Learn more about the Explorer series. DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT: Kevin DiCesare, Joel Fiser, Jaime Hritsik, Brian Jacobs. Then, like a bobber in a fishing hole, a nibble. Sudan. In presenting that case, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo underscored Bashirs control of the groups said to be behind Sudans ivory trafficking: He used the army, he enrolled the Militia/Janjaweed. A few days later the tusks proceed to Songo, the Sudanese market town where Onen said Konys men trade ivory. His control is absolute.. The culprits are believed to have been South Sudanese, according to African Parks. From Garamba, Kony sent an exploratory team to Darfur to look into forging a new relationship with the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), who had supported him against Uganda, hoping to exchange ivory for rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons. Dzanga Baialso known as the village of elephantsis a mineral-rich mudhole where the animalscongregate. Garamba is a crucible within a crucible, a park under siege in a country often in civil war in a region that has nearly forgotten peace. only . We protect the park to give the people something of value. He fights for elephants because he knows that without the animals presence, no one will support Garamba, and the parkwhich he calls Africas heartwill be lost. HOW MANY TIMES ?? Fish and Wildlife Service. Konys men jump back and forth across borders, hiding in countries where governance is weak. Father Ernest Sugule, who ministers to the village, tells me that many children in his diocese have seen family members killed by the Lords Resistance Army, or LRA, the Ugandan rebel group led by Joseph Kony, one of Africas most wanted terrorists. Their lack of tusks was thought to be a consequence of another human creationthe Mozambican civil war, which lasted from 1977 to 1992 and was partly paid for by the killing of elephants for . Im not an animal lover, he snaps. Tongo Tongo shot two elephants one day, she says. 75/129 = 58.1%. After Zakoumas rangers destroyed their camp and confiscated their equipment, the poachers were unable to return to Sudan, so three weeks later they went back to Heban hill and attacked the Hippotrague unit. But seeing it in front of you, and knowing those individuals are related, that makes my day. Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks Elephants with a rare "tuskless" genetic trait had a better chance of surviving Mozambique's long civil war, financed in. PRODUCER: Janey Adams. Track the GPS unit in an interactive map. Researchers in Mozambique found a . During the civil war in Mozambique,soldiers killed elephants with tusks in order to sell the ivory, so fewer elephants with tusks survived. They found that the tuskless trait was genetic, found in the X chromosome, and it was deadly in males. She turned her life around to be near them, settling in a rough camp in the rainforest and building an observation platform where she could safely watch the animals that congregate there. Or you hear a rumble, and you know it's probably an adult female, rumbling for a family either saying, 'I'm here,' or 'Let's go.' There were armed combatants roaming the countryside. Sudanese and Chadian poachers were likewise implicated in the 2013 butchering of nearly 90 elephantsincluding 33 pregnant females as well as newborn calvesnear Tikem, Chad, not far from Bouba Ndjidah. Accuracy and availability may vary. During the failed peace talks with Uganda, while Kony hid in Garamba from 2006 to 2008, Onen had been assigned to Konys lead peace negotiator, Vincent Otti. The series was one of NPR's earliest adopters of digital technology and led the network in surround-sound production. And I gotta find a way to get that shine, Dante says, referring to the gloss a clean elephant tusk has. PELLETIER: The reason why that's important is because if you stop the killing right now, you know, the time it would take for the population to, you know, restore that traits would be much longer. Our airport incident was one of many hiccups with the artificial tusks. I will escape from your jail, and I will kill him. He did escape, and a rumor in Zakouma is that he fled south to CAR. Killings of civilians have likewise dropped, from 1,252 in 2009 to 13 in 2014, but abductions are rising again, and it takes the arrival of only a few of the armed militants to send fear ricocheting through communities. His wife, abducted later, was killed. Rogue militias and army soldiers from the DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in the park. Do not lose even one tusk, he instructed the group, according to Onen, who said the plan was to carry the ivory to a rendezvous in CAR and then on to a market town in Darfur called Songo, not far from