How Killing Elephants Finances Terror in Africa. Armed groups help fund operations by smuggling elephant ivory. Can fake tusks with hidden GPS trackers thwart them? 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). The Texarkana Gazette is the premier source for local news and sports in Texarkana and the surrounding Arklatex areas. Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on our cover in 1985. Now we can tell her story. The Stuffed into the Fridge trope as used in popular culture. A character is killed off in a particularly gruesome manner and left to be found just to offend The problem with grains, especially modern wheat and flour, may be related to its processing, decreased nutrients and increased glyphosate use. The park has lost all its rhinos to poaching for their horns. Now it’s under siege for its ivory, mainly by rogue soldiers from national armies and by the terrorist group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). By Bryan Christy. Photographs by Brent Stirton. Published August 1. When the American Museum of Natural History wanted to update the hall of North American mammals, taxidermist George Dante got the call. When the tortoise Lonesome George, emblem of the Gal. But Dante, who is one of the world’s most respected taxidermists, has never done what I’m asking him to do. No one has. 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. Fish and Wildlife Service. Inside the fake tusk, I want him to embed a custom- made GPS and satellite- based tracking system. If he can do this, I’ll ask him to make several more tusks. In the criminal world, ivory operates as currency, so in a way I’m asking Dante to print counterfeit money I can follow. I will use his tusks to hunt the people who kill elephants and to learn what roads their ivory plunder follows, which ports it leaves, what ships it travels on, what cities and countries it transits, and where it ends up. Will artificial tusks planted in a central African country head east—or west—toward a coast with reliable transportation to Asian markets? Will they go north, the most violent ivory path on the African continent? Or will they go nowhere, discovered before they’re moved and turned in by an honest person? Joining with the Minneapolis N.A.A.C.P. Mark Dayton said “we’re shocked and horrified” by the killing of a black man by a police officer on Wednesday. As this video has been shared across the world, you will see with your own eyes how he was. National Geographic needs your help to protect elephants and to continue reporting on wildlife crime. Together we can make a difference. As we talk over my design needs, Dante’s brown eyes sparkle like a boy’s on Christmas morning. To test ivory, dealers will scratch a tusk with a knife or hold a lighter under it; ivory is a tooth and won’t melt. My tusks will have to act like ivory. Learn more about the Explorer series. Like much of the world, George Dante knows that the African elephant is under siege. 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. The result: Some 3. African elephants are slaughtered every year, more than 1. Most illegal ivory goes to China, where a pair of ivory chopsticks can bring more than a thousand dollars and carved tusks sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. East Africa is now ground zero for much of the poaching. In June the Tanzanian government announced that the country has lost 6. During the same period, neighboring Mozambique is reported to have lost 4. Locals, including poor villagers and unpaid park rangers, are killing elephants for cash—a risk they’re willing to take because even if they’re caught, the penalties are often negligible. 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. They’re looting communities, enslaving people, and killing park rangers who get in their way. South Sudan. The Central African Republic (CAR). The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Five of the world’s 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. 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. Park rangers are often the only forces going up against the killers. Outnumbered and ill equipped, they’re manning the front line in a violent battle that affects us all. Ugandan soldiers with the African Union’s Regional Task Force hunt for LRA leader Joseph Kony in the Central African Republic (CAR), pulling themselves along ropes to cross rivers. Kony’s men jump back and forth across borders, hiding in countries where governance is weak. Chapter 1: Garamba’s Victims. 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. But when I ask a gathering of children and elders in the village of Kpaika, about 3. Garamba, no one raises a hand. When I ask, “How many of you have been kidnapped by the LRA?”—I understand why. Father Ernest Sugule, who ministers to the village, tells me that many children in his diocese have seen family members killed by the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, the Ugandan rebel group led by Joseph Kony, one of Africa’s most wanted terrorists. Sugule is the founder of a group that provides assistance to victims of Kony’s army. Most of these children are very, very traumatized when they come back home.” They have nightmares, Sugule continues. Their own families are afraid that they’re devils, or forever soldiers, who might kill them in the night. It is assumed that the girls were raped, so it’s difficult for them to find husbands. Villagers sometimes taunt returned children with the same expression used for Kony’s men: “LRA Tongo Tongo.” “LRA Cut Cut”—a reference, Sugule explains, to the militants’ vicious use of machetes. Ranger Dieudonn. Since the 1. Uganda, Kony’s minions are 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 who themselves grow into killers. In 1. 99. 4 Kony left Uganda and took his murderous gang on the road. He went first to Sudan, initiating a pattern of border- hopping that continues to make him difficult to track. At the time Sudan’s north and south were in a civil war, and Kony offered Sudan’s government, in Khartoum, a way to destabilize the south. For ten years Khartoum supplied him with food, medicine, and arms, including automatic rifles, antiaircraft guns, rocket- propelled grenades, and mortars. It was thanks largely to efforts by the group Invisible Children and its video Kony 2. Kony became a household name in the West. In the United States, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama supported efforts either to arrest or kill him. State Department named Kony a “specially designated global terrorist” in 2. African Union has designated the LRA a terrorist organization. Dead elephants finance terrorism. State Department’s Marty Regan. When north and south Sudan signed a peace agreement in 2. Kony lost his Sudanese host. In March 2. 00. 6 he fled for the DRC and set up camp in Garamba National Park, then home to some 4,0. 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. His army farmed vegetables. Kony even invited foreign press into his camp for interviews. Meanwhile, flouting the cease- fire, his men crossed into CAR, where they kidnapped hundreds of children and made sex slaves of women they brought back to the park. Father Sugule introduces me to three young girls, recent LRA kidnapping victims, who are sitting on a wooden bench in his church. Geli Oh, 1. 6, spent longer with Kony’s army than her two friends—two and a half terrible years. She looks at the floor while her friends whisper to each other, smile radiantly, and nibble on cookies we’ve brought for them. Geli Oh perks up at the word “elephant.” She saw many elephants in Garamba National Park, she says, which is where the LRA took her. Tongo Tongo shot two elephants one day, she says. Killings of civilians have likewise dropped, from 1,2. In village after village along the road between Father Sugule’s church and what is now South Sudan, I meet Kony victims who describe being fed elephant meat and how, after elephants were killed, militants took the ivory away. But where? After Lucienne Lanziwa’s husband died in an LRA attack on Garamba, she got a modest stipend. Widows now get a sum equal to six years of a ranger’s salary. Chapter 2: The Problem Solver. To follow my artificial tusks from the jungle to their final destination, I need a tracking device capable of transmitting exact locations without dead zones. It needs to be durable and small enough to fit inside the cavities George Dante would make in the blocks of resin and lead that formed the tusks. Quintin Kermeen, 5. Concord, California, has the credentials, and the personality, I’m looking for. Kermeen started in the radio- tracking business when he was 1. Andean bears to California condors to Tasmanian devils. He designed a GPS tracker that the U. S. Geological Survey embedded in live Burmese pythons to monitor the invasive snakes in the Florida Everglades. For his Judas pig project he built GPS satellite collars to enable pest control authorities in New Zealand to send feral pigs into the bush and locate their invasive piggy friends. We meet over Skype.“You must be a real animal lover,” I say.“I’m not an animal lover,” he snaps. It consists of a battery capable of lasting more than a year, a GPS receiver, an Iridium satellite transceiver, and a temperature sensor.
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