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. Its hissanctuary.. Geli Oh, 16, spent longer with Konys army than her two friendstwo and a half terrible years. . World Elephant Day: Ten reasons we love elephants, Elephants counted from space for conservation project. Do we really need to sell ivory tusks in the world just to make money? Suddenly they move steadily north, about 12 miles a day along the border with South Sudan, avoiding all roads. Fifty percent of her sons will be tusked, but that other 50% would die. DNA suggests that some of the ivory is from elephants killed in May 2013 at Dzanga Bai in CAR. Here a ranger unit is permanently deployed to protect one of the parks most important assets: a radio tower that was being built. You know, yet those actions - right? Five of the six men in Zakoumas Hippotrague patrol unit were killed by elephant poachers outside the park; the sixth is presumed dead. He wasnt contrite. My interpretation, says Jean Marc Froment, then director of the park, is that the Ugandan military is conducting operations inside Garamba and at the same time taking some ivory. But, he adds, the poachers could be SPLA, which uses the same type of helicopter seen over the park. By 1979, there were only 1.3 million elephants left. ". AUDIO: Justin O'Neill. a. percentage of elephants killed only for their meat 19/129 = 14.7% b. percentage of elephants killed only for their tusks 75/129 = 58.1% c. percentage of elephants killed for both their tusks and meat 27/129 = 20.9% 5. Ive flown from Garamba park headquarters to a dirt airstrip deep inside the park to join an antipoaching patrol. Schreger lines, he says. Sugule is the founder of a group that provides assistance to victims of Konys army. A few days later the tusks proceed to Songo, the Sudanese market town where Onen said Konys men trade ivory. 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. All creatures should live in harmony! In this scene from the documentary Explorer: Warlords of Ivory, a screener at Tanzanias airport accuses Bryan Christy of smuggling. Ivory shops in Khartoum advertise in English and Chinese as well as Arabic. Science and AAAS are working tirelessly to provide credible, evidence-based information on the latest scientific research and policy, with extensive free coverage of the pandemic. SHANE CAMPBELL-STATON: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute - they had this video that was called "The Tuskless Elephants Of Gorongosa." ", Turkalo says she walked up to the man in charge and saw he had an AK-47 assault rifle. All of central Africa is a hand grenade, its pin pulled by a history of resource exploitation from abroad, dictatorships, and poverty. To enjoy the CBBC Newsround website at its best you will need to have JavaScript turned on. As long-ranging animals, they shape vast swaths of wildlands, stomping and chomping through them, sparring with trees, rearranging foliage. Some 30,000 African elephants die each year at the hands of poachers to satisfy the global demand for ivory. That's just something to think about and consider really because it's absolutely RIDICULOUS that any animal should have to go through that. When in 2008 the Wildlife Conservation Society introduced a surveillance airplane, poaching declined, but Sudanese marauders adapted, returning in hit squads of under six men, who infiltrated from outside the park on one-day hunts. Written in Acholi, it details Konys order for a hundred elephant tusks. I want Dante to design an artificial elephant tusk that has the look and feel of confiscated tusks loaned to me by the U.S. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He points a finger at me, and yells, You are a liar, bwana! (Bwana is Swahili for sir.). When I ask, How many of you have been kidnapped by the LRA?I understand why. I unzip my suitcase to expose two fake tusks and hand him letters from the U.S. 19/129 = 14.7%. But in central Africa, as I learned firsthand, something more sinister is driving the killing: Militias and terrorist groups funded in part by ivory are poaching elephants, often outside their home countries, and even hiding inside national parks. In three weeks Konys brutes killed more than 800 people and kidnapped more than 160 children. Several Tanzanian officers who had presided over my arrest at the airport, including the wildlife expert, returned the next day to wish us bon voyage. Learn more about the Explorer series. Onen had been part of an LRA poaching operation in Garamba consisting of 41 fighters, including Konys son Salim. Konys force has declined from a peak of 2,700 combatants in 1999 to an estimated 150 to 250 core fighters today. 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. Turkalo clearly would rather be back in Africa than in a coffee house in Rhode Island. In March 2006 he fled for the DRC and set up camp in Garamba National Park, then home to some 4,000 elephants. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. His wife, abducted later, was killed. During the civil war in Mozambique,soldiers killed elephants with tusks in order to sell the ivory, so fewer elephants with tusks survived. