Poaching Killing Tourism and Wildlife Numbers in Great Lakes Region- Uganda Kenya Tanzania Congo(DRC) and South Sudan National Parks.
Africa is in the midst of an epic elephant slaughter. Conservation groups say poachers are wiping out tens of thousands of elephants a year, more than at any time in the previous two decades, with the underground ivory trade becoming increasingly militarized. In Uganda the Murchison falls national park which used to have most numbers of elephants have suffered from poaching since the era of lawlessness of president Idi Amin where national parks were not protected carefully. I was still young but remember that at one time Amin was celebrating independence of Uganda at the then youngest district headquarter of Rukungiri and ordered his mend to go to Queen Elizabeth and kill buffalos, hippos and antelopes to bring for people to feast on. Also the era of Lords Resistance rebellion, the rebels spent all their life in the park until they were flushed out. During this period many wildlife including elephants were killed.
Several poachers have been arrested and cautioned while others have been prosecuted over time but this vice has remained. Statistics from UWA reveal that at least 104 poachers have been arrested in the park while 75 were convicted between January and July this year 2012.
Before 2009, about three elephants were being killed every year in Uganda. Currently more than 10 elephants could have perished at the hands of poachers.
Uganda’s protected areas have always been considered a safe haven for wildlife species and conservationists would only worry once large mammals like elephants crossed over to the DRC. The DRC has, since the mid-1990s, been turned into death fields for wild animals. Armed groups operating in the eastern parts of DRC shoot down animals for ivory.
The rate of elephant death in Uganda has been investigated and it is not as high as it is in Kenya and the DRC, says Lillian Nsubuga, the UWA public relations manager. But the Ugandan elephants are far from being safe since there are corridors through which elephants from Ugandan parks move to neighbouring countries. We need concerted efforts across the boundaries if we are to protect elephants from poachers. Uganda safaris famous for gorillas which are either not spare and elephants need to protected.
About 38,000 of the surviving population live in Kenya, and 50 in Akagera National Park in Rwanda. DRC has about 300 in Virunga and a larger population occupies Garamba National Park.
Wave of poaching in Uganda
Between September 2009 and February 2010, nine elephants were found dead with bullet wounds along Ishasha River on the Uganda-DRC border.
According to Katamigwa, the elephants were shot from the DRC, but ran seeking refuge in Queen Elizabeth Park. Other residents confirmed that gunshots are sometimes heard across the border and this is followed by elephants crossing over into Queen Elizabeth National Park. Residents in Kanungu also poison the elephants.
Chinese and West Africans fuel poaching
Authorities at Entebbe International Airport recovered ivory in form of carvings and ornaments from suspected traffickers Chinese nationals in five different incidences. In the past decades, investigations have also implicated a number of West Africans. We are wondering whether this ivory impounded in Uganda is coming from neighbouring countries, says Nsubuga. This could mean Uganda is seen as an easy trafficking route for ivory.
The ivory trade is becoming more lucrative with reports from Lusaka Task Agreement Force indicating that a kilogram of raw ivory goes for as much as $1,700 (about sh4.3m) in China. In Uganda, a kilogram of raw ivory on the black market fetches about sh300,000).
Elephants are important to Uganda’s heritage and the Great Lakes region at large. Africa safaris are popular because of elephants between young and old. In addition to this, wildlife safaris tourism contributes about 80% of the total tourism earnings. Last year, Uganda earned about $800m (about sh2,048,474,976,600). This benefits the local population through employment, transport and market for local products.
Protection measures
Elephants are a key species to conservation and tourism. Some leaders in neibhouring districts accuse the authority of arresting their sons. The leaders also accuse UWA of taking suspects for prosecution far courts other than those nearer.
However, some leaders disagree with the district councils. “It is not proper to pass such a resolution. We should find solutions together because the park is also helping these districts neighbouring the parks Twenty percent of the revenue collected is shared among the parishes around the park.
The the peak of the poaching, is especially during the dry season, they arrest at least 50 poachers a month. Numbers are high during the dry season because the locals look for alternative sources of livelihood due to the scarcity of food.
