Taming Africa's Wild West, where 11,000 elephants were slaughtered

One year after the London conference on ending the illegal wildlife trade, Evening Standard owner Evgeny Lebedev goes to Gabon and wins a commitment from its President to further protect the country’s elephants
On a mission: Evgeny Lebedev with British-born zoologist Lee White, to his right, and an elite ranger team of the Gabonese wildlife service

The army had never before pushed this far into the interior in such numbers. The Gabonese region of Minkébé is normally uninhabited, other than for the occasional hunter or Baka pygmy tribe.

Pressed up against the Congo-Brazzaville and Cameroon borders, its national park is covered by virgin forest. Now it had proved fertile ground for the ivory poachers.

Tusks seized in the US were traced to the region. The few conservationists willing to undertake the trek into the park came out warning that poachers were running amok. The authorities reacted with force. For the first time in Gabon’s history, the army was dispatched into the forest.

Deep in its heart, a camp of 6,000 people was found, ruled by poaching gangs. Weapons were available to any who could afford them, prostitutes were marched up the old logging trails, and witchdoctors sold curses for handfuls of cash. It was a new Wild West, built on the lure of Africa’s “white gold”.

Mr Lebedev with President Ali Bongo Ondimba after signing the new commitment

Two hundred Gabonese paratroopers purged the site. By then, however, the worst damage was already done. Some 11,000 elephants had been slaughtered, almost a quarter of the country’s entire population.

When I reached Minkébé you could see the remains of the poachers’ shanty town. Amid the clammy heat there were bars and nightclubs with tatty posters advertising cheap drinks; traders boasting of the prices they paid for ivory and panned gold; rows of wooden sleeping huts being reclaimed by the jungle.

“This was a place with no law and order,” said Dr Joseph Okouyi, now head of wildlife protection in Minkébé. “The big men who controlled the place had their own militia. There were constant fights and people getting macheted to death.”

Since the price of ivory has soared amid China’s economic boom — with the Chinese middle classes showing an almost insatiable desire to spend this new-found wealth on ivory trinkets — criminal gangs have been hunting elephants, and thereby directly challenging the authority of the states in which the animal is found.

Mr Lebedev in an ANPN vehicle

For Gabon, Minkébé was the wake-up call. Under President Ali Bongo Ondimba, the wildlife service has been expanded from 60 ecoguards to more than 650, and its budget boosted from $1 million (£649,000) to $18 million (£11.68  million) to pay for new vehicles, uniforms, sniffer dogs and — when required — weapons.

“We’re under attack,” the President told me. “We had US marines come to train our elite rangers to face the enemy in a combat situation. A lot of strength is needed. We were able to save the gorilla. We were able to save the leopard, not least because of ladies refusing to wear leopardskin coats. We must now save some of the elephants.”

Last February, representatives of 46 countries gathered in London to agree a declaration to tackle the illegal wildlife trade, which is worth up to £12 billion a year and rated the fourth most valuable to crime after human trafficking, the arms trade and drugs. The countries agreed a series of actions, including addressing corruption, adopting legislation for tougher penalties against poachers, and recruiting more law enforcement officers. William Hague, then foreign secretary, said he believed this meant “we have begun to turn the tide”.

Mr Lebedev shakes hands with President Ali Bongo Ondimba

I came to Gabon to see for myself the extent to which those hopes have be-come reality. Gabon is particularly im-portant to the survival of the elephant, as it is one of the few homes left for one of its three sub-species. The Indian ele-phant and African savannah elephant roam vast expanses of land. But Gabon hosts the last concentration of the smaller forest elephant, whose straight tusks are of particularly fine ivory.

Once, the forest elephant spread across the Congo river basin. Recent years, however, have seen numbers decline sharply in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic as those countries were beset by civil war, criminal gangs and anarchy. In the DRC fewer than 2,000 are believed to be left.

More forest elephants are now found in Gabon than in the rest of Africa combined. It will be in Gabon’s ability to protect its surviving 40,000 that the future of the animal will be decided.

The head of Gabon’s Agence Nationale des Parcs Nationaux is a British-born zoologist, Lee White. He was among the first to highlight the scale of the poaching threat, resulting in the President placing him in charge of the country’s response. He has since overseen the 11 per cent of the country made up of national parks, and led the rapid expansion of the Gabonese wildlife service, which when he took over did not have a single vehicle.

White, 49, is honest about the challenge. Gangs 30-strong are still crossing from Cameroon equipped with satellite telephones, chainsaws for removing tusks, and high-powered rifles that he maintains are often provided by corrupt Cameroon officials.

“If we are not vigilant then we know from experience that things can change very quickly,” he said. “My job is to create a national park service almost from scratch at a time of war because of the situation in Minkébé. The President realises, and the government realises, it is going beyond a wildlife issue and is becoming a national security issue.”

The 12 months since the London conference have seen progress. In Kenya, more government rangers were trained to join the fight, harsher penalties were brought in, and the judiciary has been trained to better expedite poaching cases. Chad destroyed its ivory stockpiles. Malawi pledged to introduce new wildlife protection laws.

But an elephant is being killed every 20 minutes in Africa. Selous in Tanzania still has one of the highest rates of poaching on the continent, while in Mozambique, the situation is almost as bad. A national park in northern DRC is reporting four contacts a week. The savagery of the subsequent firefights has resulted in former French special forces personnel being brought in to aid the local rangers.

It is why I am proud to announce that President Bongo is taking more steps to protect his country’s wildlife. To mark my visit, he signed into law a commitment to send additional troops to Minkébé, triple the length of their deployment, and further strengthen Gabon’s wildlife commitments.

Perhaps most importantly, he also pledged to work with Space for Giants — the elephant protection charity that was the focus of The Independent’s 2014 Christmas campaign, supported by the Evening Standard, and of which I am now patron — to help recruit other African leaders to the anti-poaching cause. He said: “We must act now, and we must act united.” The poaching crisis is an Africa-wide problem. To face it will require an Africa-wide response.

The President has already dispatched wildlife rangers to the Central African Republic to protect that country’s elephants from roving warlord bands. He is also working closely with Chad, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Botswana on the cross-continent Elephant Protection Initiative. But these steps, as he knows, can only be the start. The effort must involve not only governments but the major multinationals operating in Africa and the leading NGOs established there. This is the coalition that needs to work together if the African elephant is to be saved in the wild.

Only then can the commitments of last year’s London conference ever hope to be fully realised — and the poachers leaving Africa’s savannahs and forests littered with bloodied carcasses finally be defeated.

Evgeny Lebedev is owner of The Independent and Evening Standard. For more about Space for Giants visit spaceforgiants.org.

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