Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (2 page)

I have never considered myself a ‘conservationist’ or an ‘environmentalist’. But like many city-bound South Africans, I have something of a yearning for the escapism offered by the bush; for that magical illusion of the wild. It is something that most of us in South Africa take for granted.

For close on twenty years, my work as a journalist has led me to focus on people. Rarely have I written about the environment. I’ve written about crime and courts, rape and murder, politics and corruption, war, unrest and famine, atrocities and human rights abuses. I’ve even ‘paparazzied’ a ‘celebrity’ or two. I’ve done stories I’m proud of and many that I would rather forget. There was a time when I thought I’d seen it all, when I sometimes arrogantly believed that nothing could shock or surprise me any more. And then this came along. A story that has angered and gripped me; a story that epitomises the rot that is steadily permeating the heart of South African society. But also a story of a handful of dedicated cops, prosecutors, conservationists and game farmers who, despite minimal resources and overwhelming odds, are trying to fight back.

I didn’t set out to investigate rhino poaching. In a way, I stumbled on the story. I’d seen the articles in the papers, read the angry comments, heard the cries of outrage, followed the reports of a rhino shot here, a poacher killed there, and learnt of the nameless arrests. But I hadn’t taken much note. At the time I was mired in a seemingly endless pursuit of corrupt politicians, trying to find ‘quick hits’ that would guarantee page leads and a nice performance review.

Then, quite by chance, I came across the story of a South African, a farm attack and rifles being smuggled across the border into Zimbabwe to be used to kill rhinos for their horns. I was intrigued. I wanted to know more. And so I dug. And the more I dug, the more I unearthed, and the more horrified I became. Horrified at the tales of ruthless criminal enterprise on a scale that I could not have imagined.

What follows is the true story of poachers, killers, pimps, soldiers, generals, assassins, mercenaries, con men, prostitutes, gunrunners, game farmers, corrupt politicians, diplomats and scoundrels. It is also the story of one of South Africa’s most precious assets: an animal that has been around for fifty million years. This is the rhinos’ last stand. One that, tragically, they may not survive.

Website:
www.killingforprofit.com

Facebook:
facebook.com/KillingForProfit

Twitter:
@julianrademeyer

3 August 2009, Southern Zimbabwe

Blood seeps through the dark-green fabric of Hardlife’s anorak. At first, the scouts think he is dead. Only when they are about thirty metres away from him do they see movement.

Hardlife looks up at the two men standing over him. Brown boots. Olive-drab uniforms. One of them is holding a rifle. He asks the men for a cigarette. ‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ someone says. Hardlife insists. There’s a pack in his trouser pocket. They light the cigarette for him.

A hundred metres away, across a stream, a body is sprawled in the brush. Life Mbedzi is dead. A .303 rifle, the stock bloodied and smeared with fingerprints, lies nearby. It is fitted with a battered scope and a custom-made silencer.

The men had crossed the fence line into the Bubye Valley Conservancy the previous night under a full moon. There were three of them: Hardlife Nkomo, Life Mbedzi and Never Ndlovu. They carried packs, tinned food, two .303 rifles, including the one with the silencer, a handheld spotlight and an axe. They set up camp and slept fitfully until first light.

Game scouts discovered the remnants of their campfire shortly after 9 a.m. The ash and cinders had been covered up, but were still warm. An empty tin of baked beans was found hidden nearby.

Some distance from the camp, the scouts came across the scuffed boot prints of three men and the spoor of two adult rhino and a calf. It made their task a little easier. Poachers rarely deviate from spoor once they’re on it.

For six hours the scouts followed the tracks, moving quietly and steadily, careful not to miss any signs. Finally, they came across fresh spoor. Two ‘stop groups’ were quickly deployed to cut ahead and set up ambush positions.

They didn’t have long to wait. Fifteen minutes later, three figures emerged from the scrub and thorn trees. They walked slowly. A hundred metres … fifty metres … twenty-five metres. Then a shout tore through the silence. Startled, the poachers took flight. They ran hard, headlong into the scouts.

Life fired blindly at them with the silenced rifle. The scouts returned fire. Hardlife dropped like a stone. Life and Never sprinted across a narrow stream, the scouts following close behind. Suddenly Life stopped in his tracks, swung around and fired another shot. An instant later, he was dead, struck by a scout’s bullet. Never Ndlovu kept running.

The 340 000-hectare Bubye Valley Conservancy is one of the last strongholds of Zimbabwe’s embattled rhino population. More than 80 per cent of the country’s rhinos are now situated on a handful of private conservancies in the country’s south-eastern Lowveld.

In 1970 there were an estimated 65 000 black rhino across Africa. By the 1980s, most had been slaughtered by poachers. Today, only 5 000 remain. In Zimbabwe, there are just over 400.

