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APRIL 1999

Can mercenary management stop poaching in Africa?

GENEVA, HARARE, JOHANNESBURG, NAIROBI––The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species on February 10 authorized Namibia and Zimbabwe to sell 34 metric tons of stockpiled elephant tusk ivory to Japan, as agreed by CITES members at the June 1997 CITES triennial meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe.

CITES withheld permission for Botswana to sell up to 25 metric tons of ivory, pending improvement of security arrangements including protection of wild elephants from poachers, but the government of Botswana was optimistic, according to the Pan-African News Service, that it too would soon get the go-ahead.

Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana hope to collect from $100,000 to $200,000 a ton for the ivory, which is used in Japan for making ceremonial signature seals. Such seals are customarily used in finalizing contracts.

The ivory to be sold comes from culled “problem” elephants and stocks seized from poachers. Ivory poachers have reportedly escalated activity across much of Africa since June 1997, in evident anticipation of the chance to smuggle ivory disguised as part of the forthcoming legal sales––the first since CITES banned international ivory trafficking in 1989.

Kenya Wildlife Service director Richard Leakey called the CITES decision “very retrogressive,” but World Wildlife Fund spokesperson John Newby lauded it as a demonstration to Africans that elephants are “a valuable resource and not just a pest.”

Leakey’s defense of elephants against all hunting and poaching is forcefully challenged by Festus Mwangi Kinujuri, member of the Kenyan parliament for Laikapia East. In late January, as the anticipated ivory sale go-ahead was pending, Kinujuri told a protest rally crowd of 500 that he would give poisoned arrows to villagers so that they could kill elephants who harm crops in the Mount Kenya area. The area includes Sweetwaters Tented Camp, one of Kenya’s top tourist attractions.

In South Africa, Kruger National Park director David Mabunda moved swiftly to head poachers off at the auction block by announcing, on March 15, a resumption of lethal elephant culling, suspended since 1995. The current Kruger elephant population is to be cut from 8,300 to 7,500, and two districts termed “botanical reserves” are to be cleared of elephants.

South Africa did not apply to sell ivory at the June 1997 CITES meeting, but did seek unsuccessfully to sell stockpiled rhino horn, and supported the applications to sell ivory from Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana.

Mozambique agriculture minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosario on March 23 announced that he would soon introduce a draft bill to “allow elephant hunting for sport in places where thereis an excess,” ostensibly to protect crops. Mozambique has banned elephant hunting since 1990, but remains a reputed center of illegal ivory trafficking.

Test of nations

Whether the ivory sales will jeopardize African elephant populations depends, all observers seem to agree, upon how effectively African nations combat poaching.

What most seem loathe to admit, however, is that combatting poaching is a test of national stability capable of challenging every government in Africa.

Whether the poachers’ targets are elephants, rhinos, gorillas, chimpanzees, lions, leopards, or hooved animals, African poaching problems tend to have a definite political dimension. Poaching profits are integrally involved in both efforts to keep governments in power and to overthrow them.

Kes Hillman Smith, for instance, conservation ecologist at Garamba National Park in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, warned in late January 1999 that poaching associated with ongoing civil wars in both the Congo and Sudan may kill the last wild white rhinos.

“In November 1998 alone,” Hillman Smith told London Daily Telegraph reporter David Blair, “there were 11 armed contacts between poachers and guards in the rhino sector.” There were then just 25 white rhinos left in Garamba, down from 1,300 circa 1970.

This is business as usual in the Congo. The late dictator Mobuto Sese Soto was a member of the World Wildlife Fund’s 1001 Club for billionaire patrons––and reputedly ruled the Congo, which he called Zaire, by managing elephant poaching as a virtual concession from 1965 until his 1993 departure into well-cushioned exile. Mobuto supporters reportedly killed 50,000 elephants for ivory during the last five years of his regime, stashing the take in Swiss banks.

The Congo situation was not unique:

• Anti-Israeli guerillas reportedly funded themselves by selling ivory and rhino horn during the 1980s, and maybe still do.

• The Renamo rebel army active in Mozambique during the 1980s reportedly killed tens of thousands of elephants, trading their tusks for South African-supplied armaments. Former Renamo members still at large are believed to be responsible for ongoing poaching throughout southern Africa.

• Displaced Rwandan militias probably including those responsible for the March 1 kidnappings and massacre of eight tourists and four wildlife guards in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park of Uganda tend to support themselves by poaching as well as armed robbery. Both are among the few economic activities practiceable by armed bands with no fixed address, few tools other than weapons, and few if any job skills.

