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. Money is available to outfit the rangers with better equipment, but buying new weapons requires formal approval of the Congolese army, something Froment has been unable to get. To gain more troops it recruited civilians into its armyincluding child soldersafter mass abductions. So did the African Union military forces, whose CAR-based men in Obo are tasked with finding Kony. 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 . I wonder if Konys men are out there now. "You know, a lot of the NGOs, we just cut and run," she tells us matter-of-factly. At the sound of a twig cracking or the detection of an unexpected scent on the wind, a ranger in front of me, Agoyo Mbikoyo, signals caution, and I drop with the team into a collective crouch and wait silently. Elephants gather in the Dzanga bai, a forest clearing the size of several football fields. Elephants without tusks were normally. PHOTO EDITOR: Kathy Moran. In January 2014, while x-raying a Vietnam-bound container declared to hold cashews, Togolese port authorities saw something strange: ivory. The Elephant Listening Project Although the adaptation comes with a pricean associated genetic mutation kills male elephants before they're bornthe emerging trait may have helped save the population. Soumaine Abdoulaye Issa had been in Darfur, he told a team of African Parks investigators, when he heard about an elephant poaching mission to Chad led by a member of the Sudan Armed Forces. 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. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. After months of tinkering, Kermeens final bespoke ivory-tracking device arrives in the mail. In ten years hes never made a mistake, he says: The tusks are real. So why elephants? 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. Click the arrow below to hear the amazing audio tale they brought home. 5. I mean, I've been through a lot of poaching.". 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. She looks at the floor while her friends whisper to each other, smile radiantly, and nibble on cookies weve brought for them. Sudan is also a well-documented supplier of ivory to Egypt and is the recipient of substantial Chinese infrastructure investment, which typically comes with Chinese workers, a source of ivory smuggling in many parts of Africa. Another potential knock-on is changes to the broader landscape, as the study has revealed that tusked and tuskless animals eat different plants. Our next story begins in a place many of us are familiar with - up awake, watching a YouTube video at 3 in the morning. One possibility is that surges of intense hunting have occurred on and off in Gorongosa over millennia, letting the genes occasionally provide a benefit. I arrive at what amounts to the park rangers northern front, an outpost vulnerable both to Sudanese poachers and Konys army. But a computer simulation, which examined the probability of tusked and tuskless females surviving the war, suggested the increase in tuskless females was far more likely to have resulted from selection, the team reports online today in Science. National Geographic needs your help to protect elephants and to continue reporting on wildlife crime. In this scene from the documentary Explorer: Warlords of Ivory, Bryan Christy presents world-renowned taxidermist George Dante with a new challenge: creating a completely convincing fake elephant tusk. It consists of a battery capable of lasting more than a year, a GPS receiver, an Iridium satellite transceiver, and a temperature sensor. "We gave them a little money and said the Seleka were coming," says Turkalo. Then they head south six miles, back into Kafia Kingi. Soldiers Kill Wild Elephant. National Geographic commissioned the creation of artificial tusks with hidden GPS trackers that were planted in the smuggling supplychain. Will they go north, the most violent ivory path on the African continent? My tusks will have to act like ivory. The family of Idriss Adoum (second from left) tracked one suspect to Sudan. It was to become her home, and her life's work. Outnumbered and ill equipped, theyre manning the front line in a violent battle that affects us all. We meet over Skype. I spend a night in police custody, where Im given a desk to sleep on. Congolese soldiers undergo training by Mathieu Eckel of African Parks, an NGO that manages Garamba National Park with the DRCs parks authority. Ivory operates as a savings account for Kony, says Marty Regan, of the U.S. State Departments Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. In this scene from the documentary Explorer: Warlords of Ivory, a screener at Tanzanias airport accuses Bryan Christy of smuggling. Schreger lines, he says. Officials are pointing fingers and arguing. In village after village along the road between Father Sugules 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. I know which house theyre in: Using Google Earth, I see its light-blue roof on my screen. If true, Soumaine Issa will find poachers working with Seleka. 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. His account was corroborated by Caesar Achellam, a former intelligence chief for Kony who is now in the Ugandan governments custody. They can get what they want today, he said, and keep it there for two, three, or even more than five years.. When Ele, a female elephant, died, other elephants approached one-by-one and touched their trunks to the body. It was the rainy season, and the rangers, like the elephants they were guarding, had left the park for higher ground. This behavior is associated with mourning, field researchers say. A welcome sight returns to Zakouma: babies. The story typically would have ended with the wanton killing of these park rangers protecting elephants. The NPR team had spent hours on that platform with Andrea, seeing these huge animals in a way few people in the world have a chance to do, and with someone who could "translate" what they were doing. Konys army had arrived in Garamba in 2006 with little ammunition left to continue its war, Onen tells me. As in eye colour and blood type in humans, genes are responsible for whether elephants inherit tusks from their parents. A female forest elephant charges, in Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve in the Central African Republic. Chad. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Geographic certifying that theyre artificial. Ugandan forces killed Binany in 2013 and recovered thediary. CORNISH: Consequences that are still continuing nearly 30 years after the war. By 1979, there were only 1.3 million elephants left. She and other scientists also recorded their calls. RESEARCH: Heidi Schultz, Brad Scriber. When I ask, How many of you have been kidnapped by the LRA?I understand why. 