Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (53 page)

Significantly, the view of animals and plants as commodities that exist to be exploited permeates the country’s conservation laws and regulations. Legislation governing trade in protected species refers specifically to animals that have ‘scientific, environmental or high economic value’.

In effect, to qualify for regulatory protection, an animal or plant must have a quantifiable value. If it has no value – even if it is incredibly rare or endangered – it has little, if any, legislative protection.

Fines imposed for wildlife crime also have virtually no deterrent effect. The enforcers regard the penalties they impose as income generators. The criminal syndicates see them as little more than an irksome business expense – a tax on stupidity for those caught and unable to bribe their way out of trouble.

The port of Haiphong, for instance, saw a series of massive ivory seizures between early 2009 and 2011. The most spectacular occurred in May 2010, when twenty-two tons of ivory was seized from a container that had been shipped from Malaysia. The ivory was being stored in a warehouse. Customs officials began agitating to sell it, and eventually Vietnam approached CITES for clarity. They were told in no uncertain terms that the ivory could not be sold. By then, some of it had already disappeared, supposedly ‘eaten by rats’.

Since then, ivory seizures at Haiphong have ground to a halt. ‘Essentially the customs people have taken a decision that if they can’t make money out
of stopping the trade, why should they bother stopping it,’ a conservationist familiar with the matter told me.

At the time of writing, nearly a year after the talks in Johannesburg, the MOU – little more than a formalised ‘gentleman’s agreement’ – had yet to be signed. But there were persistent mutterings that the signing was imminent. Somewhat disingenuously, the Department of Environmental Affairs’ deputy director-general, Fundisile Mketeni, claimed in May 2012 that the signing was merely a ‘ceremonial thing’ and that ‘we [South Africa and Vietnam] are already working together’.

I asked Sonja Meintjes, the department’s deputy director for biodiversity compliance, about the delay and whether the document was worth the paper it was written on. She claimed a draft agreement was currently being reviewed by the Vietnamese. But why had it taken so long to finalise? ‘Well, remember that they must translate everything into Vietnamese,’ she said. And she argued, despite Vietnam’s history of flagrantly ignoring environmental agreements, that the document would give South Africa a ‘platform of engagement’.

‘If it is on the table, we can say: “Listen, the presidents or ministers or whoever agreed on this co-operation. Let’s co-operate.”’

South Africa’s reliance on a diplomatic agreement, which Vietnam was clearly so reluctant to sign, seems naive. Vietnam, today, is without doubt the world’s leading destination and consumer of rhino horn. The rot that has allowed the illicit trade to flourish extends deep into the Vietnamese government and officialdom. There is no political will there to end the trade. Arrests and seizures at Vietnam’s ports occur rarely, if at all. And Vietnamese diplomats still appear to be involved in the trade despite the scandals in South Africa.

‘Vietnam doesn’t have any rhinos,’ a conservationist in Hanoi said to me one day. ‘As far as people here are concerned, why should Vietnam worry about another country’s natural resources when it can barely look after its own environment?’

14 December 2011, The Lao People’s Democratic Republic

The Xaysavang Hotel is easy to miss. A nondescript, $10-a-night flophouse in the small town of Paksan in central Laos, it is situated in a dusty side street that ends in a checkpoint 300 metres further on. Beyond a boom is a slipway leading down to the edge of the Mekong River and the ferry boats that regularly ply the crossing between Laos and Thailand.

A sign outside the hotel advertises beer and karaoke. Stunted palm trees line a driveway leading to a concrete courtyard and a series of cheap clapboard rooms. In a corner is a tacky green-and-gold Buddhist shrine with votive offerings of Pepsi and bottled water that have been left to evaporate in the heat.

By 10 a.m. the truckers, traders and prostitutes that usually frequent the hotel are long gone. We park our car inside the hotel grounds and get out. The door to what appears to be the reception is locked. The interpreter I’d hired for the trip – a sickly hotel desk-clerk with a passable grasp of English – calls out. Nothing. It is oppressively quiet.

I wander across to a carport, where three cars are covered in a thick layer of dust. They seem oddly out of place: a Mercedes-Benz import from the United Arab Emirates, a new-model Mini Cooper and a Toyota Land Cruiser. The tyres are flat.

Finally a man emerges from behind one of the rooms. He’s the caretaker, he says. ‘We’re looking for Vixay Keosavang,’ my interpreter tells him. The man shakes his head. The ‘boss’ isn’t here today. Perhaps we should try his house. It is just a short distance away. He gives us the address and a phone number.

‘Whose cars are those?’ I ask as we turn to leave. ‘They’re the boss’s,’ he says, and grins.

I first saw the name in May 2011, in a file of CITES permits and export paperwork for the Xaysavang Trading Export-Import Company. Among the papers were waybills and permits listing a Mr Vixay Keosavang of No. 174 Ban Anousonxay Rd, Paksan district, Bolikhamxay Province, Laos, as the consignee or importer of at least thirteen lion carcasses and various white rhino trophies. There were three invoices for a total amount of R981 600 (about $120 000), addressed for Vixay’s attention at Xaysavang Trading. The invoices reflected the sale of three trophies – six rhino horns – priced at R60 000 a kilogram. Their combined weight was 16.36 kilograms.

Over the course of several months I accumulated nearly 400 pages of documents, in addition to hundreds of photographs, detailing Xaysavang Trading’s business dealings. In all, Vixay’s name occurs just sixteen times. For the most part he remains a shadow, a distant puppet master manipulating the strings but never dirtying his own hands.