Given that Uganda was previously losing only three elephants to poaching every year, the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) is concerned about the new wave of elephant poaching, writes Gerald Tenywa of New vision
At Uganda wildlife Education center , six-year-old Henry Musisi of Kawempe paced away saying: Go away, before disappearing into a crowd of school children, but his new friend, Charles Hamukungu, a baby elephant at the Uganda Wildlife Education Centre kept on directing his trunk at him. It was a hide-and-seek game that evoked a lot of laughter from Musisi.
But Musisi was saddened when he learnt that underneath this innocent, charming crowd puller at the wild side of Entebbe, lay a tale of anguish.
Two months ago, a fisherman found this baby elephant fighting for his life by the lakeshore in Hamukungu village in Queen Elizabeth National Park.
The calf still had its umbilical cord, meaning he was a new born. He was alone and about to drown in the lake waters. The fisherman found it strange that the mother had abandoned this sweet bundle of joy. But the truth soon unraveled: A carcass of a bull with bullet wounds was discovered floating on Lake George.
This comes hot on the heels of other elephants that had been gunned down along River Ishasha along the Uganda-DR Congo border in April. Earlier, two elephants were poisoned using water melon and pineapples laced with acid in the Ishasha area of Queen Elizabeth National Park.
Within the last six months, eight carcasses of elephants were discovered in the nearby Kasyoha-Kitomi forest reserve in Bushenyi. Their tusks had been removed.
Ivory hunters on rampage
UWA has established two ranger outposts at Ishasha and Maramagambo forest where cases of poaching have been reported. This, according to Kirya, has improved the presence of UWA on the ground. The wildlife authority has also opened a 17km road in Ishasha as part of its anti-poaching measures. UWA is also training more staff to deploy in all national parks in order to stop poacher. Also UWA should have closer eye to all their staff so that they also do not turn against the wildlife themselves.
Another intervention is the coordinated patrols of the border areas with DRC. Work with Congolese wildlife officials to mount operations at the same time and when poachers come running from Congo we arrest them. They also do the same
But this has not been taking place for the last three months because the manpower in the DRC has reduced from 1,000 to only 300.In addition to creation of awareness about the importance of the park as an attraction to tourists and conservation of water, UWA also shares 20% of its revenue from gate collections with the local communities.
In addition to UWA efforts, the wildlife clubs of Uganda are cultivating a spirit of conservation among young people.
Ivory traders are rich and well-connected and it requires adequate funding to break through their rackets. He also pointed out that some security operatives have been implicated either in the killing of elephants or facilitating the trade.
Because of the widespread poverty and ignorance, it becomes easy to lure the local population into the illicit ivory trade
The animals also keep on straying into private land escalating conflict between park authorities and the communities. Many communities think the wild animals that destroy their crops only benefit white people says Kirya.
Like blood diamonds from Sierra Leone or plundered minerals from Congo, ivory, it seems, is the latest conflict resource in Africa, dragged out of remote battle zones, easily converted into cash and now fueling conflicts across the continent.
Some of Africa’s most notorious armed groups, including the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Shabab and Darfur’s janjaweed, are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy weapons and sustain their mayhem. Organized crime syndicates are linking up with them to move the ivory around the world, exploiting turbulent states, porous borders and corrupt officials from sub-Saharan Africa to China, law enforcement officials say.
Foreigners have been decimating African elephants for generations. “White gold” was one of the primary reasons King Leopold II of Belgium turned Congo into his own personal fief in the late 19th century, leading to the brutal excesses of the upriver ivory stations thinly fictionalized in Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” and planting the seeds for Congo’s free fall today.
Ivory Coast got its name from the teeming elephant herds that used to frolic in its forests. Today, after decades of carnage, there is almost no ivory left.
The demand for ivory has surged to the point that the tusks of a single adult elephant can be worth more than 10 times the average annual income in many African countries. In Tanzania, impoverished villagers are poisoning pumpkins and rolling them into the road for elephants to eat. In Gabon, subsistence hunters deep in the rain forest are being enlisted to kill elephants and hand over the tusks, sometimes for as little as a sack of salt.
