Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (24 page)

‘Professional hunting remains by and large white and male-dominated –
visibly separate from most South African communities,’ the former Minister of Environmental Affairs, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, is on record as saying. Kitshoff is at pains to emphasise that perceptions of hunting as ‘by and large an Afrikaans-speaking sport’ are largely wrong.

In recent media statements on the growing number of pseudo-hunts channelling rhino to medicinal black markets, PHASA has walked a legal tightrope, condemning ‘any illegal activities’, but stopping short of pointing fingers or, as its former president did, calling on members to avoid conducting hunts with Vietnamese or Thai nationals.

This approach was based on legal advice, Kitshoff says. She doesn’t recall Butland’s statement. ‘We have specifically stayed away from singling out specific countries. You have got to be careful about generalising about a country. We all know that it appears the Vietnamese are sitting behind all of this and are involved in it. But the outfitter’s responsibility lies with the permit. He must be responsible. At the end of the day, it is his choice about whom he hunts with or not. There are many who would quite simply not conduct hunts like that and others who would.’

I tell her that many of the professional hunters and outfitters I’ve spoken to have said that they are fully aware of the fact that the Vietnamese hunters are here for the horn and not the trophy. Kitshoff seems surprised. ‘The general feedback I’ve received is definitely not that,’ she says. Later, I send her an email with Butland’s 2009 comments on Vietnamese hunters. She writes back: ‘I would appreciate it if we could just keep to our latest press releases.’

PHASA’s balancing act seems designed to ensure that it doesn’t alienate its members. ‘You must remember [that] we are not just there to grind our members. We are also there to stand up for them,’ Kitshoff says.

Dawie Groenewald is the only PHASA member to have been expelled from the association in recent years. His expulsion in 2006 was in relation to unrelated ‘breaches of PHASA’s constitution’, including ‘violations of laws’ and hunting activities in Zimbabwe that ‘had nothing to do with the rhino thing’.

Following the arrest of Groenewald and several others in 2010, Kitshoff told a newspaper: ‘We are looking at blacklisting any professional hunters implicated in this scandal. If any of the other people arrested are PHASA members, they will be immediately suspended. If they are convicted of
poaching, or anything related to the case, they will also be expelled.’ But she cautioned that ‘in South Africa, you can still be a professional hunter after losing your PHASA membership’.

At least one PHASA member, Randy Westraadt – a professional hunter based in Bloemfontein in the Free State – played a pivotal role in the growth of the Vietnamese trophy industry. I first heard his name from Groenewald. ‘There are about ten guys who shoot an awful lot of rhino. I don’t have a patch on them,’ he complained. ‘Randy Westraadt and people like that are shooting ten times more rhinos than we do.’

Westraadt has previously attracted controversy over his involvement in lion hunting. In 2012, he represented the professional hunting industry on the executive committee of the South African Predator Breeders Association, an organisation accused of championing captive or ‘canned’ lion hunting.

Hunting records show that between September 2009 and November 2010, Westraadt was involved in at least thirty-four rhino hunts with Vietnamese clients. In at least four cases, the agent acting for the clients was Chris van Wyk. Westraadt’s website,
choiceafricasafaris.co.za
, quotes the prices of rhino hunts by the trophy inch. A white rhino-bull trophy would cost US$4 000 an inch for a horn of up to twenty-four inches in length. Above twenty-five inches, the price rises to US$4 500 an inch. A twenty-four-inch horn would therefore cost US$96 000.

Westraadt’s closest competitors at the time appear to have been hunter Frikkie Jacobs and his father, Kobus. Between them, according to the records of hunting permits issued, they took part in at least forty-two rhino hunts with Vietnamese hunters between August 2009 and July 2010. Many of the hunts took place at the Jacobs family’s Shingalana Lion & Rhino Game Reserve in North West province. Another PH, Brad Rolston, conducted at least twenty-four hunts over a fifteen-month period between 2009 and 2010. A key link is safari operator Alexander Steyn, who was the outfitter for several of the Vietnamese hunts conducted by Westraadt and Van Wyk.

