Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (13 page)

In 1982, Hawthorne ignores a standing instruction prohibiting Frama trucks from being searched. He pulls one over, breaks open the locks of the container and discovers it is filled with green army
trommels
. Before he can inspect the cargo, the driver makes a call to Pretoria. The SADF sends Hawthorne a message via Polla Swart, the head of nature conservation in Namibia: the truck must be allowed to proceed.

Swart is aware of the agreement between the SADF and his department that Frama trucks will not be subject to searches. Shortly after his appointment in 1981, he had been visited by an SADF colonel attached to Military Intelligence. The man reminded him that Frama trucks conveying wood and ivory were not to be stopped – on instruction from ‘the highest authority’ in South Africa.

Further evidence pointing to South African government complicity in the trafficking of rhino horn and ivory emerges in 1982, when another conservationist and a leading authority on the illicit trade, Dr Esmond Bradley Martin, publishes his book,
Run Rhino Run
. His investigations reveal that South Africa’s officially reported exports of rhino horn don’t tally with the corresponding import records in Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan.

In 1978 – the year following the imposition of an international trade ban on rhino horn by CITES – South Africa reports exports of 149.5 kilograms of horn to Hong Kong. Records show that the horn originated from the Natal Parks Board. But careful scrutiny of trade data in key Asian countries shows there have been other undeclared exports. Between June 1978 and February 1979, 344.7 kilograms of horn were imported into Hong Kong from South Africa. Japanese records show imports of 350 kilograms of horn for 1978. In
Taiwan, there are records showing a further 166 kilograms originating from South Africa that year.

The Natal Parks Board – which until then had been the main seller of rhino horn in South Africa – stops trading after the 1978 sale to comply with the CITES ban. More than 100 horns are locked away in a safe in Pietermaritzburg. By late 1979, authorities in most South African provinces officially prohibit the export of rhino products. Despite this, Japan’s statistics show 587 kilograms of horn imported from South Africa in 1980. Bradley Martin believes the horn is being routed from Angola, Namibia, Zambia and Tanzania through South Africa and on to Asia. But who is doing the killing?

Johannesburg ivory and rhino horn traders tell Bradley Martin that the nexus of trade lies in Rundu. One of them claims that between 1976 and 1979, he bought a ton of dried rhinoceros hide and 600 kilograms of horn there. He estimates that his purchases accounted for 40 per cent of the trade in Rundu at the time.

The shroud of secrecy surrounding the South African military and government’s role in ivory and rhino horn smuggling is shattered in June 1988. Craig van Note’s testimony to a US congressional oversight committee and his accusations that South Africa is ‘one of the largest wildlife outlaws in the world’ sends the SADF brass scurrying. In a clear reference to the ‘Rundu mafia’, Van Note says: ‘The Angolan ivory trafficking is managed by two former Portuguese colonists from Angola who have close ties with the South African military … Remarkably, nobody in Africa – or even in CITES – wants to talk about this scandal, which makes other, more publicised poaching in East Africa pale by comparison.’

Just over five months later, the SADF completes its cover-up. A sham military board of inquiry, chaired by Brigadier Ben de Wet Roos, completely exonerates them, saying there is ‘no evidence to prove the Defence Force was responsible for or involved in’ poaching. The only concession is that, over an eighteen-month period beginning in 1978, ‘small quantities of
ivory, captured by UNITA from poachers and others in Angola, were transported by the Defence Force on behalf of UNITA … This practice was stopped by the Defence Force and UNITA at the end of 1979.’ As far as the SADF is concerned, the matter is closed.

But not for Breytenbach. Behind the scenes, he lobbies senior SADF generals, asking them to confront what they don’t want to know – that the allegations and rumours are true. He writes a letter to the Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, setting out his concerns. The letter is ignored.

Finally, on 28 October 1989, Breytenbach breaks ranks and does the unthinkable. He drafts a letter, attaches an emotional account of what he saw in northern Namibia and Angola, and sends it to
Sunday Times
editor Tertius Myburgh. Weeks later, the
Sunday Times
publishes Breytenbach’s devastating revelations of the ‘ivory and rhino horn smuggling racket’ and an exposé of Frama Intertrading under the headline: ‘Veteran links SADF to UNITA ivory slaughter’. But it will take the death of apartheid and another six years for the veil of secrecy to finally be lifted.

In October 1994, five months after South Africa’s historic first democratic elections, the country’s new president, Nelson Mandela, signs an order appointing a commission of inquiry into the allegations. It will be chaired by appeal court judge Mark Kumleben. At sixty-seven, Kumleben is one of South Africa’s most highly regarded judges; a man of unimpeachable honesty, known for his razor-sharp intellect, fairness and gentle manner.

By then, Frama is no more. The SADF had discovered, somewhat belatedly, in 1986 that Lobbs and Maia had been ripping them off and owed the Defence Force R3.2 million. In February 1988, days before the SADF approached a court for an order liquidating the company, its name was abruptly changed to Elegant Food Distributors. The SADF did not want Frama to feature as a respondent in proceedings. On liquidation, the company’s only asset was a cash amount of R2 599, hidden in a trust account.