• Poaching is also a major source of food and cash for squatters, who are increasingly often just moving into wildlife reserves and taking them over, frequently out of frustration and despair at the slow pace of official land redistribution. Since landless masses can become a potent political force––especially if armed––shaky African governments tend to find leaving squatters in a reserve more expedient than trying to oust them.

Because of the political dimension of much of the poaching, the involvement of foreign wildlife agencies and conservation charities in para-military anti-poaching work also tends to appear political, at least to many of the people whose friends, families, and allies may be in the line of government gunfire.

Shoot-to-kill

So-called shoot-to-kill anti-poaching policies are now in disrepute, denied or disavowed by every respondent to a questionaire Carroll Cox of EnviroWatch sent in mid-1998 to more than 40 organizations which have African wildlife programs.

Barely more than a decade ago, however, with elephant and rhino poaching at their zenith, shoot-to-kill was not only popular with conservationists but almost unquestioned, and hundreds of alleged poachers were killed.

Mid-1980s news reports indicate that Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe and Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi issued almost simultaneous shoot-to-kill orders in 1984. South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Zambia reputedly put less well documented shoot-to-kill policies into effect.

In mid-1998, Zimbabwean officials told Wilderness Conservancy founder and president Robert Cleaves that the toll in firefights against alleged poachers since 1984 stood at “fewer than 20 poachers killed,” against “six game rangers killed in ambushes set by poachers.”

But Zimbabwe earlier claimed to have killed 40 poachers by mid-1988, and 160 through November 1993.

The Kenya Wildlife Service, during Richard Leakey’s first tenure as director, 1988-1994, reportedly killed 130 poachers.

Both Leakey and Zimbabwean chief warden of parks and wildlife management Glen Tatham eventually ran into trouble over shoot-to-kill––and both were widely seen as having been set up to take the poltical heat for the outcome of policies they did not create.

Tatham was in 1988 charged with murder. Reported Patrick Nagle for Southam News, “The man Tatham and his colleagues were accused of murdering was the first native Zimbabwean victim of the anti-poaching campaign,” which had previously killed only Zambian and Mozambiquan intruders.
The murder charge was later dropped, and Zimbabwean wildlife law was amended to extend game wardens’ authority to use lethal force.

Shoot-to-kill, though raised, was a minor factor in Leakey’s ouster. The primary issue was conflict between Leakey and friends and family of arap Moi, who were accused of encroaching on protected lands. Some also openly agitated for Kenya to legalize trophy hunting. Leakey––who lost both legs in a 1993 airplane crash––emerged from the ouster as arap Moi’s most popular political rival, and didn’t back off even when a mob of arap Moi supporters reportedly dragged him from his car and beat him with whips.

After the Kenya Wildlife Service markedly deteriorated under Leakey’s successor, David Western, who tried to appease arap Moi’s followers, arap Moi in mid-1998 put Leakey back in charge.

Violent beat

Whether or not shoot-to-kill policies remain in effect, shooting incidents are part of most branches of law enforcement, and are most common on wildlife beats––both in Africa and the U.S., where game wardens are nine times more likely than inner city police to be killed in the line of duty.

In just one recent 30-day interval: • Namibian police on July 19, 1998 reportedly returned fire from Joseph Mukupi, 40, and Lubata Mungowe, 50, killing both, as two other suspected poachers fled toward the Botswana border about three miles away.

• Near Melmoth, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, park rangers in late July found the remains of three colleagues who were ambushed and massacred by poachers.

• On August 14, 1998, also in South Africa, a Mpumalanga Parks board ranger reportedly caught a suspected Mozambiquan and an accomplice in the act of setting snares. The suspected Mozambiquan swung a machete-like knife called a panga at the ranger; the ranger shot him dead.

• Two days later, KwaZulu-Natal soldiers and police shot 86 hunting dogs and arrested 56 alleged poachers in breaking up an alleged hunting party near the town of Muden. Another 70-odd dogs ran away.

Northern KwaZulu-Natal has become an especially dangerous territory, KZ-N Agricultural Union president Fred Visser warned in early March 1999, telling told Ingrid Oellermann of the Johannesburg Star that poaching-related violence could even destroy the local game farming industry.

“Most of these private game farms have lodges and they offer hunting to professional hunters from overseas,” Visser explained. “This will be destroyed.”

Visser asked for a more vigorous police response. “It’s a war out there,” Visser said. “We must strike back, somehow.”

