We plunge eight hours through elephant grass so tall and thick its possible to get lost just 20 feet from the man in front of youdown grass ravines, up hills exposed to the enemy, across a murky, waist-deep pond. ", They were the Seleka the Muslim rebels who had overthrown the national government in the spring of 2013. There were armed combatants roaming the countryside. Issa, who is Chadian, said he joined the team of three Sudanese men and that together they rode more than two weeks to get to Heban, where they killed nine elephants in four days. It consists of a battery capable of lasting more than a year, a GPS receiver, an Iridium satellite transceiver, and a temperature sensor. I arrive at what amounts to the park rangers northern front, an outpost vulnerable both to Sudanese poachers and Konys army. Where did the tusks end up? Tusklessness became more common in the female elephants of Mozambique 's Gorongosa National Park after rampant ivory poaching during the country's 15-year civil war. Professor Robert Pringle of Princeton University said: "Tusklessness might be advantageous during a war, but that comes at a cost.". 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. But she knew she had to leave; she's a researcher for a non-governmental wildlife organization, not some kind of soldier-of-fortune. But it failed to rout Kony or his leadership. Once the war and poaching ended, elephants with tusks were more likely to survive because they could use their tusks to find water and food. By the time you read this, my tusks might have gone to Khartoum. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Large-tusked elephants in Gorongosa were killed for their ivory, which was sold to buy arms and ammunition. Here a ranger unit is permanently deployed to protect one of the parks most important assets: a radio tower that was being built. If true, Soumaine Issa will find poachers working with Seleka. During those years Sudanese poachers arrived in groups of more than a dozen armed men, camping inside the park for months at a time, killing, in one instance, 64 elephants in a single hunt. All creatures should live in harmony! 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 . During the rains the park is more lake than land, and elephants split into two groups to escape the floods. The park has lost all its rhinos to poaching for their horns. Using Kermeens technology, he could adjust how many times a day they tried to communicate with a satellite via the Internet. "I can never get too emotionally attached to things there," she says of central Africa, "because otherwise you set yourself up for a lot of disappointment. By Jake Buehler. His wife, abducted later, was killed. RENAMO also had imposed a system it called Gamdira whereby villagers were required to produce food, transport goods and ammunition, and village women were forced to be sex slaves. This paper is going to lead to a lot of speculation and modeling.. 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. Embattled park rangers are often the only defense for wildlife andvillagers. The Radio Expeditions series (1992-2007) was a joint production of NPR and the National Geographic Society. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. It was used to make combs, pool balls, knick-knacks, and even piano keys. 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. 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. Im a problem solver., I laugh. But Turkalo decided not to leave the region right away. Kafia Kingi is so widely recognized as a Kony hideout that in April 2013 a coalition of groups, including Invisible Children, the Enough Project, and the Resolve, issued a report called Hidden in Plain Sight: Sudans Harboring of the LRA in the Kafia Kingi Enclave, 2009-2013. LRA defectors I spoke with consistently placed the warlord in the Kafia Kingi area too. MCCAMMON: Those changes can ripple through ecosystems. Elephant tusks are elongated incisors. " Turkalo and the other women stopped their boat, afraid they'd be fired on if they kept going. Rangers join a Congolese army platoon on a 21-day mission in Garamba National Park, searching for poachers, especially those with the LRA. Thousands of elephants die each year so that their tusks can be carved into religious objects. CAMPBELL-STATON: You know, people during the Mozambican Civil War were not thinking about the evolution of elephants, I imagine, in the slightest. During the civil war between 1977 to 1992, poachers sold the ivory to finance the conflict, including buying arms and ammunition. He wasnt contrite. She and other scientists also recorded their calls. 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. The cook, Djimet Said (below), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. This limited the trade of some ivory, but trade still continued across the world. 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. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. They shift a few miles. 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. Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project, Former Commando Turns Conservationist To Save Elephants Of Dzanga Bai. Some 30,000 African elephants die each year at the hands of poachers to satisfy the global demand for ivory. Learn more about the Explorer series. Theyre in a place 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the ambient temperature, so perhaps theyve been buried in the backyard. But last year at the bai, she says, she feared for her life. A crowd gathers. for their meat. Turkalo had lived through civil strife before, but this time, she tells us, it was much worse. Onen is short and looks even smaller wearing a camouflage-patterned Ugandan army uniform thats too long for him in the sleeves. 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. November 6, 1954, Page 3 Buy Reprints. Konys force has declined from a peak of 2,700 combatants in 1999 to an estimated 150 to 250 core fighters today. When I ask, How many of you have been kidnapped by the LRA?I understand why. 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. To look for genes that might be involved, the team took blood from 18 female elephants in the park and sequenced their genomes. 