Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade

by Rademeyer, Julian

  The newspaper also tracks down Dung and asks him about his car, which, unusually, was parked in the street outside the embassy during the transaction. Normally it would be parked inside the embassy walls. ‘The car is registered under my name,’ he admits, ‘but I was not the one to use it on that day.’

  In the days that follow, Ambassador Thi condemns the incident. ‘This is a highly reprehensible act … stemming from pure greed. This is not just a private act; it is one that has a repercussion on the embassy and the image of Vietnam itself.’ He claims that staff at the embassy had been ‘repeatedly cautioned not to engage in such activity’. On 20 November, Vietnam’s foreign ministry announces that Anh has been recalled to ‘clarify the affair’. Some time later, Dung also leaves South Africa.

  The South African government says nothing, opting to sit on the fence and engage in ‘quiet diplomacy’. A senior official in the Department of Environmental Affairs, Magdel Boshoff, is given the uncomfortable task of relaying the message.

  ‘At this stage we will not request … an investigation. We don’t want to prejudice diplomatic relations with Vietnam,’ she tells 50/50.

  The story soon fades from the newspapers. But questions remain about Anh. There are unconfirmed reports that she has been posted to another African country, possibly Mozambique. In March 2012, in response to questions from the Wildlife Conservation Society, Vietnam’s foreign affairs ministry says there is ‘no evidence of Moc Anh’s involvement in rhino horn dealing in both Vietnam and South Africa’. It says it accepts Anh’s version that she was filmed while ‘helping a rhino horn dealer review his papers’ and ‘was not involved in the deal’.

  Tommy is released on bail. His case drags on for nearly two years. In February 2009, the then Minister of Environmental Affairs, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, announces a moratorium on the trade in rhino horns and products within South Africa. Two months later, according to TRAFFIC, Tommy is seen making ‘several trips’ to game ranches near Vryburg in North West province. Later, local residents find him alongside a road claiming to have been the victim of an attempted car hijacking and the theft of ‘large sums of money’. He hurriedly leaves the scene a short while afterwards and never files a report with the police. It is widely believed that Tommy may have got himself caught up in a rhino horn deal ‘gone wrong’. In May 2009, Tommy and his wife, Tran Thu Hien, obtain permits to hunt two white rhinos in KwaZulu-Natal. In January the following year, the couple obtains two more permits, to hunt rhinos in the Free State. The address they provide in their applications is on a main thoroughfare in Hanoi, not Port Elizabeth.

  Eventually Tommy is found guilty of illegal possession of rhino horn. In March 2010, he is fined R200 000 or two years’ imprisonment. The magistrate suspends a portion of the sentence for a period of five years on provision that Tommy not be convicted of a similar offence. The cash from the hotel room is forfeited to the State. Tommy opts to pay the fine. Not long afterwards, he returns to Vietnam. His wife remains behind in South Africa.

  In January 2011, she and a twenty-two-year-old man, Phuong Huynh Phat, are arrested at Wonderboom Airport near Pretoria. Four rhino horns worth about R400 000 are found in their possession. Police had been tipped off ahead of their arrival and were waiting when they landed in a private helicopter. The chopper belongs to Dawie Groenewald, the notorious game farmer and safari operator from Limpopo.

  Both Hien and Phat are adamant that they participated in legal hunts on Groenewald’s farm, but later Phat pleads guilty to illegally possessing and conveying two horns. He is fined R100 000 and given a suspended sentence of four years’ imprisonment. The horns and a piece of rhino skin are forfeited to the State. Interestingly, Phat may have hunted another rhino in Limpopo a year before his arrest. In January 2010, records show that a hunting permit had been issued to a ‘Huynphat Phuong’ by Limpopo provincial authorities. At the time of writing, Hien continues to fight the case and maintains her innocence.

  In September 2011, a court order is granted giving the State the power to seize Tommy’s assets as proceeds of crime. These include a Mercedes-Benz E500, a Toyota Hilux and a R1.8-million house he bought in a quiet suburban street in Port Elizabeth in 2009.