Awkward position

But what non-Africans and South Africans of European descent may see as only protecting wildlife and livestock through the existing state apparatus is easily interpreted by many black Africans as actively assisting corrupt oppressors––especially if all the shooting victims are poor, or are refugees and rebels fighting unpopular governments, or if too many of them are from one particular tribe.

The current government of South Africa, the first led by black executives, is keenly aware of the political risks involved in unleashing any kind of forceful response to poaching which might be perceived as having racial or tribal overtones.

Further, though Mozambiquans are believed to be responsible for much poaching in all surrounding nations, South Africa is in an awkward position to point fingers: on February 12, Mozambiquan police reportedly seized a helicopter, two trucks, and a bulldozer from three South Africans at a Chimoio-area bush camp. The South Africans “allegedly tried to herd and capture rare sable antelope and other animals from surrounding game reserves and state forests,” the Johannesburg Mail & Guardian said. “Villagers also claim to have seen the men herding sable antelope out of the nearby Nguala reserve.”

IFAW in Africa

South Africa is the focal point of the ongoing battle for influence between pro-hunting and anti-hunting western-based conservation organizations with an interest in African wildlife. Their respective success tends to be measured by the funding they convey to the South African National Park Service and the Endangered Species Protection Unit of the South African Police Service.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare in 1995 gained the advantage over trophy hunters and ivory traffickers who wanted to cull elephants in South African national parks by contributing $1 million to habitat expansion at the Addo Elephant National Park. The gift brought the four-year suspension of culling that is now at an end.

In 1998, IFAW confidentially committed $460,000 to underwrite a South African Police Service probe of elephant poaching and law enforcement response capacity in 12 African nations.

In November 1998, however, the pro-hunting Rhino and Elephant Foundation hired away former IFAW South African program director Chris Styles, who disclosed the deal––and touched off a media furor.

“Why is the wildlife unit of SAPS taking money from an overseas organization whose agenda is diametrically opposed to South African wildlife management policies?” demanded John Ledger, director of the pro-hunting Endangered Wildlife Trust and, the Cape Town Sunday Independent disclosed, “a member of the ESPU Trust, a private sector initiative which raises funds for the ESPU.”
IFAW policies may tend to contradict the carry-overs from apartheid still prevailing in South Africa, but openly so.

What anti-poaching projects funded by pro-hunting organizations stand for hasn’t always been very clear. Accountability seems to have been weak––if there was any.

Old news clips describe at least one and possibly two cases of helicopters being donated to anti-poaching strike forces in southern Africa during the late 1980s by private foundations which apparently no longer exist.

One helicopter, funded by celebrities, reportedly ended up with the Zimbab-wean wildlife department after prolonged disuse due to legal entangements.

The hazy history of the other helicopter indicates that it was donated via the shadowy Operation Lock for use in the Zambezi Valley, which could mean either Zambia or Zimbabwe. ANIMAL PEOPLE found no one able to explain who received it, who used it, and what became of it.

Though the available information indicates it was not the same helicopter acquired by Zimbabwe, ANIMAL PEOPLE was not able to firmly establish that, either.

World Wildlife Fund

Operation Lock was apparently the first major privately funded African anti-poaching project, and may have been the most sinister, not least because poachers may have been among the major beneficiaries of it.

Many of the shortcomings of Operation Lock were exposed in January 1991 by Stephen Ellis, of The Independent, a newspaper published in London, England––but it had already become the evident prototype for other privately funded para-military efforts.

According to Ellis, “Operation Lock was set up in 1987 by Prince Bernhard,” former international president of the World Wildlife Fund, “and John Hanks, then Africa Programme Director of WWF. It aimed to gather intelligence on the international trade in rhino horn by infiltrating the market and buying rhino horn to trace the dealers. The prince donated £500,000 to fund the secret sting. But it collapsed, with some horn and purchased material unaccounted for.”

But Operation Lock wasn’t just a sting, and wasn’t just a failure: it was a sting subcontracted out for execution by alleged mercenaries, with problematic links to some subjects of the investigation.

“Prince Bernhardt agreed to fund the operation,” Ellis continued, “in a private capacity and on the strict condition that the WWF should not be involved or even told about it. But according to documents obtained by The Independent, the WWF director-general, Charles de Haes, knew from the start about Dr. Hanks’ plans.”