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Geographic certifying that theyre artificial. Garamba National Park, in the northeast corner of the DRC and on the border with South Sudan, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, internationally famous for its elephants and its boundless ocean of green. In May 2013 poachers with the insurgent group Seleka massacred 26 elephants at Dzanga Bai, amineral-rich watering hole in CAR. Such a biased sex ratio would be expected with a recessive gene that kills males when they inherit it. It was to become her home, and her life's work. So why elephants? MCCAMMON: Campbell-Staton and his team worked with local researchers who had tracked elephants for decades. 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. And I gotta find a way to get that shine, Dante says, referring to the gloss a clean elephant tusk has. EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? 4. National Geographic television producer J.J.Kelley takes the floor in the waiting area. "It's another example of the imprint of [human] effect on nature," says wildlife ecologist George Wittemyer of Colorado State University, who was not involved in the research. The teams cook, also wounded, struggled 11 miles to get help. Erik Stokstad is a reporter at Science, covering environmental issues. 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. The team calculated that 18.5 percent of female elephants did not have tusks before the war began. Beginning on Christmas Eve, his soldiers spread out in small teams and murdered civilians. Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. And I was like, ooh, what's this? Kony is a former Roman Catholic altar boy whose stated mission is to overthrow the Ugandan government on behalf of the Acholi people of northern Uganda, and to rule the country according to his version of the Ten Commandments. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. Click the arrow below to hear the amazing audio tale they brought home. This find suggests the mutation for tusklessness may kill male elephants, per the New York Times. ", They were the Seleka the Muslim rebels who had overthrown the national government in the spring of 2013. The recent death toll of elephants in Garamba has been staggering, even by central African standards. 4. CORNISH: You see; while most African elephants have tusks, some female African elephants are born without them and never grow them. Sudan is also a well-documented supplier of ivory to Egypt and is the recipient of substantial Chinese infrastructure investment, which typically comes with Chinese workers, a source of ivory smuggling in many parts of Africa. only . A forum for discussion about elephants and rhinos and a rally point for those who want to getinvolved. CORNISH: Consequences that are still continuing nearly 30 years after the war. Ranger Dieudonn Kumboyo Kobango, standing with his son, Genekpio, who escaped soon after the LRA seized him, says, I search for the LRA on every patrol.. It was used to make combs, pool balls, knick-knacks, and even piano keys. Rogue militias and army soldiers from the DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in the park. He was 22 years old the night in 1998 that Konys soldiers raided his village in Gulu, Uganda, and pulled him from his bed. It was still too dangerous, Turkalo decided, so she made her escape by boat a second time. Traits that are beneficial in one environment may not be beneficial in another. During the Mozambican civil war, both sides financed their efforts by poaching elephants for ivory. Thousands of elephants die each year so that their tusks can be carved into religious objects. Andrea says all she was able to rescue were electronic copies of her research data. This is a photocopy of the diary of the LRAs Lt. Col. Vincent Binany Okumu, who, defectors say, was in charge of ivory hunting in Garamba National Park. Hed grown up not far from Garamba at a time when it was possible to fly over the park and see 5,000 elephants in a single gathering. Between April 25 and June 17, poachers killed two Garamba rangers and two army . As far as Onen knew, the poaching squad he abandoned was still making its way north from Garamba through CAR to Sudan. 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. Tusklessness, according to a new paper in Science, can be attributed in large part to a dominant mutation on the X chromosome a genetic change that also explains the sex skew Poole saw. Then they head south six miles, back into Kafia Kingi. Female elephants in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique evolved to be tuskless in response to intense hunting. "I heard they were on their way. Rangers practice their riding skills at Zakouma National Park, in Chad. Money is available to outfit the rangers with better equipment, but buying new weapons requires formal approval of the Congolese army, something Froment has been unable to get. 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. My tusks will have to act like ivory. Or will they go nowhere, discovered before theyre moved and turned in by an honest person? It was used to make combs, pool balls, knick-knacks, and even piano keys. But seeing it in front of you, and knowing those individuals are related, that makes my day. 