  30 June 2010

  Xuan Hoang cuts a pathetic figure in the dock of the Kempton Park Regional Court. His eyes are dark smudges, his shoulders bent. Grubby clothes hang on a painfully thin frame. Somewhere below him a cell door slams shut and the sound reverberates up the stairs from the holding cells to the dock. He winces. Around him, there is a babble of conversation. Fragments of Afrikaans, Sotho and English – none of which he understands. To his right sits the Vietnamese interpreter. He’s bored, fiddling with his Blackberry.

  Hoang is twenty-nine and married with two children. He works as a security guard in Hanoi and earns about $100 a month – easy cannon fodder for a syndicate willing to pay him ten times that amount to collect a package in South Africa.

  On 29 March 2010, Hoang jetted into OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg – the first time he had ever flown on an aeroplane. He had been told that someone would be waiting for him with a suitcase. His instructions were to collect the bag and take the next flight out. He did as he had been told.

  As Hoang cleared immigration on his way to board the outward flight, he was stopped by customs agents and taken aside for his luggage to be searched. Packed in the suitcase were seven rhino horns weighing just over sixteen kilograms. Hoang was arrested. He told his interrogators that he never opened the bag and had no idea what was inside it.

  In court, Hoang pleads guilty to charges of fraud and illegal possession of rhino horn. Mario Scholtz, a veteran wildlife investigator, formerly with the police’s Endangered Species Protection Unit and now with Environmental

  Crime Investigations at SANParks, is called to testify in aggravation of sentence. So far in 2010, Scholtz tells the court, South Africa has lost rhinos worth R40.6 million. Horn is being bought in South Africa at R55 000 a kilo and sold on the black market in Vietnam for nearly three times that. An example should be set.

  Hoang’s lawyer asks the court for mercy. His client was only a courier, he says, a poor man with a family that depends on him. The presiding magistrate, a man with the suitably regal name of Prince Manyathi, is unmoved. His court catches the bulk of the smuggling cases detected at OR Tambo, a few minutes’ drive away. There has been a dramatic growth in the numbers of rhino horns being intercepted. But the syndicates keep learning and adapting. They’re an inventive lot. Horns are cut up to mask their shapes, after which they are sometimes divided up into different suitcases. Others are hidden inside moulds and plaster statues. In some cases, real horns are concealed inside fake ones.

  But with each seizure the customs officials are growing more adept at finding the contraband. They now know what to look for on the X-ray-machine monitors. And the EWT, with the help of police and prosecutors, has conducted extensive training sessions on species identification, legislation, crime-scene management and court proceedings. If they’re still unsure, there’s always the old ten-rand test that they were shown in the days when specialist training wasn’t available. ‘If you don’t know what you’re looking at,’ one instructor taught them, ‘take a ten-rand note out of your wallet and look at the picture of the rhino on the front. That’s the shape of the horn. That is what you should be seeing.’

  They’re aided by newly trained sniffer dogs that have been imprinted to smell out rhino horns. (Customs officers prefer to refer to their animals as detector dogs. ‘It’s not like they have a cold or a runny nose,’ one told me indignantly.) The syndicates go to extraordinary lengths to hide the stench of decay. Horns are wrapped in foil or cling wrap. Toothpaste or shampoo is smeared inside the suitcases. Even naphthalene balls have been used. It may fool humans, but it doesn’t fool the dogs.

  Manyathi clears his throat. The fact that Hoang may only have been a courier is not an extenuating factor, he says. ‘Fines are clearly not a deterrent … You
travelled to South Africa knowing that you were going to do something illegal. The purpose was self-enrichment, without any consideration for what the damage would be.’ He sentences Hoang to ten years’ imprisonment, without the option of a fine.

  The severity of the sentence is unprecedented. For years, stiff fines and suspended prison terms have been the norm. To the syndicates they’re little more than a costly inconvenience; an added business expense that can be recouped on later shipments.

  A year later, two more couriers unfortunate enough to stumble into Manyathi’s court are slapped with prison sentences of twelve and eight years respectively. Duc Manh Chu and Nguyen Phi Hung had been arrested at OR Tambo thirty minutes before the opening ceremony of the FIFA World Cup on 11 June 2010. They had hoped that customs officials would be distracted by the spectacle playing out on television. They were wrong. The X-ray-scanner operators sounded the alarm. Twelve rhino horns were found stuffed in Chu’s luggage. A further six horns were found in Hung’s bags.