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. ", 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. A white elephant is a valuable item that has a rate that perhaps surpasses its usefulness. Suddenly they move steadily north, about 12 miles a day along the border with South Sudan, avoiding all roads. In presenting that case, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo underscored Bashirs control of the groups said to be behind Sudans ivory trafficking: He used the army, he enrolled the Militia/Janjaweed. Turkalo had lived through civil strife before, but this time, she tells us, it was much worse. A study in Gorongosa revealed that while male elephants did have tusks but almost 50% of female elephants above the age of 20 did not. There were armed combatants roaming the countryside. In humans, a mutated version of AMELX is linked to male death before birth; in females, that version stunts the growth of the upper incisors, the same teeth that become tusks in elephants. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. It also raises many questions. 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. World Elephant Day: Ten reasons we love elephants, Elephants counted from space for conservation project. SHANE CAMPBELL-STATON: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute - they had this video that was called "The Tuskless Elephants Of Gorongosa." The soldiers killed the elephants. 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. Researchers are still trying to pinpoint all the genetics that underpin . So why elephants? Written in Acholi, it details Konys order for a hundred elephant tusks. For example, tuskless motherswho would have had one copy of the dominant tuskless gene, from their own mothershad the same number of daughters with and without tusks. Armed groups help fund operations by smuggling elephant ivory. 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. As we talk over my design needs, Dantes brown eyes sparkle like a boys on Christmas morning. It was just impossible to stay. Dzanga Baialso known as the village of elephantsis a mineral-rich mudhole where the animalscongregate. Father Ernest Sugule, who ministers to the village, tells me that many children in his diocese have seen family members killed by the Lords Resistance Army, or LRA, the Ugandan rebel group led by Joseph Kony, one of Africas most wanted terrorists. East Africa is now ground zero for much of the poaching. But seeing it in front of you, and knowing those individuals are related, that makes my day. It is believed they do this either to cool themselves off or as a reaction to the annoyance of parasites of the skin. Track the GPS unit in an interactive map. The cook, Djimet Said (opposite), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. But that's not the end of the story. The Central African Republic was peaceful back then. This pushed the species to the brink of extinction. Embattled park rangers are often the only defense for wildlife andvillagers. Around us stroll Ugandan army soldiers, who make up the entire African Union contingent based in Obo and are committed to finding and killing Kony. Fish and Wildlife Service. Halfway through our patrol, we come upon a clearing of burned grass beside the Kassi River, the site of a recent battle between Garamba rangers and SPLA poachers, in which, rangers tell me, they killed two poachers. TEXT EDITOR: Oliver Payne. 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. Ivory poachers are killing some 22,000 African elephants a year. 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. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. One of them knew one of the women in the boat. 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. Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. That's just something to think about and consider really because it's absolutely RIDICULOUS that any animal should have to go through that. 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. Albert Roca, a geneticist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, calls the shift striking in its speedand because it is driven by people. The series was one of NPR's earliest adopters of digital technology and led the network in surround-sound production. A small proportion of females . Three more are classified as of importance to watch: Angola, Cambodia, and Laos. 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. But she knew she had to leave; she's a researcher for a non-governmental wildlife organization, not some kind of soldier-of-fortune. Locals, including poor villagers and unpaid park rangers, are killing elephants for casha risk theyre willing to take because even if theyre caught, the penalties are often negligible. Sugule is the founder of a group that provides assistance to victims of Konys army. Boko Haram also uses the bush as a baseNigerias Sambisa Forest, a game reserve south of Lake Chad. In 1978, the elephant was listed as threatened under the United States' Endangered Species Act. "I heard they were on their way. Mozambiques civil war from 1977 to 1992 had a grim outcome for elephants: During that time, some 90% were killed for the ivory in their tusks, which were sold to finance the war. 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. By Jake Buehler. Forest elephants linger on a misty morning at the Dzanga bai. Elephant tusks are elongated incisors. 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. She's bundled in a heavy coat rarely needed during her years in the African bush. 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.' Instead of being made a soldier, he was designated a signalera radioman privy to Konys secret communications. c. percentage of elephants killed for . Researchers have pinpointed how years of civil war and poaching in Mozambique have led to a greater proportion of elephants that will never develop tusks. Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. 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. CORNISH: You see; while most African elephants have tusks, some female African elephants are born without them and never grow them. Andrea Turkalo/The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. He points a finger at me, and yells, You are a liar, bwana! (Bwana is Swahili for sir.). Elephant ivory is a key source of funding for armed groups in central Africa . But we also discovered field biologist Andrea Turkalo, who's now a conservation scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. 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