Extinction Trade

The marauders galloped into Zakouma National Park in Chad, the last refuge of that country's once thriving elephant population. Rather than bother with the few remaining elephants, the attackers last May were after the 1.5 tons of ivory—worth as much as $1.3 million—that Chadian officials had seized from poachers over the years and stored in a strongroom at park headquarters. Neither the audacity of the attack nor its brutality—the raiders killed three park rangers—shocked wildlife officials: some 100 rangers, outgunned and outmanned, are killed every year defending Africa's wildlife. Rather, the shock was the identity of the attackers.

In an ominous sign of how the killing of endangered animals has evolved from a crime committed by small bands of unorganized, mostly poor operators, these attackers were Janjaweed, the militia that has carried out genocidal attacks in Darfur. Lured by easy money, the Janjaweed have expanded their killing fields to endangered species. In the past two years, they have butchered hundreds of elephants around Zakouma, say Chadian authorities, carrying the tusks back to Sudan, where they are secreted on ships bound mostly for Asia—or traded for weapons.

For the Janjaweed, killing elephants is the least of its atrocities. But the militia's move into ivory poaching signals a terrifying turn in the world's efforts to save vanishing species. The battle is no longer just about the elephant's trumpet never again echoing over the African savanna, or the Bengal tiger's roar being heard only in memory. The threat posed by the contraband wildlife trade is now also about the money it generates—wave upon wave of it—that is being used by very bad people to do very bad things. "Earnings from the ivory trade is sustaining the Janjaweed," says Michael Wamithi, former head of the Kenya Wildlife Service and now director of the elephant program for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. "It's untraceable money," much like the "blood diamonds" that bankrolled brutal wars in Sierra Leone. On March 5, the House Committee on Natural Resources will hold a hearing on the new twist in illegal wildlife trade.

Three nights after the Janjaweed killed the Chadian rangers in their assault on the ivory (the surviving rangers drove them off before they got their hands on the stockpile), heavily armed Somali poachers marched in lockstep so precisely that a dozen men made the sound of a single footfall. Reaching the bank of Kenya's Tana River, they fired 300 rounds from their assault rifles and killed three Kenyan rangers before losing four of their own and fleeing. The poachers, says IFAW's Wamithi, were traced to a Somali warlord, one of many whose private armies have destabilized that nation for decades. The link didn't surprise experts. If you have to equip, feed and pay a few thousand soldiers, asks William Clark, who chairs Interpol's Working Group on Wildlife Crime, "where does that come from? You need money to pay for civil war."

The State Department estimates that the market value of illegal ivory (the most commonly trafficked contraband, at $400 a pound), tiger parts ($7,000 for a set of bones), rhino horn (up to $25,000 per pound of bone), shark fins, exotic birds (up to $90,000 for a Lear's macaw), reptile skin, bushmeat and other illegal wildlife products has reached $10 billion a year and possibly twice that. China is the largest market, with the United States a close second.

The tip-off that contraband wildlife is being moved by organized syndicates is in the pattern of the seizures. Authorities intercepted an average of 92 illegal shipments of ivory every month in 2006, found Tom Milliken, director of the Africa program for Traffic International, a global network formed in 1976 to monitor wildlife trade. That is not much changed since the 1990s, but one thing is: the number that weighed one ton or more doubled from 1997 to 2006. That rise, says Traffic's Richard Thomas, "is certainly evidence of increasing organized criminal gangs … Moving a ton of ivory is not a trivial undertaking." Recently seized shipments of coral, snakeskins, conch shells, ivory, shahtoosh (the hair of endangered antelopes) and abalone have all been the largest-ever of their types, says Interpol's Clark, another sign that this is not the work of small-time crooks.