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ANOTHER ELEPHANT RANT
Here are a few things I have learned about ivory poaching from an article by Bryan Christy, (Tracking Ivory) in the September issue of National Geographic.
30,000 elephants are slaughtered in Africa every year. Tanzania lost 60% of its elephants in the last 5 years. Mozambique lost 48% of its elephant in the same period. Zakouma National Park lost 90% of its elephants since 2002. 3,000 were killed between 2005 and 2008.
It is not some poor villager killing an elephant for money to keep his family alive. Increasingly “militias and terrorist groups funded in part by ivory are poaching elephants, often outside their home countries, and even hiding inside national parks. They are looting communities, enslaving people, and killing park rangers who get in their way.”
One of these terrorist groups is the Lord’s Resistance Army, a truly evil group. According to the article, Since the 1980’s the LRA is alleged to have killed tens of thousands of people, slicing the lips, ears and breasts off women, raping children and women, chopping off the feet of those caught riding bicycles, and kidnapping young boys to create an army of child soldiers. In 2008, beginning on Christmas Eve and continuing for three weeks the LRA killed more than 800 people and kidnapped 160 children, displacing 100,000 more people in Congo and Sudan. In January 2009, in Garamba the LRA burned the park rangers’ main building, destroyed equipment and killed at least eight rangers and staff members. It has been alleged that the LRA has intentions to establish contact with Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist group responsible for killing and kidnapping hundreds of women and schoolgirls. In 2015 Boko Haram pledged allegiance to ISIS.
Other terrorist groups getting funding from the sale of poached ivory are: the Janjaweed, violent Sudanese backed militias that have committed atrocities in Darfur, and President Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan Armed Forces. Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The largest market for ivory is China. Chinese workers in Africa are a major source of smuggled ivory. It has even been alleged that the president of China brought out a plane load of ivory on his last visit to Tanzania. In China, ivory chopsticks can cost more than a thousand dollars. And beautifully carved tusks in galleries in Beijing can sell for as much as a million dollars. The growing wealth in China is only increasing the demand for ivory.
If black lives matter, they matter in Africa as well. Ivory poaching is costing lives in Africa and the money for the bullets and machetes and the funding of terrorist groups is coming from China. The Chinese government does not seem to be especially interested in ending the trade in illegal ivory.
Therefore, I ask, if the government in China knows about the poaching and the illegal trade in ivory. And knows where and to whom the money is going, and does nothing to end it. Is China a state sponsor to terrorism? And should the United States be doing any business with it?
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Photos from Vietnam. Shot on Kodak Tri X film and scanned into the computer.
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