Few South Africans have ever heard of Laos, so much so that a lawyer representing two Xaysavang employees noted their place of employment in an affidavit as the ‘Vichai Company … a company registered in Louse [
sic
] and operating out of Louse [
sic
]’.

An early report by investigator Paul O’Sullivan, summing up his inquiries into the company, refers to ‘intelligence [which] indicated that [Chumlong] Lemtongthai’, a key Thai figure who was arrested in July 2011, ‘is No. 2 in the syndicate and that the No. 1 is a Vietnamese resident, by the name of Vixay Keosavang, or Vixay Xaysavang, with (assumed to be Thai) passport no. S0044894’.

Johnny Olivier – the South African fixer who blew the whistle on the syndicate – referred to Vixay as the ‘big boss’ of the operation in his statements, and claimed that he was briefly introduced to him by Chumlong during an internet video chat.

The first public mention of Vixay’s name in connection with Xaysavang’s operations, as far as I have been able to ascertain, was in an October 2007 edition of Vietnam’s
Tien Phong
newspaper. In one of a series of investigative
reports examining the illegal primate trade between Laos and Vietnam, a Vietnamese journalist, Huong Quoc Dung, described meeting Vixay at the Xaysavang Hotel in Paksan.

Dung had unearthed a set of CITES documents, including a permit, which had allowed Xaysavang to export more than 80 000 wild animals to Vietnam, among them 7 000 monkeys, 13 000 snakes and 60 000 turtles. The monkeys went to Trung Viet, a Vietnamese company that reportedly shipped thousands of supposedly ‘captive-bred’ animals to the United States. The company also had links to a controversial Miami-based clearing house that imported monkeys from around the world and sold them off to animal research laboratories.

Dung’s investigations suggested that the CITES documents had been forged to conceal the real origins of the animals and cover up the fact that they were not ‘captive bred’ but had been caught in the wild. When the Vietnamese journalist confronted him, Vixay claimed ignorance, saying he knew nothing about the shipments or the documents. He also denied that Xaysavang had ever exported wild-caught animals to Vietnam or any other country.

The interview did shed some light on the company’s dealings with Vietnam ese and Chinese businesses. Vixay told Dung ‘there are very many Vietnamese companies dealing with us in … timber import and export and consumer products’.

Laos’s timber industry – which sees an estimated 90 000 hectares of forest cut down each year to meet a growing demand for raw materials from neighbouring countries – is notoriously corrupt. The London-based EIA says ‘flagrant violation of Lao law is the norm’ in a timber industry driven by ‘powerful vested interests profiting from the illicit trade in logs from Laos to Vietnam’.

Vixay also told Dung that he had partnered with a Chinese businessman, whom he identified only as ‘Mr Chen’, in a primate-breeding venture on a 22-hectare farm just outside Paksan. The animals, predominantly long-tailed macaques, would be bred for export to China. Mr Chen had invested $1 million in the project, he said. The initial contract was for ten years, ending in 2016. He claimed that in a little over a year since 2006, 300 macaques had been bred on the farm.

‘Our plan is to breed 10 000 individuals,’ he said. Within five years the farm would descend into a horror show.

Laos is one of Southeast Asia’s poorest nations and one of the world’s few remaining one-party communist states. Since 1975 it has been led by the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP). No other political parties are tolerated, and the Laotian constitution refers to the LPRP as the ‘leading nucleus’ of the political system. Corruption and cronyism are rife. The international corruption watchdog, Transparency International, routinely lists the country near the bottom of its annual Corruption Perceptions Index.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its long-time benefactor, Laos has struggled to find its feet among Asia’s rapidly rising dragons. Today the country remains heavily dependent on foreign aid. Economic reforms have been slow. Laos applied to join the WTO in 1997, but it has taken more than fifteen years for its membership to become a reality. In 2011, a stock market was opened in the capital Vientiane in the hope of attracting foreign investment. But 80 per cent of the country’s 6.5 million people still eke out a living from subsistence agriculture. And only about 5 per cent of the land is considered arable.

In part, this is due to the fact that Laos has the dubious distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in history. A deadly harvest of cluster bombs and unexploded munitions still litters the countryside nearly forty years after the end of America’s ‘secret war’ there. From 1964 until 1973, B52 bombers saturated the forests and fields along the length of Laos’s border with Vietnam. Their target was the Ho Chi Minh trail, a 1 600-kilometre-long spider’s web of jungle paths and mountain paths that criss-crossed the Laotian and Cambodian borders and served as a key supply route for the North Vietnamese in their war against the south and its US allies.

The statistics are staggering. Bombers flew 580 344 sorties, dropping 2.4 million tons of bombs, more than all the bombs dropped on Germany and Japan combined during World War II. Cluster bombs sprayed 260 million ‘bomblets’, slightly smaller than tennis balls, across the countryside. It is
estimated that 80 million of them didn’t explode on impact. Every year 300 people on average – many of them children – continue to be killed or maimed. The decade-long bombing campaign cost the US $2 million a day (about $17 million in today’s currency). In the seventeen years since 1995, the US government has provided a little over $59 million to fund projects aimed at removing unexploded ordnance.

The Vietnam War, and the French Indochina War before it, left another legacy: a complex network of smuggling routes running between Laos and the five countries that share its borders: Myanmar (previously known as Burma), China, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Historically, the mountains and forests on Laos’s north-west frontier formed part of the infamous ‘Golden Triangle’, a vast region of opium production that straddled borders with Thailand and Myanmar.