“To implement Operation Lock,” Ellis wrote, “Dr. Hanks commissioned KAS Enterprises Ltd., whose chair was the late Sir David Stirling, the founder of the Special Air Services. Many of the KAS staff were former members of the SAS. The initial aim was to gather intelligence, but it developed into a more ambitious project to employ former SAS men for paramilitary anti-poaching work throughout Southern Africa, and bought equipment from the South African Defense Force. At least £75,000 of Prince Bernhard’s donation was used to buy rhino horn.”

As Ellis added, even then it was no secret that “Many of the ivory and horn traffickers in southern Africa” were “also known to deal in drugs, weapons and ammunition, sometimes with the conivance of senior officers of the South African Defence Force.”

Craig Van Note, executive vice president of the WWF subsidiary TRAFFIC, outlined what WWF already knew in a mid-1988 article for Earth Island Journal.

“The South African military,” Van Note charged, “has cynically aided the virtual annihilation of the once great elephant herds of Angola. Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA rebel forces in Angola, largely supplied by South Africa, have killed perhaps 100,000 elephants to help finance the 12-year-old conflict. Most of the tusks have been carried out on South African air transports or trucks, although some move through Zaire and Burundi.”

If Bernhardt et al hoped to catch crooks in the South African military with military help, they were naive. Knowledge of the Angolan operation went right to the top––as was confirmed, after apartheid fell, by a 1995 judicial inquiry. The inquiry established that South Africa formed a front company in 1977 to trade weapons to UNITA for ivory, and only pretended to disband the firm in 1979.
Summarized Allan Thornton of the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency, “Trafficking during the apartheid era was a formal or informal policy, at least on the part of some elements in the government.”

KAS had many African projects.

“In Namibia,” Ellis wrote, “KAS trained an anti-poaching team in mid-1989, when South African forces were being demobilized prior to independence elections. The trainees almost certainly included members of Koevoet, the South African counter-insurgency unit. KAS also trained game wardens for Mozambique inside South Africa.”

Bernhard and Hanks folded Operation Lock in 1989; KAS reportedly collapsed in 1990. But that wasn’t the end of whatever was going on.

“Paramilitary training of game wardens is continuing in South African tribal ‘homelands,’” Ellis added. “Some youths have complained that after being recruited as conservation officers, they have in fact been trained as soldiers at secret military sites.”

Safari Club

African antipoaching projects sponsored by the African Safari Club, Safari Club International, African Wildlife Foundation, and Friends of Conservation, with USAid support, have largely escaped critical notice.

The apparent immunity of the Safari Club work to scrutiny may change in light of a July 1998 incident in Mozambique, involving a hunting party led by Safari Club International president Alfred S. “Skip” Donau, preceding SCI president Lance Norris, and Kenneth E. Behring, the former owner of the Seattle Seahawks football team.

Behring had just donated $20,000 to the city hospital in Pemba, Mozambique, capital of Cabo Delgado province.

The trio killed three bull elephants, including one of the largest on recent record.

According to Arizona Daily Star reporter M. Scot Skinner, “The typewritten permit [that Donau, Norris, and Behring had to hunt in Mozambique] only gave permission to kill a lion, a leopard, and a buffalo. The permission to kill ‘problem elephants’ was scrawled in Portuguese handwriting by a provincial wildlife official,” identified by New York Times reporter Tim Golden as Carlos Fernando Mugoma.

Investigators with the Humane Society of the U.S.,” Skinner continued, “contend the handwritten portion of the permit was added after the elephants were killed and after the $20,000 donation. The Donau party also promised to help pay the local government for the completion of a wild game survey. The Safari Club donated $5,000 for that effort, Donau said.”

Mozambique wildlife service chief Arlito Cuco told Tim Golden that the elephant killings were “illegal, because according to the law in Mozambique, you cannot hunt for sport,” and the elephants in question were not problem elephants. (Cuco wasn’t quoted as to whether the lion, leopard, and buffalo were problem animals.)

Responded Donau, to Skinner, “We were told by the governor of the northern province that four or five people had been killed by elephants and that the elephants were threatening some of the crops.”

The case came to light just as the Smithsonian Institution prepared to open a newly renovated Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals–funded with a $20 million gift from Behring––and caught flak for having obtained U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permission for Behring to import the remains of four rare species of wild sheep, among them an endangered Kara-Tau argali.

According to Golden, “Robert S. Hoffman, former director of the Natural History Museum [at the Smithsonian] and now a senior scientist at the museum, applied for permits to import the four wild sheep Mr. Behring shot in Kazakhstan and Kirgistan,” within the former Soviet Union, “in September 1997, just weeks before the final discussions of his $20 million donation. The gift was the largest in the 151-year history of the Smithsonian. Export permits for the animals were issued two days before CITES enacted a decision to upgrade the Kara-Tau argali to its most endangered category. The other sheep are considered threatened.”