the Sudan Armed Forces garrison in Dafaq. In May 2013 poachers with the insurgent group Seleka massacred 26 elephants at Dzanga Bai, amineral-rich watering hole in CAR. From Garamba, Kony signaled his desire for peace with Uganda, sending emissaries to neutral Juba, in southern Sudan, to negotiate with Ugandan officials while he and his men lived unmolested in and around the park, protected by a cease-fire agreement. It was just impossible to stay. But instead, that morning the poachers were hiding among trees surrounding the rangers camp. The rangers also recovered a stamped Sudanese army leave slip granting three soldiers permission to travel from Darfur to a town near the Chadian border. Meanwhile, as leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. strategize about how to stop the ever expanding network of international terrorist organizations, somewhere in Africa a park ranger stands his post, holding an AK-47 and a handful of bullets, manning the front line for all of us. As we talk over my design needs, Dantes brown eyes sparkle like a boys on Christmas morning. They used Historical records to collect height (estimated to the shoulder), tusk length, and tusk circumference from approximately 600 elephants that were culled in Tsavo East National Park (Kenya) and Mkomazi National Park (Tanzania) between 1966 and 1968. She well remembers the day when the war came to the bai. "We gave them a little money and said the Seleka were coming," says Turkalo. To me, it seems reasonable to think that the radiomans defection might have slowed the progress of the 25 elephants tusks headed to Kony. c. percentage of elephants killed for . So 50% of her daughters will be tusked. So far theyve traveled 600 miles from jungle to desert in just under two months. A small proportion of females . Copyright 2021 NPR. Theyre looting communities, enslaving people, and killing park rangers who get in their way. The White Elephant symbolizes distinctive things for both the man and Jig. Now, scientists say that drove some elephants to evolve tusklessness. Most of these children are very, very traumatized when they come back home. They have nightmares, Sugule continues. The last time an elephant was recorded killed by a poacher in Mozambique's Niassa Reserve was May 17, 2018, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, a New York -based nonprofit that helps the Mozambican government manage the national reserve. ", Turkalo says she walked up to the man in charge and saw he had an AK-47 assault rifle. That's where Princeton evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton found himself a few years ago. We protect the elephant to protect the park. Do we really need to sell ivory tusks in the world just to make money? A sixth, a young lookout, ran down the hill, disappeared, and is presumed dead. Some 30,000 African elephants die each year at the hands of poachers to satisfy the global demand for ivory. Using Kermeens technology, he could adjust how many times a day they tried to communicate with a satellite via the Internet. I know which house theyre in: Using Google Earth, I see its light-blue roof on my screen. Shane Campbell-Staton, an evolutionary biologist now at Princeton University, was curious about the elephants of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, where tuskless elephantswhich are all femaleare unusually common. "And there was moonlight and I could see he had a revolver and he might have been drinking. Three more are classified as of importance to watch: Angola, Cambodia, and Laos. With an average of 16 years in the bush with the LRA, the men bring a wealth of experience to the hunt for Kony and his fighters. I just can't understand why anyone would want to take away any of the amazing qualities and features of an elephant. But when I ask a gathering of children and elders in the village of Kpaika, about 30 miles from the parks western border, how many of them have visited Garamba, no one raises a hand. Zakoumas Mamba Team 1 antipoaching unit includes driver Issa Adoum (brown shirt). All rights reserved. In this scene from the documentary Explorer: Warlords of Ivory, a screener at Tanzanias airport accuses Bryan Christy of smuggling. MCCAMMON: Campbell-Staton and his team worked with local researchers who had tracked elephants for decades. EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? Fifty percent of her sons will be tusked, but that other 50% would die. At that point she'd already dedicated more than a decade of her life to studying forest elephants, which for centuries had remained hidden within the dense canopy of the rain forest. Being small, he balked at having to carry the heavy bundles that Konys militants ferry from camp to camp in their patrols across central Africa, and for his whining, he was beaten with a machete. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. The result was. "There's such a blizzard of depressing news about biodiversity and humans in the environment and I think it's important to emphasise that there are some bright spots in that picture. You did exactly what you were supposed to do, I said, shaking their hands. When Ele, a female elephant, died, other elephants approached one-by-one and touched their trunks to the body. The rangers Im going out with have each been allocated a handful of rounds for old and unreliable AK-47s, most of them seized from poachers. I mean, I've been through a lot of poaching.". You must be a real animal lover, I say. In 2002, NPR host and correspondent Alex Chadwick and sound engineer Bill McQuay went to central Africa to see and gather sound from the rare forest elephants of the Dzanga bai. We meet over Skype. As long-ranging animals, they shape vast swaths of wildlands, stomping and chomping through them, sparring with trees, rearranging foliage. So did the African Union military forces, whose CAR-based men in Obo are tasked with finding Kony. I unzip my suitcase to expose two fake tusks and hand him letters from the U.S. We were expecting to find an amazing new world of sound to record, and the experience lived up to its reputation the insects, the tropical downpours, and of course the cacophony of the elephants themselves. By skewing their evolution, humans fiddle with elephants' role in the ecosystem too. National Geographic commissioned the creation of artificial tusks with hidden GPS trackers that were planted in the smuggling supplychain. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. As she sips her tea in the Providence coffee shop, Turkalo is the picture of calm. Boko Haram also uses the bush as a baseNigerias Sambisa Forest, a game reserve south of Lake Chad. Six antipoaching rangers and their cook, the entirety of the Hippotrague (French for roan antelope) unit, were awake, dressed in camouflage uniforms, and preparing for morning prayersdevoted even in the darkness. CAMPBELL-STATON: You know, people during the Mozambican Civil War were not thinking about the evolution of elephants, I imagine, in the slightest. A welcome sight returns to Zakouma: babies. In 1994 Kony left Uganda and took his murderous gang on the road. Turkalo had lived through civil strife before, but this time, she tells us, it was much worse. "They were terrified. I need Schreger lines too, George, I say, referring to the cross-hatching on the butt of a sawn tusk that looks like growth rings of a tree trunk. In March 2006 he fled for the DRC and set up camp in Garamba National Park, then home to some 4,000 elephants. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. COPY EDITOR: Cindy Leitner, Hear Brent Stirton tell their stories in an audioslideshow, Hear Bryan Christy discuss the investigation on. I spend a night in police custody, where Im given a desk to sleep on. Then youre just the man for me.. I agree elephants are my favourite animals and it's unfair elephants don't cut of our noses or massively nearly ruin our species so why should we do the same to them. To gain more troops it recruited civilians into its armyincluding child soldersafter mass abductions. Editor's Note: Viewers may find the next image from the 2013 elephant slaughter disturbing. Rogue militias and army soldiers from the DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in the park. The cook, Djimet Said (opposite), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. The focus of the series was on nature, diverse cultures, and endangered environments.Its intent, according its creator Carolyn Jensen, who passed away in 2010, was to give listeners the sound equivalent of National Geographic photos. Five of the worlds least stable nations, as ranked by the Washington, D.C.-based organization the Fund for Peace, are home to people who travel to other countries to kill elephants. For ten years Khartoum supplied him with food, medicine, and arms, including automatic rifles, antiaircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. To use comments you will need to have JavaScript enabled. It hadnt explodedyet. Sudan is not on these lists, even though Sudanese poachers are a primary reason elephants are killed in several of the countries listed by CITES as of primary or secondary concern. East Africa is now ground zero for much of the poaching. Researchers are still trying to pinpoint all the genetics that underpin . Elephant ivory is a key source of funding for armed groups in central Africa . We meet in a busy coffee shop full of students from nearby Brown University. So why elephants? The men of the Hippotrague unit assumed that after the previous teams raid, the poachers had all fled home. PELLETIER: The reason