In 2010, Steyn was also a major rhino buyer, purchasing about seventeen rhinos from SANParks for just over R4 million. Steyn is a controversial figure who has been implicated in the ‘canned’ hunting of cheetahs. In 2005, an undercover journalist from the
Mail & Guardian
newspaper reportedly
negotiated with Steyn for the purchase of two captive-bred cheetahs for a hunt. When Steyn was eventually confronted and asked if he was involved in canned hunting, he replied: ‘What is canned hunting? Canned hunting takes place in a fenced-off area. Yet the whole of South Africa, the whole of Africa, is fenced. The whole of Africa is canned.’

What is apparent from the records and hunting registers – which one investigator laughingly describes as a ‘great suspect list’ – is that a relatively small group of a dozen or so hunters are the key protagonists in trophy hunts involving Southeast Asian hunters.

In March 2012, South Africa’s environment minister, Edna Molewa, announced, somewhat belatedly, that her department had asked Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to conduct inspections to determine whether trophies shot in South Africa by Vietnamese citizens were still in the hunters’ possession. A list of names and addresses taken from hunting-permit applications was provided to the Vietnamese authorities. Until the verification process had been completed, South Africa would refuse all hunting permits to Vietnamese hunters, she said.

In the same month, Walter Slippers, a safari operator who had been involved in a number of rhino hunts, brought an urgent application in the North Gauteng High Court to force the Limpopo provincial wildlife authorities to issue hunting permits to five Vietnamese hunters. The permits had initially been authorised, but, following an advisory from the national department calling on provinces ‘not to issue hunting permits to Vietnamese citizens due to various concerns regarding illegal hunting practices’, the permits were withheld.

The court ordered that the permits be issued, subject to the Vietnamese hunters being interviewed by wildlife officials. Should the interviews call into question the legitimacy of the hunt, the department could return to court, the judge said.

The arrangements for the interviews were made, but on the appointed day, Slippers conceded that his clients were not even in the country. The interviews were scrapped, the department went back to court and, based on their ‘legitimate concerns’, the court ordered that the hunting permits need not be issued.

In April 2012, Molewa gazetted a revised set of norms and standards governing trophy hunting, the microchipping of horns, the marking of live rhinos and the manner in which samples should be collected for DNA profiling.

Rhino hunts now have to comply with seventeen specific requirements as opposed to eleven under earlier 2009 guidelines.

All hunting permit applications have to be accompanied by a raft of supporting documentation. Foreign hunters have to prove that they belong to a hunting association recognised by their government, and provide a CV detailing previous hunting experience or ‘proof of previous experience in hunting any African species’. Permitting officials are now also required to consider ‘whether the country of usual residence of the hunting client, where the rhinoceros horns and the rest of the hunting trophy will be imported to, has adequate legislation to ensure that rhinoceros horns and the rest of the hunting trophy will be used for the purpose as indicated on the CITES export permit’.

Magdel Boshoff, a deputy director of policy development in the Department of Environmental Affairs, says nature conservation officials can now refuse hunting permits where previously they had no grounds on which to do so.

‘Before, if the hunter complied with all the provisions, we didn’t have any measures in place to refuse a permit. It was the exception to the rule for a permit to be refused. Now we need all that supporting information and, if it isn’t there, we can refuse to issue a permit. We’re in a position to refuse a permit on the basis that someone isn’t a bona fide hunter.’

By early 2012, the Vietnamese pseudo-hunts had ground to a halt. But already there were worrying signs that the syndicates were adapting and were looking for other fronts for their operations. New patterns had begun to emerge in the hunting registers, including a curious spike in rhino hunts conducted by hunters from the Czech Republic and Poland. Since July 2009, they had shot thirty-four rhinos.

