The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016
Page 4
“They can get what they want today,” he said, “and keep it there for two, three, or even more than five years.”
The Ugandan military finally attacked Kony’s Garamba camps in late 2008. The airstrike, dubbed Operation Lightning Thunder, included support from the DRC, southern Sudan, and the United States. But it failed to rout Kony or his leadership. Kony’s response was immediate and savage. Beginning on Christmas Eve, his soldiers spread out in small teams and murdered civilians. In three weeks Kony’s brutes killed more than 800 people and kidnapped more than 160 children. The UN estimated that the massacre displaced more than 100,000 Congolese and Sudanese. On January 2, 2009, the horror bled into Garamba’s headquarters, at Nagero, where Kony’s soldiers burned the park rangers’ main building, destroyed equipment, and killed at least 8 rangers and staff members.
Six years later, on October 25, 2014, Onen tells me, his poaching mission to Garamba was scheduled to deliver its ivory to Kony in Sudan. Kony was adamant in his radio transmissions. “Do not lose even one tusk,” he instructed the group, according to Onen, who said the plan was to carry the ivory to a rendezvous in CAR and then on to a market town in Darfur called Songo, not far from the Sudan Armed Forces garrison in Dafaq. There, Onen says, Kony’s men trade ivory with the Sudanese military for salt, sugar, and arms. The relationship is close: “SAF warns Kony if there’s trouble,” Onen says.
As far as Onen knew, the poaching squad he abandoned was still making its way north from Garamba through CAR to Sudan. To me, it seems reasonable to think that the radioman’s defection might have slowed the progress of the 25 elephants’ tusks headed to Kony.
Maybe I could get my fake tusks to Kony too.
“You Are a Liar!”
An official in Dar es Salaam’s international airport, in Tanzania—one of several countries I scouted for launching my tusks into the illegal trade—squints at an x-ray screen as my luggage rolls through his scanner.
“Open that one,” he orders.
I unzip my suitcase to expose two fake tusks and hand him letters from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Geographic certifying that they’re artificial. A crowd gathers. Officials are pointing fingers and arguing. Those looking at the tusks think I’m an ivory trafficker. Those looking at the x-ray screen, which shows the trackers inside, think I’m smuggling a bomb. After more than an hour of animated debate, they phone the airport’s wildlife expert. When he shows up, he picks up a tusk and runs his finger over the butt end. “Schreger lines,” he says.
“Exactly,” I say. “I had them . . .”
He points a finger at me and yells, “You are a liar, bwana!” (Bwana is Swahili for “sir.”)
In 10 years he’s never made a mistake, he says: the tusks are real. I spend a night in police custody, where I’m given a desk to sleep on. National Geographic television producer J. J. Kelley takes the floor in the waiting area. He asks for water for me and is led out of the building. When he returns hours later, he has three chicken dinners and several bottles of beer, paid for by the police chief. The three of us eat together (the police chief, a Muslim, leaves the beer to us). In the morning, after officials from Tanzania’s Wildlife Division and the U.S. Embassy arrive, I’m released.
Our airport incident was one of many hiccups with the artificial tusks. Several Tanzanian officers who had presided over my arrest at the airport, including the wildlife expert, returned the next day to wish us bon voyage. “You did exactly what you were supposed to do,” I said, shaking their hands.
It was reassuring to find the Tanzanian law enforcers so vigilant, because the country is plagued by perhaps the worst elephant poaching in Africa, and corruption is rife. In 2013 Khamis Kagasheki, then Tanzania’s minister of natural resources and tourism, declared that the illegal ivory trade “involves rich people and politicians who have formed a very sophisticated network,” and he accused four members of Tanzania’s Parliament of being involved in it.
