Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (54 page)

In the 19th century, demand for opium in China grew to insatiable heights. It was driven by unscrupulous British, American and European traders, who traded opium grown in Bengal and India in exchange for silks, teas and other Chinese goods. By the 1900s, it was said that a third of China’s population was addicted to opium.

This mass addiction prompted rapid expansion of opium cultivation. To meet the demand, traders from China’s Yunnan province, just north of Laos, also extended their operations into the Golden Triangle. Fields of lilac poppies flourished in the highlands and inaccessible jungle-covered mountains. Opium production became the ‘mainstay’ commercial crop for Laos’s Hmong hill tribes. Eventually, in the 1940s, the French cornered the trade. Between 1946 and 1954, during the French Indochina War, cash-strapped French intelligence agencies seized control of opium traffic and used the profits to finance covert operations in the region.

In a ground-breaking book,
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
, a US historian, Alfred W. McCoy, wrote that by 1951, the French ‘controlled most of the opium trade from the mountain poppy fields to the urban smoking dens’. Insiders dubbed it ‘Operation X’. According to McCoy, this clandestine opium traffic produced ‘a legacy of Corsican narcotics syndicates and corrupted French intelligence officers’, many of whom would later become ‘key figures in the international narcotics trade’.

The CIA’s subsequent secret war was also dogged by allegations that its Laotian operations were funded with the proceeds of heroin trafficking. Many of the claims centred on Air America, a passenger and cargo airline that was covertly owned and operated by the agency in Laos. Its motto was ‘Anything, Anywhere, Anytime, Professionally’. In addition to flying spies, soldiers, diplomats, civilians and casualties all over Southeast Asia, the airline provided key logistical support to CIA-backed Hmong guerillas. As for drugs, the agency has consistently denied any ‘knowing’ involvement in the trade. A recently declassified ‘secret history’, published by the agency’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence, does concede that ‘narcotics production [in Laos] continued in sometimes uncomfortably close proximity to the irregular [Hmong] forces managed by the CIA’.

There were no laws in Laos prohibiting the trade in opium and heroin until 1971, and personal use of the drug was legal up to 1996. Until a government crackdown in the late 1990s, Laos remained the third largest producer of opium poppies in the world. Since 1998, however, the amount of agricultural land that was used for opium production is reported to have fallen by 98 per cent. An aggressive anti-drugs campaign, fuelled by the government’s desire to increase its international credibility, saw the poppy fields systematically eradicated. But the smuggling routes remained, old networks that now carried new ‘products’: timber, people, animals, ivory and, sometimes, rhino horn.

The ground floor of the Joma Bakery next to the Benoni Cafe in the heart of the Vientiane’s tourist quarter is packed with expats and travellers gulping down lattes, turkey sandwiches, smoked salmon bagels, tuna melts and salads. At a table upstairs a man is showing me photographs of brutalised pangolins; bundles of them trussed up in blue nylon sacks.

Also known as scaly anteaters, they are today among the most threatened animals in the world. There is massive consumer demand for them in China and, to a lesser degree, Vietnam. In restaurants, their flesh is sold as a delicacy. Despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence to support the claim, the
blood and scales are said to be imbued with medical properties that promote weight loss, enhance lactation in pregnant women and, like rhino horn, supposedly cure cancer.

They are killed to order in restaurants. The animals are knocked unconscious and their throats are slit to drain the blood. Then, sometimes still half alive, they are thrown into a pot of boiling water to remove the scales before being chopped into small pieces, which are braised and added to soups and a variety of other dishes.

The photographs show sacks of pangolins crammed into a rusted cage on the back of a Toyota. Shot on a cellphone camera, the images were taken in a village somewhere near Route 8, one of the highways linking Laos and Vietnam. On the side of the vehicle is a circular blue-and-white company emblem featuring stylised images of snow-capped mountains, forests, a highway, the Mekong River and the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge that spans it. Two trucks, a cargo ship and aircraft complete the logo. Lettering in Lao and English reads: ‘Xaysavang Trading Import-Export Co., LTD’.

The man seated across from me has agreed to meet me on condition that I not disclose his identity. ‘I’ve got a family,’ he says, by way of explanation after taking his seat. ‘I’ve got to be careful.’ As it is, he’s taking some risk talking to an unaccredited foreign journalist. The Laotian government doesn’t much like prying outsiders and exercises an authoritarian control over local media. All newspapers, television and radio stations are state-owned and run. Foreign journalists who obtain official accreditation to report in the country usually find themselves accompanied everywhere they go by ‘minders’ from the government’s state security agencies.

Crimes such as ‘distorting’ LPRP party policies, ‘spreading false rumours’ and ‘slandering the state’ are punishable with imprisonment. In 2003, two European journalists and their translator were arrested on trumped-up murder charges after travelling to central Laos to report on conflict between the Hmong and the communist regime. (A low-level Hmong rebellion has been simmering since 1975.) The journalists were detained after being caught up in a shoot-out in which Laotian troops killed a Hmong village security guard. After a summary trial lasting only two-and-half hours, the three men were each sentenced to fifteen years in jail. Laos later bowed to international
pressure and released them. Two Hmong tribesmen who had helped them were not so lucky. A decade later, they remain in prison.