The Kumleben commission’s terms of reference are unusually broad, allowing it to investigate the smuggling of ivory and rhino horn, particularly
of Angolan and Mozambican origin, through South Africa; the involvement of South African citizens in the illicit trade; and the illegal trade of ivory and rhino horn of South African origin. But while it can make recommendations, it is not empowered to bring the guilty to book. Witnesses are also able to rely on the legal privilege against self-incrimination.

Twenty-three people are called to give evidence at public hearings held in Durban in August and September 1995. Breytenbach, who is there every day, listens with growing anger to the ‘lies’ of some of the country’s top generals. So is Burman, who is flown to Durban and booked into the Holiday Inn Garden Court at the commission’s expense. Kumleben’s quest for evidence is a mammoth task. Over the course of a year, the commission approaches nearly 140 potential witnesses, from government departments and organisations across southern Africa, the United States and Europe, for information.

At the heart of its inquiries are the allegations that South Africa, from the 1970s, had served as a ‘clearing house’ for the covert, illicit and large-scale handling and disposal of ivory and rhino horn originating from other African countries and sent overseas, principally to the Far East’; that the SADF was ‘covertly involved in the receipt, transportation, sale and export of
inter alia
ivory and rhino horn’; that the SADF ‘aided and abetted the slaughter and destruction of elephant herds and rhino … in Angola and Mozambique’; and that these operations were ‘sanctioned by highly placed personnel of the SADF, State officials and Ministers of State’.

In January 1996, Kumleben releases his report. Running to 226 pages, it reads, despite the dry legalese, like a thriller. It unsparingly strips apart the Defence Force’s lies. The SADF, Kumleben finds, ‘officially, though covertly, participated in the illicit possession and transportation of ivory and rhino horn from Angola and Namibia’ to South Africa between 1978 and 1986. ‘The evidence establishes that the SADF involvement in the handling and transport of ivory and probably rhino horn, directly and in conjunction with Frama, was illegal.’

The SADF was involved in Frama from ‘the womb to the tomb’, he finds, and the ham-handed Roos inquiry was a ‘charade’ that can accurately be described as ‘slapdash and superficial’.

Breytenbach and Burman are vindicated. But no arrests or prosecutions
ever flow from the commission’s findings. Breytenbach will never forget the ‘inherent deviousness’ of the SADF and the ‘calculating way in which those beautiful animals were appraised by the scheming eyes of South African Military Intelligence officers … To them, an elephant was a huge piece of worthless, mobile meat, carrying towards its front end valuable tusks under its ludicrous, hosepipe nose.’

The file was meant to have been destroyed twenty-two years ago. But the old man kept it, hoarding it among a stack of documents in a locked filing cabinet. ‘I felt at the time that it was important,’ he explains. The creased manila folder is marked in red, ‘Private and confidential’, and stamped: ‘Investigations. Subject: Operation Lock’. There’s a note pencilled on the cover: ‘Illegal rhino horn smuggling’.

He opens the file, crooked fingers grasping at yellowed pages. ‘You didn’t get this from me,’ he says softly, as if the ghosts of a forgotten scandal might hear us. He leafs through it. ‘
Secret: No unauthorised dissemination … Warning. Compromise of contents or part thereof of this document could lead to the death of personnel involved in the operation
.’

The folder contains details of a disastrous covert operation aimed at targeting, and even killing, rhino and ivory-poaching kingpins in the late 1980s. The ensuing scandal reached into the highest echelons of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the Dutch royal family and a British mercenary firm staffed by some of the most decorated veterans of Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS). It is the story of gamekeepers turned poachers and men who may well have become the willing pawns of apartheid’s spies.

The seeds for what became Operation Lock are planted in early 1987, when Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, the WWF’s founding president, embarks on a field trip to visit conservation projects in Nigeria. He is accompanied by the organisation’s head of Africa programmes, Dr John Hanks, an internationally
respected biologist and conservationist with a doctorate from Cambridge. Hanks had worked as a biologist in the Kafue and Luangwa Valley national parks in Zambia, had headed the biological sciences department at Natal University and been director of research at Natal Parks. Few could match his experience or credentials.

Bernhard is appalled by the plight of the continent’s rhino population. Black rhinos, in particular, are under severe threat. At the start of the 1970s there had been an estimated 65 000 of them. Twenty-seven years later, only about 4 000 remain. Millions of dollars have been spent on security and rangers, but little is being done to gather intelligence on the middlemen and kingpins driving the illicit trade.

Bernhard asks Hanks if he knows of an organisation that can be tasked with tracking down and exposing the smugglers. It will be ‘extremely dangerous and sensitive’ work, he says. He is prepared to fund the project and, according to Hanks, ‘he stressed that he wanted to do this in his personal capacity, using his own money, because he realised it was a sensitive topic and one that he felt should not be registered by the WWF as a project and the funds should not go through WWF books’.