Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (20 page)

Twenty years after the operation’s demise, questions persist. Most will probably never be answered. Did the Lock team become pawns in a much bigger scheme? Were they co-opted by apartheid’s securocrats into some sinister ‘third-force’ operation? Although it seems unlikely, a secret 1992 military report offers some tantalising, if inconclusive, clues. It was drawn up by the South African Defence Force chief of staff at the time, General Pierre Steyn, following a probe into revelations about a shadowy Military Intelligence unit and its links to death-squad operatives and political violence. Steyn reported his findings directly to the then state president, F.W. de Klerk. It led to a military purge dubbed the ‘Night of the Generals’ in which twenty-three senior officers were sacked.

De Klerk told Parliament that Steyn had reported verbally to him, and for years South Africans were led to believe that nothing existed on paper. Two years later, in 1994, the ANC swept to power in South Africa’s first democratic elections, and in 1997 the existence of a written report was finally confirmed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But it would be another decade before it was declassified, and only due to the persistence of the South African History Archive (SAHA), an independent research institution.

The report provides details of a clandestine operation run by the Special Forces reconnaissance directorate. Project Pastoor, as it was known, is described as a ‘peg for nearly all official operations/activities of Directorate Reconnaissance’. And many of those activities were illegal.

According to the report, Pastoor was linked to ‘alleged weapons caches in Portugal for utilisation during an internal uprising, weapons caches in the RSA and southern Africa, and clandestine transport of weapons by means of a modified aeroplane; alleged instruction to murder two Portuguese operators in detention; alleged training provided to resistance movements of other countries; alleged involvement in [political] violence on the East Rand and alleged involvement in train murders …’

Buried in an annexure is this reference: ‘Fronts of Operation Pastoor are in Kenya, Zambia and Mauritius, mainly in nature reserves. Strong contact
with the British SAS exists.’ It notes that there is documentary evidence of this and that the allegations are ‘probably true’.

‘Could it be,’ asks Ellis, ‘that Operation Lock really did get hijacked by the South African Special Forces?’

A diminutive Vietnamese woman peers uncertainly down the sights of a rifle balanced on a tripod. Her stance is unnatural. Her clothes betray her inexperience: white sneakers, fake Levi’s and a bright-red pullover worn underneath an oversized two-tone bush shirt.

Three burly South African professional hunters – or PHs, as they’re commonly known – crowd around her, guiding her aim. She squeezes off two shots in quick succession. Forty metres away, a white rhino lets out a high-pitched squeal, falls – legs thrashing – and bleeds out into the dust. The young woman poses for photographs with her kill, arms held rigidly at her sides, her head bowed. She doesn’t smile.

In other snapshots she can be seen standing behind the carcass, its head propped up on a rock. A Vietnamese man – also dressed incongruously in jeans, white tennis shoes and a pink shirt – poses beside her.

‘She didn’t have a clue,’ a witness to the hunt tells me later. ‘She had clearly never fired a rifle before and seemed almost embarrassed to be there.’

South Africa and the tiny kingdom of Swaziland are the only countries in the world where rhinos can be hunted for sport. Over the past decade, the demand for rhino trophies has grown dramatically. But the vast majority of recent trophy hunters have not been wealthy Europeans or Americans thirsting for a ‘big African adventure’ or living out fantasies of the ‘Great White Hunters’ who once cut a bloody swathe across the continent. The trophies that recent hunters have bagged would not be mounted over a bar
or in a living room as a stimulus for tall tales of escapades in the rugged African bush.

Like the young woman, they hunted in jeans, tennis shoes and brightly coloured T-shirts, not the neatly pressed designer safari gear that the Americans and Europeans pick off the shelves before flying to ‘Africa’.

Most of these hunters came from Vietnam, a country with no tradition of big-game sport hunting and no recognised professional hunting associations. They didn’t go on luxury safaris. They would arrive and leave in a hurry. In most cases, their trips were sponsored by unnamed benefactors and they had just enough money to get by for a few days. Many of them were poor, drawn from crowded tenements and crumbling slums, or ramshackle rural hamlets and villages.

If you dig through the jumbled reams of spreadsheets listing details of rhino hunting permits issued by South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs, you’ll find discernible patterns: clusters of hunters’ addresses situated in the same cramped areas of Vinh City, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Lang Son. Some are congregated in cross-streets near the same anonymous office blocks. The names of the same rural communes recur. And sometimes you’ll find the same names and passport numbers; people who obtain a permit to hunt a rhino one year and return the next for another.

The numbers of permits and dates on which they were issued also show a definite pattern. For example, take the Ngaka Modiri Molema District in South Africa’s North West province, near the Botswana border. The provincial capital, Mafikeng, lies at its heart. On 9 June 2010, eight consecutively numbered permits to shoot white rhinos were issued to a party of Vietnamese nationals. The following month, four permits were issued in a single day to Vietnamese hunters.