Garamba’s Warriors
All around me I hear the click-clack of automatic weapons being loaded. I’ve flown from Garamba park headquarters to a dirt airstrip deep inside the park to join an antipoaching patrol. I arrive at what amounts to the park rangers’ northern front, an outpost vulnerable both to Sudanese poachers and Kony’s army. Here a ranger unit is permanently deployed to protect one of the park’s most important assets: a radio tower that was being built. Garamba is managed through a partnership between the DRC’s wildlife department and African Parks, a group based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Since the 2008–9 attack by Kony’s soldiers, rangers have finished building a new headquarters and acquired two airplanes and a helicopter. But ammunition is in perilously short supply—not even enough for basic training—and the rangers’ largest weapon, a belt-fed machine gun, tends to jam every third round or so. The rangers I’m going out with have each been allocated a handful of rounds for old and unreliable AK-47s, most of them seized from poachers.
We plunge eight hours through elephant grass so tall and thick it’s possible to get lost just 20 feet from the man in front of you—down grass ravines, up hills exposed to the enemy, across a murky, waist-deep pond. At the sound of a twig cracking or the detection of an unexpected scent on the wind, a ranger in front of me, Agoyo Mbikoyo, signals caution, and I drop with the team into a collective crouch and wait silently. I make a mental note that Kony’s soldiers and other armed groups walk hundreds of miles from Sudan into this endless grass curtain to kill elephants. I wonder if Kony’s men are out there now.
The recent death toll of elephants in Garamba has been staggering, even by central African standards. Poachers killed at least 132 last year, and as of this June, rangers had discovered another 42 carcasses with bullet holes, more than 30 attributed to a single Sudanese poaching expedition—a combined loss amounting to more than 10 percent of the park’s entire population of elephants, estimated now to be no more than about 1,500.
From March 2014 to March 2015 Garamba’s rangers recorded 31 contacts with armed poachers, more than half of whom were with groups traveling south from the direction of South Sudan and Sudan. They included South Sudanese armed forces (SPLA) and Sudanese military, as well as defectors from those militaries and an assortment of Sudan-based rebels. Congo’s own soldiers threaten the park’s southern border, and villagers around the park sometimes poach elephants too. And someone—it’s unclear who—is believed to be killing elephants from helicopters, as evidenced by bullet holes in the tops of skulls and the removal of tusks by what can only be chainsaws.
“My interpretation,” says Jean Marc Froment, then director of the park, is that the Ugandan military “is conducting operations inside Garamba and at the same time taking some ivory.” But, he adds, the poachers could be SPLA, which uses the same type of helicopter seen over the park. An adviser to the Ugandan military rejects the helicopter accusation, and suggests that the elephants might have been shot in the top of the head after they were down.
Having worked extensively throughout central Africa, Froment transferred to Garamba in early 2014 after rangers discovered dozens of elephant carcasses in the park. It was supposed to be a short posting, but he saw too much death to leave. He’d grown up not far from Garamba at a time when it was possible to fly over the park and see 5,000 elephants in a single gathering. Now it was rare to see 250 in a herd.
Froment uses the word “war” to describe the fight Garamba’s 150 rangers are in with poachers. Money is available to outfit the rangers with better equipment, but buying new weapons requires formal approval of the Congolese army, something Froment has been unable to get.
Halfway through our patrol, we come upon a clearing of burned grass beside the Kassi River, the site of a recent battle between Garamba rangers and SPLA poachers, in which, rangers tell me, they killed two poachers. I find a human skull fragment, and I nearly pick up a live hand grenade near where the SPLA had camped, mistaking it for a baby tortoise. It hadn’t exploded—yet.
On our patrol we don’t encounter any poachers or rebel groups. But time is stalking our team: months later, on April 25, 2015, while on patrol, the ranger who led me into Garamba, Agoyo Mbikoyo, was shot and killed by a gang of poachers. In June three more Garamba-based officers were killed. The culprits are believed to have been South Sudanese, according to African Parks.
Planting the Fake Tusks
After visiting Garamba, I arrange with a confidential source to put my tusks into the black market near Mboki, a small village in CAR midway between Garamba and Sudan that has been the target of attacks by Kony’s army and where some people who have escaped from Kony have found safety. According to data stored in a GPS unit taken off the body of LRA commander Vincent “Binany” Okumu, who was killed in a 2013 firefight with African Union forces on his return from poaching in Garamba, this village is on the path of ivory headed to Kony’s base in Darfur.
