Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (11 page)

There are other clues; hints that what Burman had seen in the warehouse is part of something far greater than he can imagine. In Jamba, UNITA’s base
in Cuando Cubango Province just north of the Caprivi, he comes across a factory churning out ivory carvings of ‘outstanding quality’. He can’t recall the exact date, but it must have been some time in 1982.

Then there are rumours about a shadowy South African Military Intelligence front company, Frama Intertrading. Run by two Portuguese–Angolans, José Francisco Lopes and Arlindo Maia, it is formally incorporated in 1980. An army general, Gerhardus Philippus Ortlepp du Preez, arranges for the company’s bank account to be opened at a branch conveniently located near military headquarters in Poynton Building in central Pretoria. Du Preez and other SADF members have signing powers on the account, in addition to Lopes and Maia. The SADF supplies the start-up capital.

Maia is based in Johannesburg. Lopes, nicknamed Lobbs, is the man on the ground in Rundu. He’s a sergeant major in the SADF, but earns far more than the average officer of his rank. Before the war, he lived in Angola. He and his family lost everything when they fled to Namibia, but he managed to wangle a pilot’s job with CSI. A bad heart put paid to that, but they found other work for him. Lobbs has a sawmill in Rundu and another in a place called Buabuata. Within CSI, it is an open secret that Lobbs and Frama are a conduit for the SADF’s covert supplies to UNITA. Standing orders prevent soldiers and police from searching the company’s trucks that ply the road south carrying vast quantities of timber, primarily teak and kiaat. There are whispers that other contraband is hidden in the consignments.

In 1984, Burman – now a major – is running ‘Delta teams’ in the Okavango. They are small squads of five to seven men comprising a mixture of SADF Special Forces troops and Askaris – ‘ex-terrorists’ or
terrs
who have been ‘turned’ and are now fighting against their former comrades. Burman has informants feeding him information about ‘
terr
’ movements in the Caprivi.

‘They picked up info that poachers were working together with
terrs
that were supposedly coming across from Zambia, through Angola and into the Caprivi. We tracked them down, but we didn’t find any
terrs
, just the poachers.’

One of the men has a rifle and a stash of ivory. He is a San Bushman. Burman drags the poachers and their ivory back to Rundu, where they are locked up. He is astonished by what happens next. ‘I was told in no uncertain terms to release them all, because they were working for CSI and hunting for CSI.’
The rifle the poachers had been using is traced back to Colonel José d’Oliviera, a Portuguese Angolan working for CSI. D’Oliviera, Burman learns, flies the ivory to Windhoek in a private Cessna.

Before the war, the colonel worked in Angola for the
Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado
(PIDE), the Portuguese secret police. They were notoriously brutal and excelled in the dark arts of torture. In the old days they were known for their hammer-and-tongs approach to inflicting pain. Prisoners would be whipped, burnt and electrocuted.

But by the 1960s and 1970s, with the help of a CIA instruction manual, PIDE officers in Portugal and its colonies had adopted subtler methods, perfecting techniques of sleep and sensory deprivation and ‘positional torture’, where prisoners would be made to stand or kneel in stress positions for hours, and sometimes days, at a time. The victims left with their bodies largely intact, but their minds broken. The rare cases that didn’t crack or became too much of an inconvenience simply disappeared.

‘D’Oliviera was useless and a thief of note,’ Burman says. ‘All of them, those Portuguese, were in cahoots right down the line.’ D’Oliviera pulls Burman aside a few days later. ‘Be careful, or something bad is going to happen to you,’ he says. The emphasis is on the word ‘bad’. The rest is left unspoken, but Burman gets the message. ‘I could meet with an accident … or get taken out somewhere on the highway, in an ambush, on the aeroplane. Whatever. I’d disappear.’

Some time later, D’Oliviera vanishes. It is said that he’s gone AWOL. The Defence Force will eventually claim he’s resigned. Burman hears he is in Lisbon, still working for CSI. It’s deep-cover stuff. There are also rumours that police are investigating D’Oliviera in connection with the murder of four people in the Caprivi. One of them was the reputed ‘contact man’ at a De Beers mine for a diamond smuggler linked to the Rundu mafia. The man’s car had been stopped at a roadblock by ‘Angolans’ dressed in police uniforms. He, his wife, daughter and a hitchhiker were all murdered, their throats slashed and the bodies dumped next to the side of the road.

Police tracked down the killers, who implicated D’Oliviera and a cop in the killings. But when police went looking for him, they were told he had disappeared.

Burman keeps his head down and his mouth shut, for now.

In the mid-1970s, before joining CSI, Burman served in what would become the SADF’s most decorated and most notorious unit: 32 Battalion. Known as the Buffalo Battalion, it had been knocked into shape, in great secrecy, from what its commanding officer once described as the ‘most miserable, underfed, ragged and villainous’ remnants of the FNLA. Its motto,
Proelio Procusi
, means Forged in Battle. What made the Buffalo soldiers unique, besides their ferocity on the battlefield, was that in the Defence Force, which mirrored the vicious racial segregation of apartheid South Africa, they were the first outfit in which white South African officers and black Angolans fought side by side.