Despite the seriousness of the allegations, however, both the Safari Club and the Smithsonian have histories of getting away with similar schemes––at taxpayer expense.

The Behring sheep incident parallels a 1988 case in which the Smithsonian paid more than $650,000 to defend biologist Richard Mitchell, who had been borrowed from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for a year. During that year, Mitchell’s most visible activity was arranging an argali sheep hunt for former Texas governor Clayton Williams, his wife Modesta, and several companions.

This was not new work for Mitchell, who founded the American Ecological Union in 1984 to promote sport hunting in China, with Safari Club help.

Mitchell, Williams, and friends killed and imported the trophies from four argali sheep. Charged with violating the Endangered Species Act, Williams got the case dropped, reportedly with help from U.S. Senators Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) and Pete Wilson (R-Calif., now governor of California), and Rep. Jack Fields (R-Texas).

Mitchell was in 1993 convicted of illegally importing a urial sheep pelt, but was fined just $1,000, served two years on probation, and continued to review endangered species trophy import applications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of Scientific Authority until June 1996.

Friends of Animals

African anti-poaching projects sponsored by Friends of Animals, the Wilderness Conservancy, and the Owens Foundation have also run into recent trouble, some of which may result from planted rumors.

FoA has supplied 21 U.S. military surplus trucks, four trailers, and assorted field equipment obtained via the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and USAid to various African nations since 1990––and in 1992 helped France to transfer 50 AK-47 automatic rifles and 10,000 rounds of ammunition captured from Iraq during the Gulf War to the wildlife protection department in Senegal. FoA also sent custom-built spotter aircraft to the Ghana Department of Wildlife in 1997, and to the Kenya Wildlife Service in 1998.

The landing gear of the aircraft, according to a June 1996 memo by FoA international program director Bill Clark, were designed “so an automatic rifle can be mounted and fired under the propeller arc.” Such a weapon might be used, Clark said, as “a deterrent factor,” and to help encourage poachers caught in the wild to surrender.

Clark, a former U.S. Marine, also spends much time in Africa training anti-poaching forces. His position is influential enough that on one visit to Ghana, he claims, he was allowed to fly a Macchi 339 jet fighter ––not exactly a “Top Gun” aircraft, since it flies at subsonic speed, but still the hottest item in the Ghanian arsenal.

Clark’s role with FoA attracted separate but parallel investigations by Natural Resources News Service/National Defense Monitor reporter Susanne Clarke and ANIMAL PEOPLE, for two reasons.

One was that FoA in mid-1997 hired, then abruptly fired former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service special investigator Carroll Cox, for an alleged cause that FoA has yet to clearly state. A memo from FoA president Priscilla Feral to Cox, immediately preceding the firing, demanded that he disclose to her particulars of legal actions he had pursued which according to Cox involved friends of Bill Clark––acknowledged by Clark––who hold senior positions at USFWS.

The other is that Bill Clark divides his professional duties between his FoA post and an FoA-funded position with the Division of Law Enforcement within the Israeli Nature and National Parks Protection Authority.

The advantage of Clark’s dual role for FoA, explains FoA president Priscilla Feral, is that Clark thereby enjoys access to international law enforcement documents pertaining to wildlife trafficking. A political ramification, however, is that the Israeli agency is also integrally involved in national defense: the nature reserves it administrates may double as no-man’s-land, including the strip of the Judean desert that divides Israel from the Palestinian-controlled West Bank.

Further, because anti-Israeli guerilla activity has historically been funded by the elephant and rhino horn traffic, Israel may have an interest in such traffic which goes beyond concern for conservation. Conversely, even if opponents of Israel are no longer involved in wildlife trafficking, conservation could provide a pretext for maintaining surveillance of their suspected strongholds.

In any event, nations with large Islamic populations, in particular, could question FoA motives for involvement in their affairs, or in the affairs of hostile neighbors.

Questions about Bill Clark’s activity increased after Suzanne Clarke, via the Freedom of Information Act, obtained a September 11, 1997 memo from White House staffer Martha Wofford to higher-ups. The memo suggested an alleged lack of “any sense of uniformity in how we monitor” FoA, and added that USAid deputy director of southern African affairs Maureen Dugan “mentioned that this same group actually killed someone and were forced out of a country in southern Africa––not sure which one.”