why that's important is because if you stop the killing right now, you know, the time it would take for the population to, you know, restore that traits would be much longer now that there's been a change in the genes than if it wasn't. Kony was adamant in his radio transmissions. Suddenly they move steadily north, about 12 miles a day along the border with South Sudan, avoiding all roads. MCCAMMON: Those changes can ripple through ecosystems. No one has. Turkalo is back in the U.S. now, living near Providence, R.I. She had to flee Africa last year because of the civil war in the country that is home to the elephants she shared a life with. The operation was designed by Kony himself, Onen says. Was it genetically inherited at all? Rangers practice their riding skills at Zakouma National Park, in Chad. It's run by a band of men who, if not exactly soldiers-of-fortune, certainly are trained warriors who can deal not just with poachers, but with civil war, too. When the tortoise Lonesome George, emblem of the Galpagos Islands, died, it was Dante who was tasked with restoring him. Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project Civil war drove these elephants to lose their tusksthrough evolution. For the man, the White elephant represents some component that is extra of a burden, even though it is a blessing, it is then again unwanted. It's called the Dzanga bai a clearing the size of several football fields that's rich in the mineralized mud that the elephants depend on. But Dante, who is one of the worlds most respected taxidermists, has never done what Im asking him to do. Unlike Savanna elephants, forest elephants don't have natural predators, such as lions. Six years later, on October 25, 2014, Onen tells me, his poaching mission to Garamba was scheduled to deliver its ivory to Kony in Sudan. After more than an hour of animated debate, they phone the airports wildlife expert. Outnumbered and ill equipped, theyre manning the front line in a violent battle that affects us all. He points a finger at me, and yells, You are a liar, bwana! (Bwana is Swahili for sir.). Veteran ranger Jean Claude Mambo Marindo sits beside almost a hundred tusks seized from elephant poachers at Garamba National Park, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). For example, tuskless motherswho would have had one copy of the dominant tuskless gene, from their own mothershad the same number of daughters with and without tusks. Kiev's troops have big Nazi problem - ex-US soldier who escaped Ukraine; DESTRUCTION OF OUR CULTURE HAS SUCCEEDED; Most Ukrainian Soldiers On Bakhmut Front-Line Killed 'Within 4 Hours' URGENT: mRNAs jabs may have caused tens of millions of serious new health problems worldwide, a huge peer-reviewed study shows That members of the Sudanese military trade arms for ivory with the LRA raises questions about the highest levels of Sudans government. All around me I hear the click-clack of automatic weapons being loaded. During the Mozambican civil war, both sides financed their efforts by poaching elephants for ivory. When ivory poachers target elephants, the hunters can affect more than just animal numbers. The Ugandan military finally attacked Konys Garamba camps in late 2008. Margaret Acino was 23, pregnant, working in the fields near Gulu, Uganda, when an LRA commander called for a razor and ordered his boy soldiers to slice off her lips, ears, and nose. We need your help to protect elephants and report on wildlife crime. Here a ranger unit is permanently deployed to protect one of the parks most important assets: a radio tower that was being built. Diya is for accidents, he says. During the Mozambican Civil War from 1977 to 1992, humans killed so many elephants for their lucrative ivory that the animals seem to have evolved in the space of a generation. In Mozambique, past hunting pressure led to an increase of . On the 15th day after they began to move, they cross into South Sudan and from there make their way into the Kafia Kingi enclave, a disputed territory in Darfur controlled bySudan. A forum for discussion about elephants and rhinos and a rally point for those who want to getinvolved. Quintin Kermeen, 51, based in Concord, California, has the credentials, and the personality, Im looking for. All rights reserved. Two genes stood out: MEP1a and AMELX, which are active in tooth development in other mammals, were present in seven elephants with tusks, but had unique mutations in 11 tuskless elephants. In . Campbell-Staton points out that other species in Gorongosa rely on elephants having tusks to dig up holes for water and strip bark from trees. That evening, they floated by a village. Ugandan forces killed Binany in 2013 and recovered thediary. This ideathat an animal's perception of danger . We can't change the last bit we