisford, a spokesman for Ezemvelo, said that never before had a hunter demanded a trophy despite failing to make a kill. ‘This is a bit of a first,’ he later told the Telegraph newspaper. ‘We will argue that one in court if needs be.’
Gaisford was disparaging of Perot Jnr’s hunting abilities. ‘It would be a bloody awful shot, like missing the barn wall at two paces. These animals are not difficult to hunt; they are very placid. It’s a bit like shooting a cow in a field. But anyone can duff a shot. Maybe he was nipped by a bee as he pulled the trigger or wet his pants, who knows?’
Gary Kelly, the professional hunter who accompanied Perot Jnr, defended his client, saying the animal had moved as the shot was fired. ‘That could happen to anybody. He’s a very good shot, a great guy and a wonderful hunter.’ The rhino, meanwhile, appeared to have survived with a minor flesh wound and rangers were unable to find any trace of a carcass or wounded animal.
In November 2009, after months of legal wrangling, conservation authorities agreed to allow a ‘follow-up’ hunt. If it succeeded, Perot Jnr could have the animal’s head. But at the last minute, the hunt was called off. Writing in the Mercury newspaper, environmental journalist Tony Carnie said that the ‘initial decision to allow Perot’s agents to have a “second bite at the cherry” drew strong opposition after it emerged the animal would be shot by Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife if there was a visible bullet wound from Perot’s large-calibre hunting rifle’. Perot later relinquished his claim after it emerged that the animal he had shot at was alive and appeared to be uninjured.
Whenever a hunter or safari operator is arrested in connection with illicit trade in rhino horn, Adri Kitshoff hastily checks her membership lists to see if there is a match. ‘Every time a name gets mentioned, I rush off to check the lists, because in all likelihood it is going to happen that one of our members is arrested,’ she says. Since her appointment as PHASA CEO in November 2009 – the first woman to hold this position – she has become the public face and voice of the hunting industry. It is her job to put a positive spin on an industry that is drawing increasing criticism. These days, she has her work cut out for her.
‘It is heartbreaking what some people are doing,’ she says of the Vietnamese pseudo-hunts. ‘The man in the street, the man who reads a newspaper, doesn’t differentiate between those hunters and others who operate properly. All he sees is that the professional hunting industry is rotten. And your local hunter, who has never in his life shot a rhino, is going to look at the situation and say: “Ja nee, it’s these damn PHs. Look at them carrying on like cowboys and crooks.” This is our industry. And for me, it is really heartbreaking that there are people out there dragging it down.’
Ian Player says the hunting industry should have ‘moved quickly and taken these guys to task. There are those in the game-ranching fraternity who’ve done tremendous harm, not only to conservation, but to South Africa … The pictures of the savagery and barbarism with which these rhinos have been treated … it’s not doing our country any good’.
PHASA’s problem lies in the fact that it is not a regulatory authority; it can do little more than suspend, expel or blacklist members found guilty of rhino crimes. Membership is voluntary and at least half the estimated number of professional hunters in South Africa do not belong to it. In an attempt to mollify critics of the hunting industry, the association has taken to aggressively promoting the ‘positive role that hunting plays’. In radio and newspaper interviews, Kitshoff repeats the association’s catchphrases over and over. ‘No other industry can create the value for wildlife that hunting does … Without the value, we wouldn’t have the wildlife in South Africa that we have today.’
There are the untested claims: ‘Since we introduced controlled hunting in the middle of the last century, our wildlife has increased from half a million heads of wildlife to more than 18.5 million.’ And there’s the economic message: foreign hunters bring in ‘about R2 billion a year’. But critics argue that eco-tourism generates a much greater income, with one study suggesting that it brings in ‘more than fifteen times the income of livestock or game rearing or overseas hunting’.
PHASA, which was formed thirty-five years ago, today has just over 1 000 members. The vast majority are uncomfortably white and male. At PHASA’s annual gala dinner, which I attended, the contrast between the sea of white faces at the tables and the images of black children and game rangers being projected on a giant screen – the beneficiaries of PHASA’s largesse – was stark. It seemed both patronising and an obsequious attempt to curry favour with the current government. There was something of an old boys’ club about it all. This preponderance of ‘pale males’ is something of which the association has been made acutely aware.
‘Professional hunting remains by and large white and male-dominated – visibly separate from most South African communities,’ the former Minister of Environmental Affairs, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, is on record as saying. Kitshoff is at pains to emphasise that perceptions of hunting as ‘by and large an Afrikaans-speaking sport’ are largely wrong.
In recent media statements on the growing number of pseudo-hunts channelling rhino to medicinal black markets, PHASA has walked a legal tightrope, condemning ‘any illegal activities’, but stopping short of pointing fingers or, as its former president did, calling on members to avoid conducting hunts with Vietnamese or Thai nationals.