ANIMAL PEOPLE heard rumors about the memo for months before managing to get a copy. When we did, we recognized the account referenced to Dugan as probably a garbled version of allegations directed at the Owens Foundation some months earlier. But no one ever acknowledged as much. Neither did USAid send Suzanne Clarke a correction and retraction until September 1, 1998.

WildCONS

Meanwhile, on June 8, 1998, FoA president Feral faxed to ANIMAL PEOPLE a note alleging that Wildlife Conservancy president Robert Cleaves “is a big hunter,” who “asked someone (whose identity I’m not revealing) to get him some trophy ivory back into the U.S., and in exchange, he’d donate an airplane to the [South African] Endangered Species Protection Unit.”

Responded Cleaves, “I am not a hunter and never have been. I have never shot an animal, nor asked anyone to do it for me. I would never shoot an animal except in self-defense. I have never asked anyone to ‘get some trophy ivory back into the U.S.’” The only part of the allegation that was true, Cleaves said, was that he had offered to donate “free use of a light observation aircraft for use in ESPU anti-poaching operations.” The offer was declined.

“It sounds to me as though someone is trying to create a problem where none exists,” Cleaves concluded.

Cleaves, states his web site resume, “was a jet fighter pilot and test pilot 1950-1986, first on active duty in the U.S. Air Force and then on reserve duty as a deputy judge advocate general. He represented President Ronald Reagan at the transition of Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in 1980, and later on in matters relating to Angola during its civil war, and was on President Reagan’s ‘short list’ as U.S. Ambassador to South Africa.”

A cofounder of the International Wilderness Leadership Foundation, Cleaves “has been involved in conservation and anti-poaching in southern Africa since 1968,” the web site adds. “WildCONS, of which Cleaves is founder and president, operates five aircraft in anti-poaching operations in southern Africa,” specifically in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Zambia. The first of the aircraft began service in 1990.

The WildCONS aircraft, Cleaves stipulates, are not armed. WildCONS did, however, donate 15 Ruger semi-automatic rifles to South Africa anti-poaching forces.

“WildCONS lost two aircraft and two good men in anti-poaching operations in 1992,” Cleaves recalls. “One was following a snared black rhino who was pulling a heavy log drag in the Ndumu Game Reserve in northern Zululand. The other was confiscating weapons and equipment hidden by poachers on a farm near Mana Pools National Park in the lower Zambezi valley of Zimbabwe.”

Flying three patrol missions from the Ndumu reserve in August 1998, while on an inspection visit, Cleaves personally gained a measure of revenge during the second day.

“I spotted three men in the Tembe Elephant Reserve carrying what I believed to be an AK-47,” Cleves told ANIMAL PEOPLE. “I called their location to operations and loitered until the ground team arrived and took the three into custody. I then flew the short distance to the Tembe airstrip and waited for the team to walk the men out of the bush. They not only had an AK-47, but also had the anterior and posterior horns from an endangered black rhino. They were making their way toward safe haven across the Mozambique border.”

Owens Foundation

Cleaves, beyond clearing himself of nasty charges, put in good words for Bill Clark, who might have been presumed to be Feral’s anonymous source, and emphatically put his personal reputation behind wildlife biologists Mark and Delia Owens, the founders of the Owens Foundation.

U.S. citizens working in Africa since 1973, Mark and Delia Owens in their first book, Cry of the Kalahari (1985) exposed the deaths from starvation and thirst of thousands of migrating wildebeests whose route through Botswana was blocked by cattle fencing. Botswanian leaders and international development schemes were behind the fence-building.

Rousted from Botswana, Mark and Delia Owens in 1986 relocated to Zambia. There they formed the North Luanga Conservation Project, an anti-poaching economic development scheme. They helped local villagers start a fish farm, a carpentry shop, and a cooking oil press, and helped equip and train the North Luanga game scouts. Financial support came from the Frankfurt Zoological Society and Prince Bernhardt, who at the same time was funding Operation Lock.

Mark and Delia Owens may have paid dearly for the Bernhardt/Operation Lock association, by being in the same general theatre of operations and by undertaking work which was easily confused with that of the KAS professional soldiers, whatever KAS was doing and on behalf of whom.

According to Stephen Ellis, KAS had “approached conservation officials in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Tanzania, and Kenya,” trying unsuccessfully to expand their operations. None wanted to do business with KAS and South Africa, Ellis wrote, but somehow “KAS succeeded in working with Zimbabwean game wardens and funded a helicopter for anti-poaching operations in the Zambezi Valley,” along the Zambian border. This was the mystery helicopter.