  Manyathi is clearly unimpressed. ‘I don’t one day want to have to show my grandchildren pictures of rhinos because all the live animals have been killed by greedy people,’ he says in his judgment. Chu gets the maximum sentence: ten years for the illegal possession of the horns. Manyathi tacks on an additional two years for fraud. There is no option of a fine. Hung gets six years on the illegal-possession charge – effectively one year for each horn – and two years for fraud. Both men later appeal their sentences … without success.

  14

  Shopping for Rhino Horn in Hanoi

  December 2011, Northern Vietnam

  Mrs Dung’s smile is bright and birdlike. ‘I have just what you’re looking for,’ she says, leading the way to the back of the shop. Shelves cluttered with ceramic vases, plates, tea sets, cups, bowls, spoons and serving dishes line the room. ‘I sell many of these,’ she tells me, scratching around in the darkness and dust of a corner shelf. ‘Last year I sold 800 to the army. In total, I think I sold about 1 800. Quite a few went to clients outside Vietnam …’

  ‘Here,’ she says, dusting something off. ‘Sixteen dollars for the big one. Eight dollars for the small.’ She hands me two rather unremarkable-looking dishes, one inside the other. Both have been glazed a dark aquamarine. ‘You can touch inside if your hands are clean,’ she nods. The bases of the dishes are white and rough. They feel unfinished, with raised nodules like fine sandpaper. A shallow lip protrudes outwards.

  ‘These are what you use to make the medicine,’ Mrs Dung says. ‘You grind a little bit of the horn off on the bottom in hot water and drink it. It is good for many treatments. For the first stage of cancer, it is very good. The second stage … Well, there is nothing much you can do.’ Neatly painted in white on the side of the larger dish is an image of an African rhino. One of its feet is raised and its head is down. It looks to me as if it is running.

  The village of Bat Trang is situated on the polluted banks of the Red River, thirteen kilometres from the centre of the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. It is famed for its pottery and ceramics and has been for several hundred years. The old traditions still thrive here, but these days the villagers derive much of their income from producing cheap knock-offs of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. It is a monotonous parade of writhing Chinese dragons, impossibly picturesque mountain villages, crystal streams and ancient woods. I read somewhere that the villagers export ceramics worth about $40 million every year. As I wander the streets, I stumble upon the occasional oddity – a ceramic Smurf, an American eagle, a clay tiger, a crocodile, a buxom porcelain woman in an orange bikini, two wrestlers, and even an ancient Chinese figure wearing a pair of seventies shades.

  There is a wet sheen on the roads where they have been hosed down to dampen the fine grey dust from the pottery works. Narrow alleyways lead from the main streets to a hidden network of workshops, spinning potters’ wheels and fiery kilns. The air is thick with the loamy smell of wet clay. There is also a tantalising scent of spring onions, ginger, cloves, pepper and cilantro. It is lunch time, and the potters and shopkeepers are all tucking into steaming bowls of pho bo, the delectable beef noodle broth that is practically Vietnam’s staple dish.

  Two words and a photograph in a tiny sports shop in central Hanoi led me to Bat Trang. Little more than a hole in the wall with a metal shutter, the shop sold tennis rackets, squash rackets and fake Nike socks. A wheeled display cabinet stood at the entrance. Two pamphlets had been stuck up against the glass. One advocated the benefits of a brand of racket strings. The other promoted a ceramic dish. Below the latter was a slogan in Vietnamese that I couldn’t understand, but three words stood out. Sù’ng tê giác – rhino horns. The pamphlet, as I would later discover, was an advert for a ‘high-quality rhino horn grinding dish’. On the back of it was an image of a black rhino in a green field.

  And there was an address and a telephone number in Bat Trang.

  Adverts for rhino horn grinding-dishes abound on Vietnamese websites, online social networks and discussion forums. A typical advert, which had received 7 720 hits and nearly 300 responses by the time I viewed it, recommended the use of rhino horn for more than seventy medical conditions, ranging from heat stroke and high fevers to delirium, convulsions, ‘hysteria’, encephalitis, infections and poisoning. Somewhat surprisingly – given that the use of rhino horn as an aphrodisiac has long been discounted as the sensationalist invention of the Western media – the advert noted that it could also be used to treat impotence.

