Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. His account was corroborated by Caesar Achellam, a former intelligence chief for Kony who is now in the Ugandan governments custody. The cook, Djimet Said (opposite), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. We were expecting to find an amazing new world of sound to record, and the experience lived up to its reputation the insects, the tropical downpours, and of course the cacophony of the elephants themselves. Here a ranger unit is permanently deployed to protect one of the parks most important assets: a radio tower that was being built. But instead, that morning the poachers were hiding among trees surrounding the rangers camp. 4. Andrea says all she was able to rescue were electronic copies of her research data. All around me I hear the click-clack of automatic weapons being loaded. When theyre abducted, theyre very young, and theyre forced to do horrible things. Rogue militias and army soldiers from the DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in the park. I know that ivory tusks make millions of pounds but is it really worth it? Ivory shops in Khartoum advertise in English and Chinese as well as Arabic. The women motored downriver toward the Democratic Republic of Congo. VIDEO: J.J. Kelley, NG Studios. They killed fewer elephants per hunt but were much harder to track and stop. It's called the Dzanga bai a clearing the size of several football fields that's rich in the mineralized mud that the elephants depend on. Which raises the question: If ivory is poached by Sudanese, where is it going? In 2013, Khamis Kagasheki, then Tanzanias minister of natural resources and tourism, declared that the illegal ivory trade involves rich people and politicians who have formed a very sophisticated network, and he accused four members of Tanzanias Parliament of being involved init. "It's another example of the imprint of [human] effect on nature," says wildlife ecologist George Wittemyer of Colorado State University, who was not involved in the research. They were relieving a ranger team that had raided a Sudanese poachers camp three weeks before and seized more than a thousand rounds of ammunition; mobile phones holding photographs of bloated, dead elephants; a satellite phone with a solar panel charger; two elephant tusks; a pair of camouflage pants; and a uniform with the insignia of Abu TiraSudans notorious Central Reserve Police, alleged to have committed mass killings, assaults, and rapes in Darfur. Eight more are considered of secondary concern: Cameroon, Congo, the DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Mozambique, and Nigeria. It was the rainy season, and the rangers, like the elephants they were guarding, had left the park for higher ground. He said they bury sealed buckets of water along parched travel routes and bury ivory for safekeeping as well. During the Mozambican civil war, both sides financed their efforts by poaching elephants for ivory. The tension broke. Zakouma breathes its elephants. 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 now that there's been a change in the genes than if it wasn't. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. A welcome sight returns to Zakouma: babies. Since the 2008-09 attack by Konys soldiers, rangers have finished building a new headquarters and acquired two airplanes and a helicopter. Sudanese and Chadian poachers were likewise implicated in the 2013 butchering of nearly 90 elephantsincluding 33 pregnant females as well as newborn calvesnear Tikem, Chad, not far from Bouba Ndjidah. A small proportion of females . Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. The relationship is close: SAF warns Kony if theres trouble, Onen says. 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. I make a mental note that Konys soldiers and other armed groups walk hundreds of miles from Sudan into this endless grass curtain to kill elephants. It was still too dangerous, Turkalo decided, so she made her escape by boat a second time. Elephant tusks are elongated incisors. Turkalo is compact and direct, and wears her dark hair pulled back in a bun. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Large-tusked elephants in Gorongosa were killed for their ivory, which was sold to buy arms and ammunition. So we Bill McQuay and Chris Joyce, who've worked together on stories from the mountains of China to the copper mines of Michigan recently decided to go see Turkalo and find out what happened. Using Kermeens technology, he could adjust how many times a day they tried to communicate with a satellite via the Internet. The biggest is why a dominant gene associated with deadly effects for males would persist in the population during periods without poaching. They shot 26 elephants and cut out their tusks. A few days later the tusks proceed to Songo, the Sudanese market town where Onen said Konys men trade ivory. From March 2014 to March 2015, Garambas rangers recorded 31 contacts with armed poachers, more than half of whom were with groups traveling south from the direction of South Sudan and Sudan. You must be a real animal lover, I say. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. During the failed peace talks with Uganda, while Kony hid in Garamba from 2006 to 2008, Onen had been assigned to Konys lead peace negotiator, Vincent Otti. Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. hide caption. And I was like, ooh, what's this? We meet over Skype. During the civil war between 1977 to 1992, poachers sold the ivory to finance the conflict, including buying arms and ammunition. Unlike Savanna elephants, forest elephants don't have natural predators, such as lions. On September 11, 2014, Michael Onen, a sergeant in Konys army, walked out of Garamba National Park carrying an AK-47, five magazines of ammunition, and a story. Where did the tusks end up? Its rare that you get such a dramatic example, says co-author Robert Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton. Most of these children are very, very traumatized when they come back home. They have nightmares, Sugule continues. Track the GPS unit in an interactive map. As far as Onen knew, the poaching squad he abandoned was still making its way north from Garamba through CAR to Sudan. Weve heard he went to Seleka, Idriss Adoums son Issa tells me, referring to the violent rebel coalition that overthrew the CAR government on March 24, 2013. But time is stalking our team: Months later, on April 25, 2015, while on patrol, the ranger who led me into Garamba, Agoyo Mbikoyo, was shot and killed by a gang of poachers. Because there were no tuskless males, the researchers suspected the trait might be caused by genes on the x chromosome, including a dominant one for tusklessness and a recessive one lethal only to males. They used Historical records to collect height (estimated to the shoulder), tusk length, and tusk circumference from approximately 600 elephants that were culled in Tsavo East National Park (Kenya) and Mkomazi National Park (Tanzania) between 1966 and 1968. Boko Haram also uses the bush as a baseNigerias Sambisa Forest, a game reserve south of Lake Chad. The New York Times Archives. Nov. 6, 1954. " Turkalo and the other women stopped their boat, afraid they'd be fired on if they kept going. I know which house theyre in: Using Google Earth, I see its light-blue roof on my screen. Seven surgeries later shes forgiven them. SHANE CAMPBELL-STATON: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute - they had this video that was called "The Tuskless Elephants Of Gorongosa." She had gone to Africa to do aid work, but was drawn to the intricate lives of these elephants. When north and south Sudan signed a peace agreement in 2005, Kony lost his Sudanese host. Tongo Tongo shot two elephants one day, she says. I find a human skull fragment, and I nearly pick up a live hand grenade near where the SPLA had camped, mistaking it for a baby tortoise. 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. Diya is for accidents, he says. All of central Africa is a hand grenade, its pin pulled by a history of resource exploitation from abroad, dictatorships, and poverty. Thousands of elephants die each year so that their tusks can be carved into religious objects. Onen is short and looks even smaller wearing a camouflage-patterned Ugandan army uniform thats too long for him in the sleeves. The team calculated that 18.5 percent of female elephants did not have tusks before the war began. The family of Idriss Adoum (second from left) tracked one suspect to Sudan. 5. And I gotta find a way to get that shine, Dante says, referring to the gloss a clean elephant tusk has. We'll tell you more about them Friday, on NPR's Morning Edition. These jumbo foragers are masterful engineers of their surroundings. That's painful to imagine, especially for anyone who's had the chance to watch these animals. ", But Turkalo's 22 years with those elephants came to a disastrous end last year, when civil war in the republic found its way to the Dzanga bai. When the American Museum of Natural History wanted to update the hall of North American mammals, taxidermist George Dante got the call. Five of the six men in Zakoumas Hippotrague patrol unit were killed by elephant poachers outside the park; the sixth is presumed dead. Wittemyer wonders whether a similar phenomenon happened long ago in Asia, because both male and female fossil elephants there have tusks, but among living Asian elephants, only males have tusks. The recent death toll of elephants in Garamba has been staggering, even by central African standards. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. Konys force has declined from a peak of 2,700 combatants in 1999 to an estimated 150 to 250 core fighters today. Its not a secret to anyone that Konys in Sudan, says the State Departments Marty Regan. Congos own soldiers threaten the parks southern border, and villagers around the park sometimes poach elephants too. When Ele, a female elephant, died, other elephants approached one-by-one and touched their trunks to the body. He and his colleagues analyzed videos, taken before the civil war, of elephants in the park. ", Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. Today, poaching has stopped in Gorongosa, and the elephant population is recovering. "I could hear the call and say, 'Yeah, that's a juvenile being pushed out of a hole by its mother; it's protesting.' A pilot study published this year showed that the presence of a beehive fence reduced the odds of an elephant crossing the river by 95%. They can get what they want today, he said, and keep it there for two, three, or even more than five years.. She's bundled in a heavy coat rarely needed during her years in the African bush. Sudan. Why are you collecting ivory? Otti demanded of Kony. Kony is a former Roman Catholic altar boy whose stated mission is to overthrow the Ugandan government on behalf of the Acholi people of northern Uganda, and to rule the country according to his version of the Ten Commandments. Was it genetically inherited at all? They all report to him, they all obey him. Their own families are afraid that theyre devils, or forever soldiers, who might kill them in the night. Schreger lines, he says. I spend a night in police custody, where Im given a desk to sleep on. Copyright 2021 NPR. But after Otti left Garamba to participate in the peace talks, Kony began killing elephants for ivory. 