According to Owens Foundation administrative director Mary Dykes, it was definitely not the same helicopter that Mark Owens obtained in 1988 and flew on frequent anti-poaching patrols during the next four years. The Owens helicopter, said Dykes, “was donated by a wealthy individual who lives in Atlanta. I bought the helicopter and had it shipped to South Africa. Mark then flew it to North Luanga.”

Turning Point

By all accounts, the Owens’ combination of anti-poaching work with economic development, exclusive of hunting, was successful. Mark and Delia Owens wrote two more books, The Eye of the Elephant (1991), and Survivor’s Song (1996). But a March 1996 ABC News Turning Point episode called Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story effectively drove them out of Africa.

As a whole, Turning Point offered a quality investigative report on African elephant conservation. “Sustainable use via hunting” was explored, but Mark and Delia Owens, opposing hunting, seemed to hold the high ground––except in the title and leader (the prefatory promotional note); teasers aired between commercials, intended to keep viewers watching; and a scene of apparent Zambian game scouts shooting an alleged poacher as he lay wounded on the ground.

The title called to mind the 1932 short story The Most Dangerous Game, by Richard Connell, a staple of high school literature classes, in which a trophy hunter pursues kidnapped humans. The Connell story has inspired many screen knock-offs, including a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode aired not long before the Turning Point piece.

The leader appeared to show Mark Owens using his helicopter to spot and chase a poacher. The footage, properly identified later in the broadcast, was taken from a night training exercise undertaken with the Zimbabwean game scouts.

The teasers asked if Mark Owens had crossed a line in his pursuit of poachers, whom he admits to rousting at times by dropping giant firecrackers near their camps. Mark Owens was shown handing weapons to game scouts, outfitting them with new boots, and at times carrying a weapon himself, chiefly while taking visitors to view wildlife.

All of this served to rivet attention on the killing of the alleged poacher. But Mark Owens is not in that scene. Even viewers who think he might have been present cite as evidence only the brief appearance of a hand holding a weapon similar to one Owens held in a different video clip.

In August 1996, Mark and Delia Owens began their annual two-month visit to Europe and the U.S. to raise funds and buy supplies. This time, however, the Zambian government withheld permission for them to return to North Luanga.

On September 16, 1996, Turning Point senior broadcast producer Janice Tomlin wrote to Roland Kuchel, the U.S. ambassador to Zambia, “I have learned that the footage that was broadcast on our program of a poacher being killed has created a problem for the North Luanga Conservation Project. I can assure you in the strongest way possible that neither Mark nor Delia Owens nor any other North Luanga Conservation Project staff were even in the area at the time of this shooting.”

ABC stopped distributing Deadly Game. But by not stating who did the shooting, where and when, ABC stopped short of clearing Mark and Delia Owens of suspicion.

Mark and Delia Owens had made many enemies, including not only poachers but also promoters eager to revive elephant trophy hunting in Zambia, and to expand it in Zimbabwe, where it not only never stopped but has been subsidized since 1989 by $28.1 million in USAid grants.

Many of the Owens’ foes already had copies of Deadly Game. A Florida magazine for big game hunters called The Hunting Report amplified the controversy for months. The December 1996 Hunting Report wrapped Deadly Game coverage around an announcement that “The Hunting Report and famed hunting attorney John J. Jackson III have formed a strategic alliance to open a new front in the fight for hunters’ rights worldwide. Jackson is the immediate past president of Safari Club International,” the item continued, “whose successes include blocking an effort to list the African elephant as endangered on the U.S. endangered species list.”

The coup-d’grace came in April 1997. A London Times article by one Christina Lamb, writing from Lusaka, Zambia, claimed Mark and Delia Owens had been “drummed out of Zambia for ‘Rambo-style activities’” including “instructing park rangers to shoot to kill.”

In fact, Mark Owens did once tell the Zambian game scouts he worked with to shoot to kill, in the Deadly Game documentary––if they met poachers who shot at them.
Mary Dykes responded with a six-page rebuttal of Lamb’s central allegations. It was apparently never published.
Mark and Delia Owens now live in Montana. Zambia says they could return; according to Dykes, they don’t think they would be safe if they did. Mark Owens in late 1998 was doing aerial surveying for the Idaho-based Selkirk Grizzly Bear Recovery Project.

