Elephant butchery in Tanzania an open secret – 31,000 elephants killed on the Selous National Park

China driving rampant elephant poaching - Courtesy of Wildlife Direct

Click here to read the full article in the Spectator 

April 2010. Well CITES is over and the ivory trade has not reopened, but according to one new documentary Africa's elephants are no safer. In 2009 Aidan Hartley, of UK's Channel 4, investigated the story on the ivory trade. It was not an easy task for him and his team to do the undercover work to reveal what is really happening on the ground and in African government offices. This multi part documentary, called End of the Elephant, aired on Channel 4 and can also be watched online.

Elephant massacre in Selous National Park
In a special article in the Spectator, Aidan Hartley revealed that it was easy to find ivory on the Tanzanian streets - any amount he wanted. But it was the bullet riddled carcasses in the Selous National Park that led Aiden to call the situation there a free fall. Over 31,000 elephants have been killed in the last 3 years in this premier

Tanzanian ‘protected area'. Aidan says "I became sickened by seeing so many fresh elephant carcasses'
"I became sickened by seeing so many fresh elephant carcasses: bullet-riddled, heaving with maggots, skulls hacked up with axes where poachers extracted the tusks. And what astonished me was that this was going on under the noses of foreign tourists, each of them paying a fortune to visit Tanzania's game parks." 

Aidan says "The Tanzanian government clearly has done little to stem the illegal killings of elephants, to the disgust of tour operators and conservationists. Indeed this was the main reason that Tanzania failed in her bid to sell off her ivory stockpiles at the just concluded CITES conference in Doha. The slaughter of Tanzania's elephants has been an open secret for some time. Corruption in official offices and threats to tour operators who 'speak' have kept it out of the official news."

Who buys Tanzania's ivory?
Aidan discovered that Chinese in the country are the main buyers: "We met Salim and another dealer, Daudi, at a petrol station. They got in our car and Daudi produced a tusk that still had dried blood on it. I asked, ‘Do many mzungus [white people] buy these, or is it mainly the Chinese?'

‘All the time the Chinese come. Many, yes! Yes!' exclaimed Daudi."

"According to the seller Salim, ivory is purchased by the Chinese and exported through the main airport after paying bribes. This ivory is fresh and still bloody and the sales and exports are happening openly everyday. Clearly the ivory is arriving in China without any problems on that end. Amazing considering that all the Chinese authorities would need to do is search the luggage of every person travelling from Tanzania to catch them. If they could track every tourist into China during the Swine flu epidemic, why can't they do this? I believe it's due to a total lack of political will on the part of the Chinese government."

Chinese government officials
But Aidan says it's worse than mere negligence. His source, Daudi, revealed that Chinese government officials travelling through Tanzania, including Hu Jintao's entourage, use their diplomatic status and immunity to move ivory. To Aidan this stinks much more than the sickly smell of 31,000 rotting maggot ridden elephant carcasses.