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. As of this writing, my artificial tusks sent out their last communication from a Sudanese town called Ed Daein, 500 miles southwest of Khartoum. They also had twice as many daughters as sons. I unzip my suitcase to expose two fake tusks and hand him letters from the U.S. Ivory operates as a savings account for Kony, says Marty Regan, of the U.S. State Departments Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. The poachers opened fire, killing five rangers. This is the long shadow of that human imprint that is going to take generations to erase, Pringle says. Its only the ivory that will make the LRA strong, he recalls Konysaying. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. In March 2015 Boko Harams leader, Abubakar Shekau, pledged allegiance to ISIS, and his group was renamed Islamic States West Africa Province, giving that Middle East terrorist group a foothold in WestAfrica. The relatives of murdered Zakouma ranger Idriss Adoum tracked one of the alleged Heban hill poachers to Sudan and arranged to have him brought back to Chad to stand trial. Outnumbered and ill equipped, theyre manning the front line in a violent battle that affects us all. Sugule is the founder of a group that provides assistance to victims of Konys army. Campbell-Staton points out that other species in Gorongosa rely on elephants having tusks to dig up holes for water and strip bark from trees. Geli Oh, 16, spent longer with Konys army than her two friendstwo and a half terrible years. Now, researchers report this intense hunting dramatically altered a major elephant population there, favoring female elephants born without tusks. Andrea Turkalo/The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. 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. Then they head south six miles, back into Kafia Kingi. "And there was moonlight and I could see he had a revolver and he might have been drinking. On our patrol we dont encounter any poachers or rebel groups. Rangers join a Congolese army platoon on a 21-day mission in Garamba National Park, searching for poachers, especially those with the LRA. It's nothing extraordinary for humans. Theyre looting communities, enslaving people, and killing park rangers who get in their way. As in eye colour and blood type in humans, genes are responsible for whether elephants inherit tusks from their parents. To test ivory, dealers will scratch a tusk with a knife or hold a lighter under it; ivory is a tooth and wont melt. Researchers are still trying to pinpoint all the genetics that underpin . The air strike, dubbed Operation Lightning Thunder, included support from the DRC, southern Sudan, and the U.S. 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. Several Tanzanian officers who had presided over my arrest at the airport, including the wildlife expert, returned the next day to wish us bon voyage. That's where Princeton evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton found himself a few years ago. While Dante set about embedding Kermeens tracker inside his tusk mold, a third team member, John Flaig, a specialist in near-space, balloon-based photographyimages taken from at least the height of spy planeswas preparing to monitor the tusks as they moved. "There's such a blizzard of depressing news about biodiversity and humans in the environment and I think it's important to emphasise that there are some bright spots in that picture. This pushed the species to the brink of extinction. Now it was rare to see 250 in aherd. This project was made possible by a grant from The WoodtigerFund. After six hours on the dark river, they got to safety, to a campsite in the Congo. 'Everybody out, everybody out.' From the moment of his capture, Onen says, he was a complainer. Once the war and poaching ended,elephants with tusks were more likely to survive because they could use their tusks to find . The rangers on Heban hill had little reason to be concerned for their safety. The last time an elephant was recorded killed by a poacher in Mozambique's Niassa Reserve was May 17, 2018, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, a New York -based nonprofit that helps the Mozambican government manage the national reserve. Next, researchers wanted to pin down the mechanism of inheritance for tusklessness. After Zakoumas rangers destroyed their camp and confiscated their equipment, the poachers were unable to return to Sudan, so three weeks later they went back to Heban hill and attacked the Hippotrague unit. Researchers looked at why female elephants in Gorongosa national park in Mozambique were frequently born without tusks, and found that the animals were in effect genetically engineered by mass . Do not lose even one tusk, he instructed the group, according to Onen, who said the plan was to carry the ivory to a rendezvous in CAR and then on to a market town in Darfur called Songo, not far from the Sudan Armed Forces garrison in Dafaq. Two genes stood out: MEP1a and AMELX, which are active in tooth development in other mammals, were present in seven elephants with tusks, but had unique mutations in 11 tuskless elephants. Use the evidence above to make a claim about the main reason elephants were illegally killed in this region. Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks Elephants with a rare "tuskless" genetic trait had a better chance of surviving Mozambique's long civil war, financed in. Like much of the world, George Dante knows that the African elephant is under siege. 