Conditions in Laotian jails are said to be appalling. Released prisoners have told of inmates shackled together in leg irons, forced to sleep on concrete floors in cells stinking of human excrement. They are routinely starved and beaten. In its 2012 annual report, Amnesty International reported that three demonstrators who were arrested in October 1999 for attempting to stage a peaceful protest against the government were still being held in jail despite having completed their ten-year prison sentences. Activists claim that a network of brutal secret prisons exists where dissidents, among them Hmong rebels, are held.

I caught a glimpse of one such prison from a boat on the Mekong River. It was set in a jungle clearing, guarded on one side by the river and on the other by green hills and dense, almost impregnable forest. Two long barracks were flanked by watchtowers manned by silhouetted figures armed with rifles. The boatman steered a wide berth away from the bank that the prison stood on and cut across the current.

‘It is a bad place,’ the boatman said.

Upstairs at the Joma Bakery, a man takes a seat within earshot of our table. He slouches with his back against a wall and then promptly dozes off. Or appears to. My contact looks uncomfortable. His voice drops to a whisper as he glances across at the interloper, whose eyes are hidden by sunglasses. Finally, he suggests that we move. ‘I don’t know who he is,’ he whispers, ‘but it could be someone trying to listen to us.’

Once we’re settled in another room and another corner, he tells me about a shipment that was stopped by a customs officer at Vientiane airport on 9 May 2004. There were 400 pangolins weighing about 600 kilograms packed in crates. Twenty of them were already dead. The cargo was bound for Vietnam en route to China and was accompanied by CITES permits and documentation, which may have been forged. The shipment was detained for several hours and then, inexplicably, someone ordered that it be released. This was
done after a tax of $6 a kilogram had been levied. The customs officer who had stopped the cargo was later reprimanded. The name on the export manifest was Xaysavang Trading.

Documents I received from another source shed even further light on the extent of Xaysavang’s wildlife-trafficking operations. One is a sales contract between Xaysavang Trading, represented by its ‘director’, Vixay Keosavang, and a Vietnamese import-export company called ThaisonFC, JSC. In terms of the agreement, which was signed in March 2009, Xaysavang would provide the Vietnamese with 100 000 live animals, including 40 000 rat snakes, 20 000 monocellate cobras, 10 000 king cobras, 20 000 water monitors and 20 000 endangered yellow-headed temple turtles – all of which are considered delicacies in parts of Asia. Xaysavang stood to make $860 000 from the deal (about R6.9 million). The shipments would be delivered in tranches over the next eight months through several Vietnamese land borders, ports and airports.

A certificate of origin issued to Xaysavang Trading by the Bolikhamxay Provincial Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Paksan on 16 March 2009 shows that 2 000 yellow-headed temple turtles, weighing about 10 tons, were to be shipped by truck from Laos to Vietnam. Vixay’s business card lists him as the deputy chairman of the Bolikhamxay Chamber of Industry and Commerce.

From other documents it would appear that Vietnam may not have been the final destination. In an earlier transaction, ThaisonFC, JSC, received a shipment of 2 000 live yellow-headed temple turtles from Laos and re-exported them to the Quang Da Seafoods Trading Company in China’s Guangxi province.

Xaysavang Trading was formally registered in Laos on 8 August 2008 with reported start-up capital of just over $1.6 million. The enterprise registration certificate lists Vixay Keosavang as the sole director.

It remains unclear when exactly the company expanded its business operations to southern Africa. The whistleblower, Johnny Olivier, remembers
meeting Punpitak Chunchom, Vixay’s ‘man in South Africa’, and some of the Thais working for Xaysavang, in mid- to late-2008. At the time, the main focus of their enterprise was the purchase of lion bones. Records obtained by Gareth Morgan, a DA Member of Parliament, showed that five South African game farmers and taxidermists shipped at least 327 lion carcasses or skeletons to Xaysavang in Laos between 2009 and 2010.

The first time the company appears to have been implicated by name in illegal activities in Africa is in a press statement released by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) on 27 July 2009. It recorded that KWS, together with Kenyan customs, had seized 280 kilograms of ‘raw elephant ivory’ and two un-mounted rhino horn ‘trophies’ weighing eighteen kilograms. The estimated value was $1 million.

The consignment, which had originated in Mozambique, was ‘illegally destined to Laos’. According to the statement, ‘The captured trophies were registered in the name of Xaysavang Trading Export Import Company Limited and destined to Paxsan District-Bolikhamxay Vientiane-Laos.’ KWS head Julius Kipng’etich commented that ‘since Mozambique has no rhinos and elephants, we suspect the trophies were illegally poached from neighbouring countries and transported to Maputo by road’.

Waybills issued by Mozambique Airlines in Maputo show that other consignments were routed from there to Johannesburg, and then on to Hong Kong, Bangkok and, finally, Vientiane. On 25 November 2010, 435 kilograms of cargo was shipped from Mozambique. The contents were listed on the waybill as ‘personal effects’. The shipment, which was addressed to Xaysavang Trading in Laos, arrived in Bangkok on 6 January 2011, and was detained and searched by Thai customs officials. Inside two pallets they found sixty-nine elephant tusks and four pieces of ivory worth an estimated $320 000 (about R2.6 million).