This approach was based on legal advice, Kitshoff says. She doesn’t recall Butland’s statement. ‘We have specifically stayed away from singling out specific countries. You have got to be careful about generalising about a country. We all know that it appears the Vietnamese are sitting behind all of this and are involved in it. But the outfitter’s respon
sibility lies with the permit. He must be responsible. At the end of the day, it is his choice about whom he hunts with or not. There are many who would quite simply not conduct hunts like that and others who would.’
I tell her that many of the professional hunters and outfitters I’ve spoken to have said that they are fully aware of the fact that the Vietnamese hunters are here for the horn and not the trophy. Kitshoff seems surprised. ‘The general feedback I’ve received is definitely not that,’ she says. Later, I send her an email with Butland’s 2009 comments on Vietnamese hunters. She writes back: ‘I would appreciate it if we could just keep to our latest press releases.’
PHASA’s balancing act seems designed to ensure that it doesn’t alienate its members. ‘You must remember [that] we are not just there to grind our members. We are also there to stand up for them,’ Kitshoff says.
Dawie Groenewald is the only PHASA member to have been expelled from the association in recent years. His expulsion in 2006 was in relation to unrelated ‘breaches of PHASA’s constitution’, including ‘violations of laws’ and hunting activities in Zimbabwe that ‘had nothing to do with the rhino thing’.
Following the arrest of Groenewald and several others in 2010, Kitshoff told a newspaper: ‘We are looking at blacklisting any professional hunters implicated in this scandal. If any of the other people arrested are PHASA members, they will be immediately suspended. If they are convicted of poaching, or anything related to the case, they will also be expelled.’ But she cautioned that ‘in South Africa, you can still be a professional hunter after losing your PHASA membership’.
At least one PHASA member, Randy Westraadt – a professional hunter based in Bloemfontein in the Free State – played a pivotal role in the growth of the Vietnamese trophy industry. I first heard his name from Groenewald. ‘There are about ten guys who shoot an awful lot of rhino. I don’t have a patch on them,’ he complained. ‘Randy Westraadt and people like that are shooting ten times more rhinos than we do.’
Westraadt has previously attracted controversy over his involvement in lion hunting. In 2012, he represented the professional hunting industry on the executive committee of the South African Predator Breeders Association, an organisation accused of championing captive or ‘canned’ lion hunting.
Hunting records show that between September 2009 and November 2010, Westraadt was involved in at least thirty-four rhino hunts with Vietnamese clients. In at least four cases, the agent acting for the clients was Chris van Wyk. Westraadt’s website, choiceafricasafaris.co.za, quotes the prices of rhino hunts by the trophy inch. A white rhino-bull trophy would cost US$4 000 an inch for a horn of up to twenty-four inches in length. Above twenty-five inches, the price rises to US$4 500 an inch. A twenty-four-inch horn would therefore cost US$96 000.
Westraadt’s closest competitors at the time appear to have been hunter Frikkie Jacobs and his father, Kobus. Between them, according to the records of hunting permits issued, they took part in at least forty-two rhino hunts with Vietnamese hunters between August 2009 and July 2010. Many of the hunts took place at the Jacobs family’s Shingalana Lion & Rhino Game Reserve in North West province. Another PH, Brad Rolston, conducted at least twenty-four hunts over a fifteen-month period between 2009 and 2010. A key link is safari operator Alexander Steyn, who was the outfitter for several of the Vietnamese hunts conducted by Westraadt and Van Wyk.
In 2010, Steyn was also a major rhino buyer, purchasing about seventeen rhinos from SANParks for just over R4 million. Steyn is a controversial figure who has been implicated in the ‘canned’ hunting of cheetahs. In 2005, an undercover journalist from the Mail & Guardian newspaper reportedly negotiated with Steyn for the purchase of two captive-bred cheetahs for a hunt. When Steyn was eventually confronted and asked if he was involved in canned hunting, he replied: ‘What is canned hunting? Canned hunting takes place in a fenced-off area. Yet the whole of South Africa, the whole of Africa, is fenced. The whole of Africa is canned.’
What is apparent from the records and hunting registers – which one investigator laughingly describes as a ‘great suspect list’ – is that a relatively small group of a dozen or so hunters are the key protagonists in trophy hunts involving Southeast Asian hunters.
In March 2012, South Africa’s environment minister, Edna Molewa, announced, somewhat belatedly, that her department had asked Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to conduct inspections to determine whether trophies shot in South Africa by Vietnamese citizens were still in the hunters’ possession. A list of names and addresses taken from hunting-permit applications was provided to the Vietnamese authorities. Until the verification process had been completed, South Africa would refuse all hunting permits to Vietnamese hunters, she said.