In recent years, Zimbabwe has experienced some of the worst levels of rhino poaching since the 1980s. The killings have been fuelled by Zimbabwe’s ongoing political and economic turmoil, large-scale illegal hunting by ruthless South African safari operators, and growing demand for rhino horn on the black markets of Southeast Asia.

In 2000, President Robert Mugabe’s government began a ‘fast-track’ land-resettlement programme that saw hundreds of predominantly white-owned farms seized by squatters and independence ‘war veterans’ determined to reclaim land they said had been ‘stolen by settlers’. The seizures – which Mugabe repeatedly claimed were intended to benefit the ‘poor, landless masses’ – were often accompanied by violence and used to intimidate and attack political opponents of the ruling ZANU-PF party.

Mugabe and his allies reportedly seized nearly half the country’s commercial farms for themselves and their cronies. Wildlife conservancies and plantations were parcelled off to a ‘well-connected elite’, with devastating results.

Agricultural production reportedly fell by as much as 70 per cent over the course of a decade, with production losses estimated at nearly R100 billion (about $12 billion). By 2002 it was conservatively estimated that game worth R330 million (about $40 million) had been lost since the start of the farm invasions. Some conservancies had lost up to 60 per cent of their animals. In places, poachers tore down game fences and used the wire to make hundreds of snares.

A US embassy assessment in 2003 attributed the dramatic escalation in poaching to widespread hunger, land seizures, and ‘the general breakdown of law and order’. Some ‘commercial operators’ had also taken advantage of the ‘relative chaos by marketing “bush meat” and smuggling rhino horn’.

Some South African hunters and safari operators had also been quick to cash in. ‘A lot of South Africans thought Zimbabwe was going to the dogs, and their attitude was, “Let’s get in and get our cut,”’ says Blondie Leathem, Bubye’s general manager.

In the Gwaai Valley Conservancy, near the Hwange National Park in western Zimbabwe, South African hunters were accused of ‘shooting whole herds of animals’. Describing the carnage, a conservationist I interviewed said: ‘Gwaai was destroyed early on. There were a lot of South African hunters involved in raping that place – just shooting entire herds of zebra and wildebeest.’

Zimbabwean rhino specialist, Raoul du Toit – the man credited with driving the formation of the conservancies in the early 1990s – said that while ‘impoverished Zimbabweans may claim that they are driven to poaching in order to feed themselves, relatively wealthy sports hunters from South Africa have no such excuse – their unethical behaviour is driven by financial interests and thrill-seeking’.

There were other elements involved, too. US diplomatic cables warned of ‘heavily armed “military” personnel’ linked to incidents of rhino poaching. A 2009 cable from the Harare embassy reported on ‘persistent rumours that
senior government officials may be involved in poaching and smuggling’. The cable’s author noted that journalists and conservationists had been ‘warned not to investigate too deeply’.

Hardlife takes a drag on the cigarette and coughs. He speaks slowly, weakened by shock and loss of blood. The silenced .303 had been given to them by a South African, he tells his interrogators. A ‘heavy white man’ called Johannes. He said the gang had previously supplied him with zebra skins and rhino horns. He had arranged to collect them at 8 p.m. that night at a spot along the tar road near the conservancy, about sixty kilometres north of the Zimbabwean border post at Beitbridge. The gang would leave a tree branch in the road to signal that all was safe.

At least 123 rhinos were poached in Zimbabwe in 2008 – the highest number recorded since 1987 and nearly three times the number killed in 2007. The Bubiana Conservancy, just to the north of the Bubye Valley, bore the brunt of the initial attacks. One of Bubiana’s scouts was killed; another was wounded. By the end of 2008, seventy-one rhinos had been shot in the Lowveld conservancies.

In one incident, a group of Zimbabwe National Parks (Zimparks) rangers and rhino monitors surprised a gang of poachers who were resting among the granite boulders of a
koppie
. Two rangers and a poacher simultaneously opened fire with AK-47s, spraying the hillside with bullets. They were only about seven metres apart, but in the chaos most of the shots went wide. One of the poachers was hit in the arm. Somehow, the rangers escaped unscathed. Nineteen spent cartridge casings were later picked up at the scene.

The carnage in Bubiana peaked in June 2008. Over the next six months, nearly fifty black rhino were poached. In the first five months of 2009, a further twenty-four were killed. The remaining rhinos – twenty-two in all – were translocated to Bubye in May 2009. Teams of scouts, veterinarians
and conservationists worked frantically to move the survivors. But the slaughter continued to the very end. At night, as Bubiana’s last rhinos were trucked out of the conservancy, the sound of automatic rifle fire could be heard rolling off the hills.