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. I just can't understand why anyone would want to take away any of the amazing qualities and features of an elephant. I know that ivory tusks make millions of pounds but is it really worth it? The dogs are Belgian Malinois shepherds, famed for their use in military operations, especially in tough conditions like the dense central African bush. "You know, a lot of the NGOs, we just cut and run," she tells us matter-of-factly. 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. But ammunition is in perilously short supplynot even enough for basic trainingand the rangers largest weapon, a belt-fed machine gun, tends to jam every third round or so. Arent you interested in peace talks?. COPY EDITOR: Cindy Leitner, Hear Brent Stirton tell their stories in an audioslideshow, Hear Bryan Christy discuss the investigation on. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. hide caption, "We didn't know anything about (the forest elephants) in terms of their social structure, numbers, genetics, communication," Turkalo explained back in 2002 when the NPR team visited. 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. It was just impossible to stay. Zakouma National Park has lost nearly 90 percent of its elephants since 2002. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. And someoneits unclear whois believed to be killing elephants from helicopters, as evidenced by bullet holes in the tops of skulls and the removal of tusks by what can only be chain saws. Forest elephants linger on a misty morning at the Dzanga bai. Meanwhile, according to Onen, Konys men hid ivory by burying it in the ground or submerging it in rivers. No, I want ivory for ammunition to keep fighting, was Konys reply, according to Onen, who was listening to transmissions. In Mozambique, past hunting pressure led to an increase of . I make a mental note that Konys soldiers and other armed groups walk hundreds of miles from Sudan into this endless grass curtain to kill elephants. Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project, Former Commando Turns Conservationist To Save Elephants Of Dzanga Bai. 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. I find a human skull fragment, and I nearly pick up a live hand grenade near where the SPLA had camped, mistaking it for a baby tortoise. 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. In humans, a mutated version of AMELX is linked to male death before birth; in females, that version stunts the growth of the upper incisors, the same teeth that become tusks in elephants. " Turkalo and the other women stopped their boat, afraid they'd be fired on if they kept going. One of them knew one of the women in the boat. Albert Roca, a geneticist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, calls the shift striking in its speedand because it is driven by people. Female elephants do use their tusks, but female elephants in Mozambique are doing just fine without them, according to Long. 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. But it could take a long time for tusked females to become as common as they once were. Its only the ivory that will make the LRA strong, he recalls Konysaying. The operation was designed by Kony himself, Onen says. We can't change the last bit we can shape the future. Dont yet have access? The reason why the soldiers killed the elephants was to gain ammunition and arms from the money received after selling their ivory. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. Otti was furious, Onen says. Quintin Kermeen, 51, based in Concord, California, has the credentials, and the personality, Im looking for. 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. 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. You must be a real animal lover, I say. At the sound of a twig cracking or the detection of an unexpected scent on the wind, a ranger in front of me, Agoyo Mbikoyo, signals caution, and I drop with the team into a collective crouch and wait silently. Ugandan soldiers with the African Unions Regional Task Force hunt for LRA leader Joseph Kony in the Central African Republic (CAR), pulling themselves along ropes to cross rivers. The Central African Republic was peaceful back then. 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. But one of the murdered men, Idriss Adoum, had a younger brother, Saleh, who resolved that, when the rains stopped, he and a cousin would hunt the killers in Sudan, where so many ivory roads lead. PRODUCER: Janey Adams. But a new study suggests there is a serious reason for why lots of tuskless elephants can now be found in the country of Mozambique in Africa - poaching. 