Unwitting Targets
It was just after 4:00 a.m. on Heban hill, in Chad, 80 miles from the Sudanese border and 60 miles northeast of Zakouma National Park, home to the country’s largest remaining elephant herd, 450 animals. Six antipoaching rangers and their cook, the entirety of the Hippotrague (French for “roan antelope”) unit, were awake, dressed in camouflage uniforms, and preparing for morning prayers—devoted even in the darkness. It was the rainy season, and the rangers, like the elephants they were guarding, had left the park for higher ground.
Zakouma breathes its elephants. Dry season in, rainy season out. During the rains the park is more lake than land, and elephants split into two groups to escape the floods. One moves north toward Heban, the other west toward central Chad.
The rangers on Heban hill had little reason to be concerned for their safety. They were relieving a ranger team that had raided a Sudanese poachers’ camp three weeks before and seized more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition; mobile phones holding photographs of bloated, dead elephants; a satellite phone with a solar-panel charger; two elephant tusks; a pair of camouflage pants; and a uniform with the insignia of Abu Tira—Sudan’s notorious Central Reserve Police, alleged to have committed mass killings, assaults, and rapes in Darfur. The rangers also recovered a stamped Sudanese army leave slip granting three soldiers permission to travel from Darfur to a town near the Chadian border.
Zakouma National Park has lost nearly 90 percent of its elephants since 2002. Most—up to 3,000—were poached from 2005 to 2008. During those years Sudanese poachers arrived in groups of more than a dozen armed men, camping inside the park for months at a time, killing, in one instance, 64 elephants in a single hunt. When in 2008 the Wildlife Conservation Society introduced a surveillance airplane, poaching declined, but Sudanese marauders adapted, returning in hit squads of under six men, who infiltrated from outside the park on one-day hunts. They killed fewer elephants per hunt but were much harder to track and stop. Now, says the park’s director, Rian Labuschagne, of African Parks, “my biggest fear is that they’ll start coming in pairs.”
The men of the Hippotrague unit assumed that after the previous team’s raid, the poachers had all fled home. But instead, that morning the poachers were hiding among trees surrounding the rangers’ camp. The poachers opened fire, killing five rangers. A sixth, a young lookout, ran down the hill, disappeared, and is presumed dead. The team’s cook, also wounded, struggled 11 miles to get help. Later, when Labuschagne examined the trajectory of bullets at the scene, he concluded that the poachers had been trained in how to set up a crossfire, which, combined with evidence found at the scene, pointed to President Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan Armed Forces.
The story typically would have ended with the wanton killing of these park rangers protecting elephants. But one of the murdered men, Idriss Adoum, had a younger brother, Saleh, who resolved that, when the rains stopped, he and a cousin would hunt the killers in Sudan, where so many ivory roads lead.
Sudan’s Complicity
As Somalia is to piracy, Sudan has become to elephant poaching. In 2012 as many as 100 Sudanese and Chadian poachers on horseback rode across central Africa into Cameroon’s Bouba Ndjida National Park. They set up camp and in a four-month rampage killed up to 650 elephants. According to Céline Sissler-Bienvenu, Francophone Africa director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, who led a group into the park after the slaughter, the poachers were most likely from Darfur’s Rizeigat tribal group, with ties to the Janjaweed—the violent, Sudanese-government-backed militias that have committed atrocities in Darfur. Sudanese and Chadian poachers were likewise implicated in the 2013 butchering of nearly 90 elephants—including 33 pregnant females as well as newborn calves—near Tikem, Chad, not far from Bouba Ndjida.
That members of the Sudanese military trade arms for ivory with the LRA raises questions about the highest levels of Sudan’s government. In 2009 Bashir became the world’s first sitting head of state indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In presenting that case, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo underscored Bashir’s control of the groups said to be behind Sudan’s ivory trafficking: “He used the army, he enrolled the Militia/Janjaweed. They all report to him, they all obey him. His control is absolute.”