In the same month, Walter Slippers, a safari operator who had been involved in a number of rhino hunts, brought an urgent application in the North Gauteng High Court to force the Limpopo provincial wildlife authorities to issue hunting permits to five Vietnamese hunters. The permits had initially been authorised, but, following an advisory from the national department calling on provinces ‘not to issue hunting permits to Vietnamese citizens due to various concerns regarding illegal hunting practices’, the permits were withheld.
The court ordered that the permits be issued, subject to the Vietnamese hunters being interviewed by wildlife officials. Should the interviews call into question the legitimacy of the hunt, the department could return to court, the judge said.
The arrangements for the interviews were made, but on the appointed day, Slippers conceded that his clients were not even in the country. The interviews were scrapped, the department went back to court and, based on their ‘legitimate concerns’, the court ordered that the hunting permits need not be issued.
In April 2012, Molewa gazetted a revised set of norms and standards governing trophy hunting, the microchipping of horns, the marking of live rhinos and the manner in which samples should be collected for DNA profiling.
Rhino hunts now have to comply with seventeen specific requirements as opposed to eleven under earlier 2009 guidelines.
All hunting permit applications have to be accompanied by a raft of supporting documentation. Foreign hunters have to prove that they belong to a hunting association recognised by their government, and provide a CV detailing previous hunting experience or ‘proof of previous experience in hunting any African species’. Permitting officials are now also required to consider ‘whether the country of usual residence of the hunting client, where the rhinoceros horns and the rest of the hunting trophy will be imported to, has adequate legislation to ensure that rhinoceros horns and the rest of the hunting trophy will be used for the purpose as indicated on the CITES export permit’.
Magdel Boshoff, a deputy director of policy development in the Department of Environmental Affairs, says nature conservation officials can now refuse hunting permits where previously they had no grounds on which to do so.
‘Before, if the hunter complied with all the provisions, we didn’t have any measures in place to refuse a permit. It was the exception to the rule for a permit to be refused. Now we need all that supporting information and, if it isn’t there, we can refuse to issue a permit. We’re in a position to refuse a permit on the basis that someone isn’t a bona fide hunter.’
By early 2012, the Vietnamese pseudo-hunts had ground to a halt. But already there were worrying signs that the syndicates were adapting and were looking for other fronts for their operations. New patterns had begun to emerge in the hunting registers, including a curious spike in rhino hunts conducted by hunters from the Czech Republic and Poland. Since July 2009, they had shot thirty-four rhinos.
‘The Czech hunters are being specifically recruited by the Vietnamese to hunt rhinos,’ a senior South African investigator told me. ‘When the Czech police went and interviewed the hunters, the guys confessed and said, “Yes, we were recruited by the Vietnamese to go and shoot, this is what we were paid and here are the permi
ts.” That is how big this thing is. It is a worldwide phenomenon, and the syndicates are always one step ahead.’
7
The ‘Boeremafia’
18 June 2011
Dawie Groenewald would shoot a hundred rhinos a year, given half a chance. ‘It’s a good business,’ he says. In fact, right now he’d probably kill every rhino he could lay his hands on. ‘I feel so fucking angry about the system that I want to shoot as many rhinos as I can get,’ he tells me. ‘And that’s not right.’
It is almost a year since Groenewald, his wife Sariette and nine others, including professional hunters, veterinarians, a pilot and farm labourers, were arrested by the police’s organised crime unit. The fifteen-month investigation – called ‘Project Cruiser’ – was described by police as ‘a huge stride in our undying effort to thwart rhino poaching’. An SAPS spokesman, Colonel Vish Naidoo, claimed that the Groenewald syndicate had been linked to literally ‘hundreds of rhino poaching incidents’. Newspapers were filled with grisly accounts of the ‘Rhino Slaughter Farm’ and the rotting carcasses exhumed from mass graves. Outside the Musina Regional Court, where the suspects appeared, demonstrators held up placards exhorting: ‘Sny Dawie se horing af ’ (Cut off Dawie’s horn). There were cries of ‘Rhino killer!’ as Groenewald arrived at court with his wife.
Prosecutors threw the book at him. The indictment in the matter of the State v Dawid Jacobus Groenewald and ten others runs to 637 pages, and there are 185 witnesses lined up to testify. Groenewald himself faces 1 736 counts of racketeering, money-laundering, fraud, intimidation, illegal hunting and dealing in rhino horns. He is accused of killing fifty-nine of his own rhinos for their horns, then getting rid of the carcasses by burying them, burning them or selling them to a local butchery. In addition he’s charged with illegally dehorning dozens of the animals and selling at least 384 rhino horns over a four-year period. The case – which at the time of writing in late 2012 had yet to go to trial – could drag on for years.
Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade Page 15