‘The Czech hunters are being specifically recruited by the Vietnamese to hunt rhinos,’ a senior South African investigator told me. ‘When the Czech police went and interviewed the hunters, the guys confessed and said, “Yes,
we were recruited by the Vietnamese to go and shoot, this is what we were paid and here are the permits.” That is how big this thing is. It is a worldwide phenomenon, and the syndicates are always one step ahead.’

18 June 2011

Dawie Groenewald would shoot a hundred rhinos a year, given half a chance. ‘It’s a good business,’ he says. In fact, right now he’d probably kill every rhino he could lay his hands on. ‘I feel so fucking angry about the system that I want to shoot as many rhinos as I can get,’ he tells me. ‘And that’s not right.’

It is almost a year since Groenewald, his wife Sariette and nine others, including professional hunters, veterinarians, a pilot and farm labourers, were arrested by the police’s organised crime unit. The fifteen-month investigation – called ‘Project Cruiser’ – was described by police as ‘a huge stride in our undying effort to thwart rhino poaching’. An SAPS spokesman, Colonel Vish Naidoo, claimed that the Groenewald syndicate had been linked to literally ‘hundreds of rhino poaching incidents’. Newspapers were filled with grisly accounts of the ‘Rhino Slaughter Farm’ and the rotting carcasses exhumed from mass graves. Outside the Musina Regional Court, where the suspects appeared, demonstrators held up placards exhorting: ‘
Sny Dawie se horing af
’ (Cut off Dawie’s horn). There were cries of ‘Rhino killer!’ as Groenewald arrived at court with his wife.

Prosecutors threw the book at him. The indictment in the matter of the
State v Dawid Jacobus Groenewald
and ten others runs to 637 pages, and there are 185 witnesses lined up to testify. Groenewald himself faces 1 736 counts of racketeering, money-laundering, fraud, intimidation, illegal hunting and dealing in rhino horns. He is accused of killing fifty-nine of his own rhinos for their horns, then getting rid of the carcasses by burying them, burning them or selling them to a local butchery. In addition he’s charged with illegally dehorning dozens of the animals and selling at least 384 rhino
horns over a four-year period. The case – which at the time of writing in late 2012 had yet to go to trial – could drag on for years.

But Groenewald is adamant. ‘I am not a poacher,’ he tells me as we sit on the deck of the hunting lodge at his farm Prachtig, sixty kilometres south of Musina. ‘That word makes me sick. It is not necessary for me to poach a rhino.’

I first heard Groenewald’s name in Zimbabwe a few months before his arrest during my initial inquiries into Johan Roos, the Musina poacher accused of supplying silenced rifles to poaching gangs.

I had gone to meet Charles Davy, the founder and driving force behind the Bubye Valley Conservancy in Zimbabwe’s south-eastern Lowveld. It was there that two silenced rifles – including one stolen during a farm attack in South Africa – had been recovered and linked to Roos.

Davy is a controversial figure. He has made millions through property development, game farming and hunting. Until 2006, he had been a director and shareholder of HHK Safaris, one of Zimbabwe’s largest hunting operators.

Dubbed the ‘great white survivor’ by a British press fixated on his daughter Chelsy’s long on-again, off-again relationship with Prince Harry, Davy was one of the few white farmers to weather the storm of Robert Mugabe’s land grabs. Davy said it had come at a price: ‘I have given up rather a large part of my life to end up with the bit that I have left.’ Four of his farms, covering an area of about 56 000 hectares, were ceded to the government for resettlement. Despite this, rumours persist that he is somehow protected because of his ties to leading figures in Mugabe’s government. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has accused Davy of ‘sustaining’ the Mugabe regime, a claim he denies.

But they point to his friendship with Webster Shamu, Zimbabwe’s information minister and one of the old guard close to Mugabe. Davy claims he has known Shamu since the mid-1990s and that they have a ‘legitimate, longstanding business partnership’ in a safari business. ‘He’s a person I like and get along with,’ he told me.