Michael Onen, the defector from Kony’s army, told me that the LRA and the Janjaweed had battled over ivory, with one group robbing the other, and that it was the Janjaweed’s success in trading ivory that originally gave Kony the idea to start killing elephants. The LRA sells to the Sudan Armed Forces, Onen said.
Despite Sudan’s role as a safe haven for groups known to traffic ivory, such as the LRA, Janjaweed, and other poaching gangs, the country has drawn limited official attention as a poaching state. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a treaty organization that governs international trade in ivory—and its continuing ban—has identified eight countries “of primary concern” when it comes to international ivory trafficking: China, Kenya, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Uganda, Tanzania, and Vietnam. Eight more are considered of secondary concern: Cameroon, Congo, the DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Mozambique, and Nigeria. Three more are classified as of “importance to watch”: Angola, Cambodia, and Laos.
Sudan is not on these lists, even though Sudanese poachers are a primary reason elephants are killed in several of the countries listed by CITES as of primary or secondary concern. Sudan is also a well-documented supplier of ivory to Egypt and is the recipient of substantial Chinese infrastructure investment, which typically comes with Chinese workers, a source of ivory smuggling in many parts of Africa. Ivory shops in Khartoum advertise in English and Chinese as well as Arabic. According to CITES secretary-general John Scanlon, Sudan does not appear on these lists because CITES sets priorities based mainly on ivory seizures, and there have been few ivory seizures linked to Sudan in recent years. Which raises the question: If ivory is poached by Sudanese, where is it going?
A Kony Hideout
My artificial tusks sit motionless for several weeks, a pair of tear-shaped blue dots on my computer screen, which displays a digital map of the eastern corner of CAR. Then, like a bobber in a fishing hole, a nibble. They shift a few miles. Suddenly they move steadily north, about 12 miles a day along the border with South Sudan, avoiding all roads. On the 15th day after they began to move, they cross into South Sudan and from there make their way into the Kafia Kingi enclave, a disputed
territory in Darfur controlled by Sudan.
Kafia Kingi is so widely recognized as a Kony hideout that in April 2013 a coalition of groups, including Invisible Children, the Enough Project, and the Resolve, issued a report called Hidden in Plain Sight: Sudan’s Harboring of the LRA in the Kafia Kingi Enclave, 2009–2013. LRA defectors I spoke with consistently placed the warlord in the Kafia Kingi area too. So did the African Union military forces, whose CAR-based men in Obo are tasked with finding Kony. “It’s not a secret to anyone that Kony’s in Sudan,” says the State Department’s Marty Regan. “It’s his sanctuary.”
A few days later the tusks proceed to Songo, the Sudanese market town where Onen said Kony’s men trade ivory. In Songo the tusks are held for three days in what looks like a clearing outside town. Then they head south six miles, back into Kafia Kingi. I order a satellite shot of their location from DigitalGlobe, a commercial vendor of space imagery, and ask for outside help interpreting it. According to Colonel Mike Kabango, of the African Union forces, the image shows a large tent and two smaller ones; to Ryan Stage, a remote-sensing specialist in Colorado, it shows a large truck and two small tents. After three weeks the tusks turn north again, back into Sudan. Gathering speed, they continue north before abruptly turning east, in the direction of Khartoum.
Other roads also lead to Sudan. The relatives of murdered Za-kouma ranger Idriss Adoum tracked one of the alleged Heban hill poachers to Sudan and arranged to have him brought back to Chad to stand trial. Soumaine Abdoulaye Issa had been in Darfur, he told a team of African Parks investigators, when he heard about an elephant-poaching mission to Chad led by a member of the Sudan Armed Forces. Issa, who is Chadian, said he joined the team of three Sudanese men and that together they rode more than two weeks to get to Heban, where they killed nine elephants in four days. After Zakouma’s rangers destroyed their camp and confiscated their equipment, the poachers were unable to return to Sudan, so three weeks later they went back to Heban hill and attacked the Hippotrague unit.