Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (12 page)

One of Savimbi’s admirers at the time is the British journalist Fred Bridgland. He gains unprecedented access to the man supporters called
O
Mais Velho
, The Eldest One, and will later be accused of being a Savimbi apologist. In 1986, Bridgland – who subsequently grows increasingly disenchanted with UNITA’s inherent totalitarianism – publishes a biography,
Jonas Savimbi: A Key to Africa
. It includes a telling admission. ‘We export ivory, rhino horn and leopard and antelope skins to help pay for our war,’ Savimbi is quoted as saying. ‘But we have declared some conservation zones where hunting elephant, giraffe and black sable is banned.’ He also claims that South Africa has to be paid for its assistance in ivory and diamonds.

Breytenbach is astounded by Savimbi’s claims. ‘I know that the support budgeted by Military Intelligence in 1986/87 amounted to R400 million … [W]ith that money, the South Africans bought virtually all [of] Savimbi’s military hardware, fuel and clothing.’

It is to Breytenbach that Burman eventually turns. He tells him the story about the CSI store, his confrontation with Oelschig, the threat from D’Oliviera and the poachers he was forced to release. Breytenbach is enraged. ‘I was the fucking
bliksem
in,’ he recalls in March 2012. ‘I was the
moer
in.’ The pieces of a disturbing puzzle are beginning to take shape.

One of Breytenbach’s sergeants hears that Lobbs has bought a small shop and service station in Katima Mulilo, the commercial centre of the eastern Caprivi. Situated on the banks of the Zambezi River, the town provides easy access to Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. In the centre of the town is a strategically important SADF base. Breytenbach regards it as the ‘most corrupt place’ he has ever come across.

‘Virtually everyone in town was involved [in] some racket or another, be it the illegal export of wood, smuggling of ivory and rhino horn, selling unlicensed and unroadworthy second-hand vehicles to the local inhabitants, diamond smuggling, dealing dagga, smuggling Mandrax from Lusaka to Johannesburg, or providing the black market in Sesheke, in Zambia, with luxuries stolen from government stores and warehouses on the Namibian side of the Zambezi River.’

A man named Coimbra manages the shop for Lobbs. Coimbra’s two sons
are both in the SADF. Breytenbach’s sergeant, who is friendly with one of the sons, tells him that they have a ‘pipeline’ to smuggle consignments of ivory, rhino horn, diamonds and Mandrax to Lobbs in Rundu.

A Namibian police (SWAPOL) inspector, Hennie Brink – head of the Diamond Branch – tells Breytenbach he knows about the ‘pipeline’ and has been investigating it for some time; all the evidence points to Frama, the MI front company. Brink claims that senior SADF officers are involved in the trade.

‘It goes very, very high up in the hierarchy,’ he tells Breytenbach, adding: ‘As a matter of fact, I thought you were one of them, otherwise I would have approached you long ago.’ A decade later, Brink is killed in Cape Town – blasted in the back with a shotgun.

Manie Grobler, a biologist and nature-conservation officer who is friendly with Breytenbach, approaches him one day and asks if he has any knowledge of a consignment of ivory, worth several million rand, which is apparently waiting to be picked up at an airstrip in the Caprivi. Breytenbach suspects it is a dirt strip in Buabuata, used by Military Intelligence, and that the consignment forms part of the UNITA stockpiles. He gives Grobler the name of a colonel to contact. Via a middleman, the colonel sends Grobler a message: Lay off or you will ‘get sorted out’.

There are also questions about the death of a senior nature-conservation official. The man, Jan Muller, obtained ‘incriminating tapes’, which he tells Grobler implicates SADF officers in the smuggling of ivory and rhino horn. He’s taking them to Grootfontein, a 250-kilometre journey from Rundu on the Golden Highway. The tapes are in his briefcase. Suddenly, a grader pulls into the road in front of him. His car slams into it head-on and he is killed instantly. The tapes are never found.

A friend of Breytenbach’s, a commandant in 32 Battalion, tells him that some of the former FNLA troops who had served in the battalion started working for Lobbs after they were discharged from the Defence Force. They are being used as poachers, he says. One of them has been caught with eighty-two elephant tusks in his backyard. The case is quashed.

‘This was the sort of thing that was going on the whole time,’ Breytenbach says in an interview. ‘Every time something crops up, you know somebody’s
caught with ivory or somebody’s caught with this, that or the other, then it gets squashed, or they pay a fine and that’s the end of the story.’

In 1987, the head of the roads department in Namibia approaches an army brigadier and requests permission to stop Frama trucks plying routes along the highway. He says he suspects that they are carrying contraband, but each time they are stopped, the drivers display military-issue cards, saying that they have the right of passage.

‘Be my guest,’ the brigadier says. A truck is stopped. Inside it is a cache of ivory and the driver is arrested. The brigadier is hauled over the coals by a general. ‘Leave this alone,’ he’s told. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you.’

Breytenbach had earlier scoffed at a series of ‘incredible’ investigative reports written and published in the
Windhoek Observer
by its eccentric editor, Hannes Smith, better known as ‘
Mal
Smittie’ or ‘Mad Smittie’. Week after week there were lurid revelations about the underworld activities of the ‘Godfather’ of Rundu. It was Lobbs. Matters came to a head when Smittie scaled the security fence surrounding a property belonging to Lobbs. The next day, the front page of the newspaper carried a photograph of a scowling Portuguese man in a cowboy hat waving a rifle at the editor.

