How Anti-Terrorism Tactics Are Being Used to Fight Elephant Poaching: In Kenya, Elephant poaching reached it's record high in 2012. It is reported that 384 elephants were slaughtered. Three years later, only 96 elephants were killed in 2015. Lower poaching numbers aren't only great for the elephants- less poaching means less funding for terror groups, such as the Lord Resistance Army, led by the notorious Joseph Kony. In fact, Feisal Ali Mohamed, an ivory poaching kingpin, was sentenced to 20 years in prison last Friday, guilty of dealing in ivory worth $433,000. In a press statement, Kenya Wildlife Service said, "The guilty verdict is a strong message to all networks of poaching gangs, ivory smugglers, financiers, middlemen and shippers that Kenya will not watch as its elephant population is decimated or its territory used as a conduit for traffickers."
While the
risk of extinction seems to constantly loom over African elephants, poaching devastates locally
and globally. Over the past 28 years, Joseph Kony, one of Africa’s most notorious
terrorists, has led the Lord’s Resistance Army in abducting more
than 66,000 children for use as child soldiers, servants, and sex slaves. Acts of cyclical violence
against vulnerable children and the gentle giant Loxodonta Africana, fuel
further brutality and instability in these fragile political regions and
ecosystems. Ivory tusks are worth up to $1,500
per pound on the black market; a male elephant typically has two
250-pound tusks.
Often the slaughter of one elephant can bring Kony and the LRA $750,000. With about 35,000 elephants killed per year worldwide, and
only 500,000 remaining in the wild, elephants are likely to be extinct by 2030 if poachers such as Kony are not stopped.
In 1994, during the civil war between the
North and the South in Sudan, Kony offered the Northern government his assistance
in destabilizing the South. In return, the
government in Khartoum funded the LRA, supplying Kony and the soldiers with
“food, medicine, and arms, including automatic rifles, antiaircraft guns,
rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars." However, in 2005, the peace agreement between
the North and South ended Kony’s funding.
The LRA relocated to Garamba National Park, in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo, surrounded by about 4,000 elephants at the time. With the ivory demand high in Asia, Kony realized
his new source of funding: the largest land mammal on Earth.
In 2009, Kony’s men attacked the rangers
protecting Garamba National Park, weakening antipoaching efforts. Since then, a ranger unit has been
permanently deployed to protect the new park headquarters, and more specifically,
a radio tower that is being built for the rangers, one of the park’s most
valuable assets. The rangers’ resources
are limited; using old and unreliable AK-47s, often seized from poachers, two
airplanes, and a helicopter against the LRA, though their main setback is their
lack of ammunition. A
Sudanese poaching expedition in 2015 wiped out nearly 400 of Garamba National
Park’s elephants, and the LRA is responsible for another 2,100, leaving less
than 1,500 elephants in the park. The fight between
Garamba’s 150 rangers and poachers such as the LRA is often described as
war.
Slaughtering elephants and ruling in
terror fuels the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Kony is raiding villages and “forcing children to kill their parents or
siblings with machetes or blunt tools. He mutilates those who stand in his way,
or those simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, cutting off innocent
civilians’ noses, lips, and hands. He abducts girls to be sex slaves for
his officers,” creating an almost unstoppable terrorist army, fueled by
elephants. Ivory is the ammunition killing humans and elephants.
Without awareness of the looming environmental
catastrophe, or with malicious callousness of said devastation, elephant
poaching by the Lord’s Resistance Army will continue until extinction of the
species on the continent. The criminal Kony,
must be named an international terrorist and an enemy of peaceful governments
everywhere. Ending the cycle of
arming terrorists begins with limiting the purchase of ivory. Kony must not
be allowed to use elephants as his source of ammunition, to save the lives of
countless civilians currently being threatened by the Lord’s Resistance Army,
as well as the elephants of Africa.
Sources:
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