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. Wittemyer wonders whether a similar phenomenon happened long ago in Asia, because both male and female fossil elephants there have tusks, but among living Asian elephants, only males have tusks. In 1994 Kony left Uganda and took his murderous gang on the road. South Sudan. As in eye colour and blood type in humans, genes are responsible for whether elephants inherit tusks from their parents. After visiting Garamba, I arrange with a confidential source to put my tusks into the black market near Mboki, a small village in CAR midway between Garamba and Sudan that has been the target of attacks by Konys army and where some people who have escaped from Kony have found safety. I just can't understand why anyone would want to take away any of the amazing qualities and features of an elephant. Civil war drove these elephants to lose their tusksthrough evolution. VIDEO: J.J. Kelley, NG Studios. Now, scientists say that drove some elephants to evolve tusklessness. That's so terrible! Among the recent casualties was a group of rare forest elephants in the Central African Republic. The elephants coat themselves in red clay. Its not a secret to anyone that Konys in Sudan, says the State Departments Marty Regan. During the same period, neighboring Mozambique is reported to have lost 48 percent of its elephants. But Onen got his way. Sudan. His control is absolute.. Maybe I could get my fake tusks to Konytoo. Or possibly even shown up in illegal ivorys biggest consuming country:China. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. Weve heard he went to Seleka, Idriss Adoums son Issa tells me, referring to the violent rebel coalition that overthrew the CAR government on March 24, 2013. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. After six hours on the dark river, they got to safety, to a campsite in the Congo. Five of the six men in Zakoumas Hippotrague patrol unit were killed by elephant poachers outside the park; the sixth is presumed dead. In the United States, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama supported efforts either to arrest or kill him. 3. To gain more troops it recruited civilians into its armyincluding child soldersafter mass abductions. A young elephant splashes in a stream that runs through the bai. 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. Michael Onen, the defector from Konys army, told me that the LRA and the janjaweed had battled over ivory, with one group robbing the other, and that it was the janjaweeds success in trading ivory that originally gave Kony the idea to start killing elephants. 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. Elephants without tusks were normally. Kony even invited foreign press into his camp for interviews. 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. Before the civil war, about 18.5% of females were naturally tuskless, but that figure has risen to 33% among elephants born since the early 1990s. Later, when Labuschagne examined the trajectory of bullets at the scene, he concluded that the poachers had been trained in how to set up a cross fire, which, combined with evidence found at the scene, pointed to President Omar al-Bashirs Sudan Armed Forces. The tension broke. A study in Gorongosa revealed that while male elephants did have tusks but almost 50% of female elephants above the age of 20 did not. So 50% of her daughters will be tusked. Villagers sometimes taunt returned children with the same expression used for Konys men: LRA Tongo Tongo. LRA Cut Cuta reference, Sugule explains, to the militants vicious use ofmachetes. "We gave them a little money and said the Seleka were coming," says Turkalo. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Soldiers Kill Wild Elephant. Park rangers are often the only forces going up against the killers. This comment was removed because it broke the rules. Dry season in, rainy season out. CORNISH: Campbell-Staton had heard all of this before. As we talk over my design needs, Dantes brown eyes sparkle like a boys on Christmas morning. Today, poaching has stopped in Gorongosa, and the elephant population is recovering. Mozambique's elephants declined from an estimated 20,000 to 10,300 during the same period. The Ugandan military finally attacked Konys Garamba camps in late 2008. when will hunters get the message we need other species alive on our planet for our own species to survive . I'm outraged as to how some people have the audacity to kill these inconncent , sentient creatures who , like most animals help keep the food chain stable. Turkalo had lived through civil strife before, but this time, she tells us, it was much worse. Without the stress of poaching, the elephants started breeding again, and more than 40 calves have been born. In 2012 as many as a hundred Sudanese and Chadian poachers on horseback rode across central Africa into Cameroons Bouba Ndjidah National Park. They found that the tuskless trait was genetic, found in the X chromosome, and it was deadly in males. "I could hear the call and say, 'Yeah, that's a juvenile being pushed out of a hole by its mother; it's protesting.' During the civil war between 1977 to 1992, poachers sold the ivory to finance the conflict, including buying arms and ammunition. Kermeen started in the radio-tracking business when he was 15 and has since built electronic trackers and collars for wildlife from Andean bears to California condors to Tasmanian devils. for their tusks. It was reassuring to find the Tanzanian law enforcers so vigilant, because the country is plagued by perhaps the worst elephant poaching in Africa, and corruption is rife. Turkalo's pretty famous in the world of elephant research, as one of the first to study forest elephants. 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