can shape the future. Poachers killed at least 132 last year, and as of this June, rangers had discovered another 42 carcasses with bullet holes, more than 30 attributed to a single Sudanese poaching expeditiona combined loss amounting to more than 10 percent of the parks entire population of elephants, estimated now to be no more than about 1,500. Ongwen said Konys plan is to obtain as much ivory as possible for his future survival should he not be able to overthrow the government of Uganda.. Its not clear why a mutated version of AMELXwhich is located on the x chromosomewould be fatal to males, but researchers suspect one or more nearby genes come along for the ride. Its hissanctuary.. A booming Chinese middle class with an insatiable taste for ivory, crippling poverty in Africa, weak and corrupt law enforcement, and more ways than ever to kill an elephant have created a perfect storm. I know that ivory tusks make millions of pounds but is it really worth it? CORNISH: The upshot, which they published this week in the journal Science, is that females without tusks are pretty likely to have tuskless babies, which is why the trait was becoming so prevalent. Today, poaching has stopped in Gorongosa, and the elephant population is recovering. On January 2, 2009, the horror bled into Garambas headquarters, at Nagero, where Kony soldiers burned the park rangers main building, destroyed equipment, and killed at least eight rangers and staff members. No, I want ivory for ammunition to keep fighting, was Konys reply, according to Onen, who was listening to transmissions. Soldiers killed elephants to acquire ivory which was later sold to finance arms and ammunition. To look for genes that might be involved, the team took blood from 18 female elephants in the park and sequenced their genomes. So support charities who put a stop to that. Im a problem solver., I laugh. Its easier to live with things, she says. So I said to myself, 'I better go into a very passive mode.' It was used to make combs, pool balls, knick-knacks, and even piano keys. In May 2013 Seleka-backed Sudanese poachers attacked Dzanga Bai, an elephant oasis in Dzanga-Ndoki National Park of southwest CAR, killing 26 elephants. World Elephant Day: Ten reasons we love elephants, Elephants counted from space for conservation project. MCCAMMON: Around 90% of the elephants there were killed, but many female elephants without tusks survived and thrived. Year after year, the path to many of the biggest, most horrific elephant killings traces back to Sudan, which has no elephants left but gives comfort to foreign-born poacher-terrorists and is home to the janjaweed and other Sudanese cross-continental marauders. It was supposed to be a short posting, but he saw too much death to leave. Congolese soldiers undergo training by Mathieu Eckel of African Parks, an NGO that manages Garamba National Park with the DRCs parks authority. In 2013, Khamis Kagasheki, then Tanzanias minister of natural resources and tourism, declared that the illegal ivory trade involves rich people and politicians who have formed a very sophisticated network, and he accused four members of Tanzanias Parliament of being involved init. 3. for their tusks. In Songo the tusks are held for three days in what looks like a clearing outside town. 5. He said: "We actually expect that this syndrome will decrease in frequency in our study population, provided that the conservation picture continues to stay as positive as it has been recently. b. percentage of elephants killed . Locals, including poor villagers and unpaid park rangers, are killing elephants for casha risk theyre willing to take because even if theyre caught, the penalties are often negligible. Despite their lack of tusks, it's often the females who can be seen defending the herd. Follow theirroute. ", They were the Seleka the Muslim rebels who had overthrown the national government in the spring of 2013. But a computer simulation, which examined the probability of tusked and tuskless females surviving the war, suggested the increase in tuskless females was far more likely to have resulted from selection, the team reports online today in Science. Inside the fake tusk, I want him to embed a custom-made GPS and satellite-based tracking system. The family of Idriss Adoum (second from left) tracked one suspect to Sudan. Mozambique's elephants declined from an estimated 20,000 to 10,300 during the same period. CORNISH: Campbell-Staton had heard all of this before. Was much worse all roads animated debate, they shape vast swaths of wildlands, and.: around 90 % of her daughters will be tusked, but that other species in Gorongosa, and park! Lived through civil strife before, but many female elephants in the Providence coffee full! 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