But Smittie pressed on, revealing that seventy elephant tusks had been dug up in the home of one of Lobbs’s employees. Another stash of ivory – 270 tusks in all – was nabbed in Namibia. The two smugglers, both Angolans, escaped with a ‘ludicrously small fine’. Both men worked for Lobbs.

Breytenbach, who once ‘laughed with the best of them over the editor’s fertile imagination’, is now coming to a grim conclusion: ‘The picture that gradually began to emerge was an ugly one and, at first, I found it hard to believe. Not in my worst nightmare could I have imagined that officers in the SADF would get involved in something that would be worthy of the Mafia. This extremely effective and secret pipeline was operating under the protection of the Official Secrets Act for the illegal export of ivory and rhino horn.’

Breytenbach, who planned to retire from the army in 1987, accepted a post as park warden for the eastern Caprivi. One night, over beers and the glowing
coals of a fire, he tells a senior intelligence official about his ‘suspicions and misgivings, including the Mandrax that was being transported along the pipeline from Lusaka to Johannesburg’. He urges the man to crack down on the smugglers, get rid of the ‘Portuguese mafia’ and ‘take urgent steps, since the elephant herds and few remaining rhinos were being slaughtered’.

The man says little. A few weeks later, Breytenbach is informed that his appointment as park warden has been withdrawn at ‘the insistence of the SADF’. He appeals to the Chief of the Defence Force, General Jannie Geldenhuys, and is reinstated. But Military Intelligence officers have other ideas and lean on the man who offered Breytenbach the job. Somehow they succeed in having the appointment withdrawn again. There will be no reprieve this time.

For years, mutterings of SADF involvement in elephant and rhino poaching have been swirling in conservation circles in southern Africa. Animals are being decimated in southern Angola, it is said. But there is little hard evidence and Angola remains off-limits and largely ‘opaque to the media except for military propaganda’.

In 1974, Garth Owen-Smith, a lanky, bearded conservationist, is hiking near the Otjihipa Mountains on the border between Angola and Namibia. The trek takes him along the Kunene River on the last 100 kilometres of its journey to the sea. The silence is shattered by the ‘clatter of a helicopter flying upstream’. From a rocky ridge, Owen-Smith spies a tented camp, ‘presumably belonging to the SADF, where the helicopter landed’. The hikers press on and soon forget about the intrusion. They camp overnight.

‘[A]n hour before sunrise, we again heard the helicopter’s aggravating racket as it flew downriver,’ Owen-Smith writes in his book,
An Arid Eden
. ‘This time we just stood beneath a large winter thorn tree and let it go overhead before continuing our walk. An hour later it came back, and in the course of the day flew over us another four times … I assumed it was patrolling the river to make sure no SWAPO guerillas infiltrated the Kaokoveld from this part of Angola. But I was wrong.

‘The next morning we discovered the real reason why the helicopter had flown over us so many times the previous day. On the bank of the Kunene was the fresh carcass of an elephant bull. A chainsaw had been used to cut through the skull to remove its tusks. All four feet had also been sawn off, and a piece of skin cut from its flank. On closer examination I found a number of bullet holes in the carcass, at least one of which was fired from directly overhead. There were also boot prints from the site to a rocky ledge where the helicopter had landed …

‘About six kilometres further west, we found the clear imprints of a helicopter’s wheels in the soft sand. Nearby, in the dense vegetation, were more boot prints, and close to the riverbank a pool of dried blood indicated where a large animal had been killed. Around the site was the fresh spoor of at least one lion. I also picked up four empty 7,62 cartridge cases of South African military origin. It was clear that one or more lions had been shot there, and a drag mark to the place where the helicopter had landed showed that at least one carcass had been loaded onto it.’

Years later Robbie Hawthorne, the principal nature conservator for the southern port of South West Africa, tells Owen-Smith that elephants are being ‘killed on a massive scale in Angola, and that those involved [include] senior government officials’. One of Hawthorne’s key informants is Muller. When he is killed in the collision with the grader, Hawthorne remarks bitterly to Owen-Smith: ‘They got him.’

Hawthorne also tells him about a strange incident that occurred when security forces ambushed a group of men they believed to be SWAPO guerillas. One was killed and others were wounded in an exchange of fire. A large quantity of ivory and rhino horn was recovered. The men, it seemed, were ‘just a gang of poachers’. But among their number was an odd grouping of ‘white Angolan refugees’. The case was quashed before it could go to court. ‘They couldn’t be charged, because they knew too much,’ Hawthorne says.

By the mid-1980s, Owen-Smith recalls, ‘Strong rumours were surfacing of elephants and other wildlife being decimated in south-east Angola, where South African forces were operating in support of UNITA.’

In 1980, Clive Walker, then director of the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), red-flags the ‘large-scale destruction of wildlife and, in particular, of
elephants and rhinoceros’ throughout northern Namibia in a paper presented at a conference in Nairobi. He expresses concern about the status of the animal population in Angola, and notes that there are ‘considerable rumours and allegations’ about the perpetrators of the poaching. An aerial survey of the Kaokoland, an arid, mountainous region in northern Namibia known for its striking beauty, reveals that there are fewer than fifty elephants and fifteen rhinos left. The mummified carcasses of five elephants, their tusks removed, are discovered. Spent cartridge cases from automatic weapons litter the ground around them.