The unit’s founder, Colonel Jan Breytenbach, was a living legend. Despised by many SADF top brass and mistrusted as a maverick, Breytenbach fostered unstinting loyalty in the troops he commanded. He led them from the front, not from the safety of the backline. ‘He was, and still is, highly unorthodox and eccentric,’ Burman says. ‘Whatever he put his mind to, he pulled off. He was an absolutely powerful man, legend-wise, and not to be crossed. Even today, if he puts out a call, the boys will be there, for whatever circumstances.’

In conservative Afrikaans society, Breytenbach was regarded as an oddity. He’d served with the
Engelse
in the British Royal Navy, participated in the Suez landings in 1959 and, shockingly, married an Englishwoman. His brother, Breyten – one of South Africa’s great literary figures – was deemed a ‘terrorist’. A committed opponent of apartheid, he left South Africa in the 1960s and settled in Paris, where he married a French–Vietnamese woman. Apartheid legislation classified her as ‘non-white’, and in terms of the Immorality Act – a law that criminalised interracial marriage – they could be arrested if they travelled to South Africa. In 1975, while Jan Breytenbach was leading the men of 32 Battalion into battle, Breyten, travelling on a false passport, was taken into custody at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and charged under the Terrorism Act. He was convicted of high treason and would spend seven hellish years in jail, later publishing a prison memoir,
The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist
.

Jan Breytenbach was a ruthlessly efficient soldier. Conversely, he was also an avid conservationist who hand-reared three lions and a leopard while the war raged. Military Intelligence officers thought he had a ‘screw loose’ because he ‘befriended big cats’. In the mid-1980s, while overseeing training camps for UNITA guerillas in the Caprivi Strip, Breytenbach was appointed as a conservator by the Department of Nature Conservation in Windhoek. The western Caprivi, where Breytenbach had a base on the banks of the Cuando River, is a declared nature reserve. He argued, somewhat quixotically, that military training in the area had to be ‘conducted with minimum disturbance to wildlife’. The brass scoffed at him. There was no place for conservation in wartime.

Breytenbach has vivid memories of the time he spent in the southern Angolan province of Cuando Cubango, north of Rundu, in the 1970s, when South African troops invaded during Operation Savannah. This was where UNITA was based. But it was also an area of staggering beauty, teeming with game.

‘It was breathtaking,’ he would say years later. ‘I’d never seen anything like it in my life before … The number of animals and the diversity of wildlife species were such that it put the Kruger National Park completely in the shade. When we’re talking about elephants, we’re talking about tens of thousands of elephants roaming around all over the place, hundreds of rhino, huge herds of buffalo, especially along the Luiana River, sables, roan antelope, tsessebe, blue wildebeest, zebras. There were just vast numbers of game. I think the reason for that is that … there’s a lot of tsetse fly there, so people didn’t go there much. At night, you could barely sleep because of the noise of the elephants and rhinos storming up and down.’

In the western Caprivi, Breytenbach set up a camp that became known as ‘Rhino Base’, named after the twenty black rhino that lived in the vicinity. There must have been several hundred more in the western Caprivi as a whole.

‘On various occasions when we went into Angola and crossed the
kaplyn
, we came across black rhino bulls. The damn things would chase us,’ Breytenbach laughs. ‘We would be in a Land Rover in the sand trying to drive like madmen because the rhinos were catching up with us. There must have been dozens of them in that area.’

In the winter of 1986, Breytenbach returns to Cuando Cubango as a military advisor to Savimbi. Accompanied by some of his men, he drives north in a convoy of heavily armoured Casspirs. The landscape is still as beautiful as he remembers, but it is eerily quiet. ‘The teeming herds of the past had completely disappeared,’ he later writes. ‘Now there was nothing at all, not even a duiker or a steenbuck ducking and diving to get away from the labouring Casspirs. The tall red syringas were as profuse as ever … The extensive reed and papyrus swamps were still there. But over it all hung an atmosphere of utter desolation. There was no life.

‘The further north we went … the stronger the contrasts became. As the tree canopies got higher and the forests got thicker, the silence in them became deeper and more oppressive, like the deathly silence of the grave … Where did they go? There was no doubt in my mind that they were shot, brutally exterminated in their thousands in ten to fifteen years.’

After his return to base, Breytenbach tallies up the score. On the 4 000-kilometre journey, he had seen the spoor of five elephants and one kudu, and noted sightings of an owl, a sitatunga, two reedbuck and a dozen pairs of wattled cranes.

Often wounded elephants cross south over the ‘cut-line’. Many are riddled with bullets. In the sand one can see the drag marks left by a wounded animal. In 1986 or 1987, Breytenbach flies by chopper to a base in the western Caprivi. From the air, he counts twenty elephant carcasses – the tusks removed – scattered over ten square kilometres.

Journalists flown on propaganda junkets to meet Savimbi in Jamba are regularly shown pockets of elephant, giraffe, buffalo and zebra as proof of UNITA’s commitment to conservation. But Breytenbach knows the conservation areas are also used as hunting grounds for Savimbi and his cronies, as well as visiting delegations of politicians, army generals and economists. He also knows that ivory and rhino horn is being stockpiled at Jamba. But how is it getting out?