4. In May 2013 Seleka-backed Sudanese poachers attacked Dzanga Bai, an elephant oasis in Dzanga-Ndoki National Park of southwest CAR, killing 26 elephants. its rare to figure out the genetics behind this human-caused evolution, was far more likely to have resulted from selection, A racing heart makes the mind race, too, mouse study finds, Reactor experiment demonstrates alternative fusion scheme, U.K. scientists hope to regain access to EU grants after Northern Ireland deal, Astronomers stumble in diplomatic push to protect the night sky, Unfair medical screening plagues polar research, After uproar, society backpedals from actions against scientists who staged climate protest at meeting, Pablo Neruda was poisoned to death, a new forensic report suggests, Europes well-preserved bog bodies surrender their secrets, Teens leukemia goes into remission after experimental gene-editing therapy, Honey bee life spans are half what they were in the 1970s, DNA from elephant tusks reveals poaching routes, DNA links elephant tusks from a 487-year-old shipwreck to their living relatives. According to Col. Mike Kabango, of the African Union forces, the image shows a large tent and two smaller ones; to Ryan Stage, a remote-sensing specialist in Colorado, it shows a large truck and two small tents. He sits on a plastic chair opposite me in a clearing at the African Union forces base in Obo, in the southeastern corner of CAR, where he is in custody. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. The UN estimated that the massacre displaced more than a hundred thousand Congolese and Sudanese. In a public square in Am Timan, shortly before his trial, he shouted, I know who betrayed me! 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. No, I want ivory for ammunition to keep fighting, was Konys reply, according to Onen, who was listening to transmissions. Im a problem solver., I laugh. He went first to Sudan, initiating a pattern of border-hopping that continues to make him difficult to track. Meanwhile, according to Onen, Konys men hid ivory by burying it in the ground or submerging it in rivers. 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. Villagers sometimes taunt returned children with the same expression used for Konys men: LRA Tongo Tongo. LRA Cut Cuta reference, Sugule explains, to the militants vicious use ofmachetes. 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. 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. Those looking at the x-ray screen, which shows the trackers inside, think Im smuggling a bomb. MCCAMMON: Around 90% of the elephants there were killed, but many female elephants without tusks survived and thrived. ", Now, a year later, Andrea is stoic about the loss. 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. Later, when Labuschagne examined the trajectory of bullets at the scene, he concluded that the poachers had been trained in how to set up a cross fire, which, combined with evidence found at the scene, pointed to President Omar al-Bashirs Sudan Armed Forces. Turkalo clearly would rather be back in Africa than in a coffee house in Rhode Island. The study is extremely thorough and ticks off all the boxes, Roca says. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Geographic certifying that theyre artificial. Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project, Former Commando Turns Conservationist To Save Elephants Of Dzanga Bai. In June three more Garamba-based officers were killed. But it failed to rout Kony or his leadership. World Elephant Day: Ten reasons we love elephants, Elephants counted from space for conservation project. From Garamba, Kony sent an exploratory team to Darfur to look into forging a new relationship with the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), who had supported him against Uganda, hoping to exchange ivory for rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons. See the article in its original context from. My interpretation, says Jean Marc Froment, then director of the park, is that the Ugandan military is conducting operations inside Garamba and at the same time taking some ivory. But, he adds, the poachers could be SPLA, which uses the same type of helicopter seen over the park. Jensen, who was executive producer of the series, and Alex Chadwick, chief correspondent, insisted on the highest quality sound recording to complement its reporting. Kony was adamant in his radio transmissions. It was to become her home, and her life's work. But Dante, who is one of the worlds most respected taxidermists, has never done what Im asking him to do. Such a biased sex ratio would be expected with a recessive gene that kills males when they inherit it. 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. "When it gets bad we leave.". a. percentage of elephants killed . The rangers Im going out with have each been allocated a handful of rounds for old and unreliable AK-47s, most of them seized from poachers. She well remembers the day when the war came to the bai. These soldiers are tasked with helping rangers fight poachers and armed groups like theLRA. 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. MCCAMMON: But the number of tuskless elephants was multiplying in Mozambique during and after the country's decades-long civil war, which ended in 1992. It also raises many questions. They shift a few miles. CAMPBELL-STATON: I saw that video in November, and by June I was in a helicopter over Mozambique. Or will they go nowhere, discovered before theyre moved and turned in by an honest person? It was just after 4 a.m. on Heban hill, in Chad, 80 miles from the Sudanese border and 60 miles northeast of Zakouma National Park, home to the countrys largest remaining elephant herd, 450 animals. CORNISH: Consequences that are still continuing nearly 30 years after the war. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Save elephants of Gorongosa. the massacre displaced more than a hundred thousand Congolese and Sudanese these elephants technology! Pushed the species to the nearest village for help the gloss a clean elephant tusk has the,! 2013 Seleka-backed Sudanese poachers attacked Dzanga Bai question: if ivory is by. Genes are responsible for whether elephants inherit tusks from their parents decided so... Wanted to update the hall of north American mammals, taxidermist George Dante knows that the massacre more. And stop a game reserve south of Lake Chad screen, which was to... For Kony who is one of the elephants there were killed for their ivory, which was to. 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