Move across to the neighbouring Dr Ruth Segomotsi Mompati District, which accounts for the vast majority of these rhino ‘hunts’, and you’ll find batches of permits issued over the same period in twos and fives to groups of Vietnamese hunters. For instance, on 23 July 2010, records show that permits numbered O 21436 through O 21440 were issued to Le Viet Tuan, Dang Cong Tuan, Vo Hien Nha, Nguyen Dinh Hoang and Phan van Tanh. Two of the permit-holders came from the hamlet of Nghi Khanh, a rural community
surrounded by rice fields and farmland just north of Vinh City in northern Vietnam. The other three all came from Vinh City itself.

A similar pattern is evident in North West’s Dr Kenneth Kaunda District. On 28 July 2009, three permits were issued to Vietnamese hunters; 20 November 2009 – four permits; 14 December 2009 – three permits; 15 December 2009 – six permits; 25 March 2010 – three permits; 15 April 2010 – five permits.

‘None of the Vietnamese can hunt,’ says Dawie Groenewald, the notorious safari operator who faces hundreds of criminal charges related to allegations of illicit rhino horn deals and illegal hunts. ‘I’ll be straight with you. They are not here to hunt. They are here to get the horn. That’s it. These guys are making so much fucking money out of rhino horn. They’ve been trading in it for thousands of years and we’ll never stop it.

‘I make very good money out of the hunts. When the Vietnamese came in, all of a sudden they started paying R50 000, R60 000 and R70 000 a kilogram. Rhino prices shot through the roof. American hunters won’t pay that. A guy who sells a rhino hunt to an American is fucked up, because he’s not going to make any money. What does it matter who shoots a rhino, an American or a Vietnamese? You go with whoever can pay the most money. That’s the way it works. It’s not my problem what they do with the horn over there.’

It’s called ‘pseudo-hunting’. It isn’t hunting, it’s shooting. And the ‘hunters’ are little more than pawns recruited by criminal syndicates to acquire horn for the medicinal black markets of Southeast Asia and China. Everyone knows it, from the outfitters and professional hunters who arrange the hunts to the permitting officials and bureaucrats who are meant to enforce the regulations.

In July 2009, the Professional Hunters’ Association of South Africa (PHASA) took the unprecedented step of advising members ‘not to book and conduct hunts with nationals from Vietnam or other Far Eastern countries’ until the government had ‘removed this abuse from our legal system’.

In a statement, PHASA’s then president, Peter Butland, said that ‘expert evidence from enforcement and trade monitoring agencies [has] indicated a
direct link between the export of rhino horn from recent legal rhino hunting by Vietnamese, from rhino poaching on private and state land, from cross-border smuggling, from the theft of rhino horn … and Far Eastern syndicates’.

It was a warning that went largely unheeded.

The first Vietnamese ‘sports hunter’ to be issued a permit to shoot a rhino in South Africa arrived in the country in 2003. Others soon followed. Records show that nine rhino ‘trophies’ and two rhino ‘horns’ were exported from South Africa to Vietnam that year. This implies – if you take into account that a trophy comprises both front and back horns – that at least ten white rhinos were shot and twenty horns obtained in pseudo-hunts.

The following year, three trophies were taken and then, according to the CITES trade database, the market escalated dramatically. Twelve trophies – twenty-four horns – left South African shores in 2005, bound for Vietnam. In 2006, at least ninety-eight horns were shipped. By 2007, that number had jumped to 146 horns. In 2008, it dipped to ninety-eight horns, then rose again sharply to 136 horns in 2009 and 131 in 2010.

In total, over a seven-year period, at least 329 rhinos were ‘hunted’ by Vietnamese nationals, netting about 659 horns. Assuming that the average rhino horn weighed between three kilograms and five kilograms, this means that between two and three tons of horn were ‘legally’ exported to Vietnam over that period. In black-market terms, that’s worth anywhere been $200 million and $300 million. A bargain for the syndicates, considering that the hunts set them back only about $20 million in trophy fees.

The figures for the number of rhino hunts are problematic and could potentially be higher. A report issued by the international wildlife-trade-monitoring network TRAFFIC in August 2012, suggests that as many as 400 rhino were shot in pseudo-hunts. The South African Department of Environmental Affairs’ records on rhino hunting permits and trophy exports are notoriously chaotic. In 2010, for instance, CITES data shows that South Africa reported exporting twenty ‘trophies’ and ninety-one ‘horns’ to Vietnam. The previous year it reportedly exported thirty-seven ‘trophies’ and sixty-two
‘horns’. But both CITES and South Africa’s Threatened or Protected Species (TOPS) regulations prohibit the trade of individual rhino horns and allow only for sports-hunted trophies to be legally exported.

The department readily admits that there are severe inconsistencies. These, they say, are due to a variety of factors but, most significantly, the complexity of the reporting requirements – which many provincial officials fail to grasp – and the lack of a centralised computer system linking all nine provinces and their data to the national department.

‘The big problem,’ says Sonja Meintjes, the department’s deputy director for biodiversity compliance, ‘is that we do not have an integrated electronic permitting system … To find out how many permits have been issued, we have to write to each of the nine provincial permitting offices to ask for the data. After a week, we might get four or five provinces responding to us. It is a nightmare. We see the strangest things in provincial reports: species that are not species; or numbers that are incorrect. Three thousand when it should be three hundred, or even thirty. You get things listed like lion horns. Have you ever seen a lion horn? Or even things like ivory from a lion. That is why it is so dangerous to work with that information.’