The Frankfurt Zoo now runs the North Luanga Conservation Project. Since 1996 the zoo has reportedly sponsored a training camp for Malawian game scouts at Liwonde National Park in Malawi. The camp is directed by Mike Labuschagne, a veteran of combat in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Angola who later did security work for South African game farmers.

According to the Cape Town Argus of December 12, 1998, “In Labuschagne’s first three months, anti-poaching patrols destroyed 118 boats used by poachers to fish illegally in the Shire River. Only three boats had been destroyed in the previous 18 months. Before Labuschagne’s arrival, three scouts had been killed by poachers. Since then, not a single scout has been lost.”

The Frankfurt Zoo does not buy the Liwonde project’s ammunition. Labuschagne raises the funds for that elsewhere. But if the Cape Town Argus report is credible, it is no secret that “The training, which Labuschagne refers to as ‘para-military,’ clearly has one goal in mind: the elimination of poaching through brute force and superior firepower.”

U.S. sends advisors

U.S. government agencies seem to be getting more deeply involved in African anti-poaching work, following stronger liaison between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the CIA, which began soon after the 1993 inauguration of U.S. president Bill Clinton and vice president Albert Gore.

USAid is only one of several U.S. government avenues of influence in African wildlife policymaking and enforcement. The Cooperative Enforcement provisions of the 1994 Lusaka Agreement are another. Negotiated by the United Nations Environment Programme, the Lusaka Agreement links the anti-poaching and wildlife trafficking operations of the Congo, Kenya, Leosotho, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia, with financial support from the U.S., Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Great Britain. The resultant joint task force is to start working out of the Kenya Wildlife Service headquarters in Nairobi beginning in June 1999.

The Partnership for Biodiversity, cosponsored by the Interior Department and the Peace Corps, affords further input. An internal publication of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently described how in late 1997 the Partnership for Biodiversity sent USFWS Alaska regional director for law enforcement John Gavit and Texas-based special agent James Stinebaugh to Tanzania to spend a week reviewing wildlife law enforcement procedures at Tarangire National Park.

USFWS never answered a mid-1998 ANIMAL PEOPLE request for comment on several aspects of the report, especially pertaining to weapons supply and training.

Under the Clinton/Gore administration, U.S. government involvement may be expected to continue boosting the “sustainable use” wildlife management popularized by the World Wildlife Fund, which is also now endorsed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Not interested in wildlife conservation per se, UN-FAO sees “sustainable use” as a pretext to expand game farming. To promote that idea, UN-FAO in mid-1998 mass-mailed a report entitled Wildlife and food security in Africa to U.S. environmental journalists.

Thus far in 1999, however, the most visible UN-FAO African-oriented project seems to have been the mid-March first conference of the International Observatory on Rabbit Breeding in Mediterranean Countries. Meeting in Rome, the delegates offered rabbit-rearing as “a low-cost answer to the problem of hunger and rural poverty in developing nations”–– whose chief problem, especially in North Africa, is lack of the water needed to raise green crops for either rabbits or humans.

Precedent

Ultimately, coming to grips with African wildlife poaching requires coming to grips with African realities, including that a continent dominated and exploited by warring soldiers of fortune has little hope of developing stable governments able to keep either wildlife reserves or anything else secure.

Neither does selling wildlife to the highest bidder tell Africans that poaching is wrong. Rather, it reinforces the view that one is wise to get the best price one can, before freebooting strongmen horn in on the deal.

There is hope in U.S. history. Yellowstone National Park had no law enforcement for eight years after Congress designated it in 1872, and had poaching problems similar to those of Africa. Inside Yellowstone, the state authorities of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana had no jurisdiction, making the park a magnet for fugitives.

Henry Yount, the first Yellowstone gamekeeper, quit after just a year because protecting the deer, elk, antelope, and bighorn sheep of the Lamar Valley from market hunters was more than he could do alone.

Tent camps for visitors opened in 1883, but so much banditry followed that in 1886 the U.S. Secretary of War sent the First Cavalry to establish law and order. Yet troops alone didn’t do the job.

Within five years, the first Yellowstone lodges were built. Poaching and crime didn’t vanish with the advent of heavier tourist traffic, but receded to the background level which is to be expected wherever as many as three million people a year go to see wildlife and spend money.

The First Cavalry continued to patrol Yellowstone until 1916. By then, their presence was viewed as a quaint anachronism. Promoting nonlethal wildlife-based tourism had created an unparalleled place to see North American animals––and stoked the economic engine for much of three states.
––M.C.