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.' Then youre just the man for me.. But seeing it in front of you, and knowing those individuals are related, that makes my day. 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. ", "We got into a boat; we went downriver," Turkalo says. 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. Konys response was immediate and savage. According to CITES Secretary-General John Scanlon, Sudan does not appear on these lists because CITES sets priorities based mainly on ivory seizures, and there have been few ivory seizures linked to Sudan in recent years. It was used to make combs, pool balls, knick-knacks, and even piano keys. 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. It was to become her home, and her life's work. That's so terrible! But Onen got his way. See the article in its original context from. Quintin Kermeen, 51, based in Concord, California, has the credentials, and the personality, Im looking for. That's just something to think about and consider really because it's absolutely RIDICULOUS that any animal should have to go through that. The Central African Republic was peaceful back then. They killed fewer elephants per hunt but were much harder to track and stop. 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. Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. East Africa is now ground zero for much of the poaching. 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. His account was corroborated by Caesar Achellam, a former intelligence chief for Kony who is now in the Ugandan governments custody. She's bundled in a heavy coat rarely needed during her years in the African bush. Elephants coming to the bai get essential minerals from the muddy water. The relationship is close: SAF warns Kony if theres trouble, Onen says. Konys men jump back and forth across borders, hiding in countries where governance is weak. 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. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. Today, poaching has stopped in Gorongosa, and the elephant population is recovering. Use the evidence above to make a claim about the main reason elephants were illegally killed in this region. RESEARCH: Heidi Schultz, Brad Scriber. At the time Sudans north and south were in a civil war, and Kony offered Sudans government, in Khartoum, a way to destabilize the south. Konys army had arrived in Garamba in 2006 with little ammunition left to continue its war, Onen tells me. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. We ask if she recognized any of the elephants in the photos taken of their carcasses after the poachers fled. Seleka rebels had a stock of about 300 ivory tusks that they sold, which enabled them to get the supplies that helped them overthrow President Franois Boziz in CAR, Ongwen told African Union forces, according to his debriefing. Chad. That's where Princeton evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton found himself a few years ago. The tension broke. Civil war drove these elephants to lose their tusksthrough evolution. "I don't know which ones they killed," she replies. By skewing their evolution, humans fiddle with elephants' role in the ecosystem too. 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. 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. Do we really need to sell ivory tusks in the world just to make money? The soldiers killed the elephants. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Ive met more than a thousand children who have been abducted, he says as we talk inside his church in the nearby town of Dungu. Click the arrow below to hear the amazing audio tale they brought home. Father Sugule introduces me to three young girls, recent LRA kidnapping victims, who are sitting on a wooden bench in his church. During the civil war in Mozambique, soldiers killed elephants with tusks in order to sell the ivory, so fewer elephants with tusks survived. "But I'm certain I knew a few of the elephants they killed," she says including some that the NPR team had recorded. Sugule is the founder of a group that provides assistance to victims of Konys army. 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. Despite Sudans role as a safe haven for groups known to traffic ivory, such as the LRA, janjaweed, and other poaching gangs, the country has drawn limited official attention as a poaching state. Having worked extensively throughout central Africa, Froment transferred to Garamba in early 2014 after rangers discovered dozens of elephant carcasses in the park. The UN estimated that the massacre displaced more than a hundred thousand Congolese and Sudanese. Researchers have long suspected that the tuskless trait, only seen in females, was linked to the sex of the elephant. Which raises the question: If ivory is poached by Sudanese, where is it going? Despite their lack of tusks, it's often the females who can be seen defending the herd. 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. Ivory poachers are killing some 22,000 African elephants a year. 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. Now, says the parks director, Rian Labuschagne, of African Parks, my biggest fear is that theyll start coming in pairs.. Kony was adamant in his radio transmissions. It also raises many questions. By 1979, there were only 1.3 million elephants left. Or possibly even shown up in illegal ivorys biggest consuming country:China. The story typically would have ended with the wanton killing of these park rangers protecting elephants. This project was made possible by a grant from The WoodtigerFund. The elephants coat themselves in red clay. Dzanga Baialso known as the village of elephantsis a mineral-rich mudhole where the animalscongregate. Without the stress of poaching, the elephants started breeding again, and more than 40 calves have been born. Since the 2008-09 attack by Konys soldiers, rangers have finished building a new headquarters and acquired two airplanes and a helicopter. 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. It was still too dangerous, Turkalo decided, so she made her escape by boat a second time. 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