  There were detailed instructions on its use. Pour a little hot water into the grinding-dish, grasp the horn and, using circular movements, rub it against the roughened base of the dish. As fragments of horn mix with the water, it should turn a milky white. The smell it gives off is slightly acrid.

  ‘Drink 0.5 to 1 grams a day,’ the advert advises. ‘The horn can be used on its own or with other medicines for the purpose of healing.’ Prospective customers are warned against buying ‘low-quality dishes’, which may contain ‘impurities and toxic chemicals’. The base of a ‘quality dish’ should be white and ‘feel a bit rough’ in contrast to a substandard dish, which invariably has a yellow, uneven base and ‘loses its roughness after first use’. In Vietnam there has been a steady, resurgent interest in traditional medicine in recent decades. Scattered across the country today are roughly fifty institutes and hospitals where traditional medicine is practised. Most state hospitals have departments of traditional medicine, and about 9 000 health centres are licensed to practise it.

  A comprehensive pharmacopoeia – published in Vietnam as recently as 2006 – suggests that rhino horn is ‘effective in treating ailments like high fever, delirium, convulsions and headaches’. Four grams can supposedly treat a drug overdose. And a mixture of burnt rhino horn powder, water, aloe, nuts and radish seeds will cure cholera, the authors claim. Rhino horn, the book continues, should ideally be ‘harvested by splitting the thick skin from around the nose bone and carefully scraping the hard membrane at the base of the horn’.

  ‘Good quality horns are coloured black, polished, without cracks and have … a sweet smell … Rhino horns taste a bit salty, bitter and sour.’ When ingested, the authors claim, it targets the heart, liver and lungs, helps reduce temperature, calms the mind and reduces pain. It should not be used by pregnant women or in cases where fever is relatively low. It is also ‘recently considered a strong aphrodisiac’, the entry states.

  The latter claim is supported by a 2012 TRAFFIC report that describes evidence of a ‘rhino wine’ being marketed as a performance enhancer to ‘improve the sexual prowess of men’. Known locally as tuu giac, it is used exclusively by wealthy consumers, and can apparently be made from any rhino derivative, including blood, dried dung, a penis or fragments of horn mixed with a strong rice wine. This, according to TRAFFIC, seems to parallel developments in the tiger bone trade. Increasingly, tiger bones, which have traditionally been used in the treatment of arthritis, are being marketed in tiger wine concoctions a
s a sex tonic.

  According to the pharmacopoeia, skin from a rhino’s groin and armpits ‘can be used to help strengthen our health to prevent disease’. The skin is ‘processed by removing fur, membrane and grease from the skin, exposing it to the sun during the day and drying it by fire at night for 100 days, soaking it in wine for a month, then exposing it to the sun or drying by fire’. Before it can be used medicinally, it is ‘soaked in ash water for seven nights, washed and steamed until it is well-cooked’ and then ‘eaten every day’.

  The chapter concludes with a note to readers. The rhino population, it states, is in rapid decline worldwide. ‘It has become an extremely precious species at risk of extinction and included in the Red Book of many countries … They are now protected by strict and comprehensive legislation and scientists are studying methods to cut their horns to protect them from hunting.’

  Whether rhino horn has medical properties or not is largely irrelevant. In Southeast Asia, many people still believe that it does, and that belief will not be easily swayed, even with overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.

  The horn has been used in traditional medicines for at least 2 000 years. It is used in various herbal remedies and compounds to break a range of ailments, primarily for its supposed antipyretic or fever-reducing qualities.

  The handful of published scientific studies that has been conducted into the purported medical benefits of rhino horn have demonstrated little. In 1990, researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that extracts of both rhino horn and buffalo horn demonstrated ‘significant antipyretic action’ in rats, but only at massively high doses, far higher than would be used by a human patient. Seven years later, scientists at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg came to the contrary view. They dismissed the claims as a ‘myth’ after carrying out experiments which, they wrote, ‘unequivocally’ proved that rhino horn administered to rabbits had absolutely no fever-reducing qualities.