Last year, poaching levels in Africa were at their highest since international monitors began keeping detailed records in 2002. And 2011 broke the record for the amount of illegal ivory seized worldwide, at 38.8 tons (equaling the tusks from more than 4,000 dead elephants). Law enforcement officials say the sharp increase in large seizures is a clear sign that organized crime has slipped into the ivory underworld, because only a well-oiled criminal machine — with the help of corrupt officials — could move hundreds of pounds of tusks thousands of miles across the globe, often using specially made shipping containers with secret compartments.
The smugglers are “Africa-based, Asian-run crime syndicates,” said Tom Milliken, director of the Elephant Trade Information System, an international ivory monitoring project, and “highly adaptive to law enforcement interventions, constantly changing trade routes and modus operandi.”
Conservationists say the mass kill-offs taking place across Africa may be as bad as, or worse than, those in the 1980s, when poachers killed more than half of Africa’s elephants before an international ban on the commercial ivory trade was put in place.
This will reduce tourists to our national parks. You get saddened when you guide a group of people(tourists) who have spent their hard earned savings to come to see elephants lion leopard etc and at the end of the day after driving many kilometers and crisscrossing tracks but end up not seeing any. Tourists keep asking you please we want see this and that and yet much as this is park but wild animals if they are many one should not fail to see, Our tours in Uganda national parks should not be like this.
“We’re experiencing what is likely to be the greatest percentage loss of elephants in history,” said Richard G. Ruggiero, an official with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
Some experts say the survival of the species is at stake, especially when many members of the African security services entrusted with protecting the animals are currently killing them.
“The huge populations in West Africa have disappeared, and those in the center and east are going rapidly,” said Andrew Dobson, an ecologist at Princeton. “The question is: Do you want your children to grow up in a world without elephants?”
Out here, it’s not michezo,” Mr. Onyango WArden in Garamba said, using the Swahili word for games.
In June 2012, he heard a burst of gunfire. His rangers did a “leopard crawl” on their bellies for hours through the scratchy elephant grass until they spied poachers hacking several elephants. The instant his squad shot at the poachers, the whole bush came alive with crackling gunfire.
“They opened up on us with PKMs, AKs, G-3s, and FNs,” he said. “Most poachers are conservative with their ammo, but these guys were shooting like they were in Iraq. All of a sudden, we were outgunned and outnumbered.”
Both of the rangers’ old belt-fed machine guns jammed that day, and they narrowly escaped (11 have been killed since 2008 and some of the rangers’ children have even been kidnapped). Later investigation showed that the poachers were members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel outfit that circulates in central Africa, killing villagers and enslaving children. American Special Operations troops are helping several African armies hunt down the group’s phantom of a leader, Joseph Kony, who is believed to be hiding in a remote corner of the Central African Republic.
Ivory may be Mr. Kony’s new lifeline.
Several recent escapees from the L.R.A. said that Mr. Kony had ordered his fighters to kill as many elephants as possible and send him the tusks.
“Kony wants ivory,” said a young woman who was kidnapped earlier this year near Garamba and did not want to be identified because she was still terrified. “I heard the other rebels say it many times: ‘We need to get ivory and send it to Kony.’ ”
She said that in her four months in captivity, before she ran away one night when the rebels got drunk, she saw them kill 10 elephants, wrap the tusks in cloth sacks and send them to Mr. Kony at his hiding place.
Other recent escapees said that the group had killed at least 29 elephants since May, buying guns, ammunition and radios with the proceeds. Mr. Kony may be working with Sudanese ivory traders. One ivory retailer in Omdurman, Sudan, who openly sells ivory bracelets, prayer beads and carved tusks, said the Lord’s Resistance Army was one source of the ivory he saw.
“The L.R.A. works in this, too; that’s how they buy their weapons,” the shopkeeper said matter-of-factly. That made sense, American officials said, given Mr. Kony’s few sources of income.
Several Sudanese ivory traders said the ivory from Congo and the Central African Republic moved overland across Sudan’s vast western desert region of Darfur and then up to Omdurman, all with the help of corrupt Sudanese officials. There is a well-worn practice in Sudan called “buying time,” in which smugglers pay police officers and border guards for a specified amount of time to let a convoy of illegal goods slip through checkpoints.
By Fred Bukenya
