- "There have been huge, huge numbers of animals lost.
It was an unholy slaughter."
-
- (Independent Foreign Service) -- Once this 14 763-square-kilometre
expanse of wilderness, Zimbabwe's largest, was one of Africa's grandest
showcases of wild animals. These days, Hwange National Park is exhibit
A in the unfolding story of their destruction.
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- On a recent steamy morning perhaps 60 elephants staged
a scrum at the Nyamandlovu watering hole here, jockeying frantically to
get a drink of water - not from the watering hole, a porridge of mud and
flopping, dying fish, but from a trickling pipe at the hole's edge.
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- During Hwange's long, bone-dry winter, more than two
dozen pumps supply almost all the water to thousands of animals. But Zimbabwe's
government has neither enough fuel to run them nor spare parts to repair
the many that were broken.
-
- The scene was but a small element of what Colin Gillies,
a wildlife expert with a private game farm group, calls "an unholy
slaughter" of one of southern Africa's most varied stocks of wildlife.
-
- It is the product of three years of economic collapse,
corruption and decaying civil order in a nation where the government is
encouraging squatters and political allies to seize commercial farms and
game preserves.
-
- Hunting and tourism once pumped millions of dollars into
Zimbabwe's economy, sustaining wildlife management programmes on millions
of acres of private scrubland too arid or rocky for commercial farming,
but ideal for photographic safaris and big-game hunts.
-
- Zimbabwe's decision to confiscate most of that land from
its white owners, and then to redistribute it to peasants and political
supporters, has had an unexpected result: thousands of hungry families
on land too poor to support crops have turned to poaching as their prime
source of food or income.
-
- Private wildlife programmes have been all but destroyed.
Precise figures do not exist. But by estimates from several conservationists,
former landowners and opposition politicians, as many as two-thirds of
the animals on Zimbabwe's game farms and wildlife conservancies have been
wiped out.
-
- The situation in parks is less dire, according to other
activists. Some charge that in a few parks up to 40 percent of the big
game animals have been poached.
-
- None dispute that thousands of animals have been lost,
including significant numbers of species like rhinos and wild dogs that
were already severely endangered.
-
- No one disagrees that the losses are continuing, despite
the first belated efforts by Zimbabwe's government this month to rein in
profiteering in wildlife by some of its own officials.
-
- "There were 4,000, 5,000 buffalo as of three months
ago, when we got run off," HA de Vries, 69, said of the 162,000 hectare
wildlife conservancy he partly owned in eastern Zimbabwe, bordering Hwange
National Park.
-
- "Impala - thousands and thousands. Kudu, thousands.
Elephants, 500 or 600. There was lion research going on there, wild dog
research."
-
- "I'd be surprised if there are 20 percent of the
animals left," he said.
-
- De Vries said he had been told that buck in the preserve,
known as the Gwayi Valley Conservancy, were being slaughtered to feed thousands
of members of the Green Bombers, a much feared government paramilitary
force, at a camp at an abandoned tin mine in central Zimbabwe.
-
- Similar charges were levelled by members in Zimbabwe's
parliament in August. There is no easy way to verify such claims. Former
farmers and owners of conservancies like De Vries are largely barred from
their old lands, and the settlers who replaced them are hostile to outsiders.
-
- But a Zimbabwe representative of the Washington-based
World Wildlife Federation and a top official of Wildlife and Environment
Zimbabwe, a private conservation group here, both said that reports of
wildlife losses on conservancies like Gwayi Valley were credible.
-
- "I don't think it's an exaggeration," Gillies,
a vice president of the Wildlife and Environment group, said in a telephone
interview from his home in Bulawayo, about 160km south of Gwayi.
-
- "There have been huge, huge numbers of animals lost.
It was an unholy slaughter."
-
- Harrison Kojwang, the World Wildlife Federation representative
in Zimbabwe, said that estimates of a 60 to 70 percent loss of wildlife
on farms and game conservancies were common, but that the death rates in
national parks like Hwange were so far considerably lower.
-
- Hwange park and its neighbour, Gwayi Valley, are, however,
prime examples of the collapse of the nation's parks programme.
-
- In testimony to Zimbabwe's parliament this summer, the
minister for environment and tourism, Francis Nhema, confirmed that a senior
ranger and a warden at Hwange National Park had each been awarded land
seized in the Gwayi Valley Conservancy and had been accused of allowing
illegal hunting there.
-
- Other major parcels of Gwayi Valley property have gone
to Zimbabwe's information minister, Jonathan Moyo, and to senior officials
of the ruling Zanu-PF.
-
- Former landowners in the region, most of whom spoke on
condition of anonymity, charged in interviews that unscrupulous safari
operators from South Africa and Botswana had moved into Gwayi Valley and
other large conservancies, bribing settlers and officials to take big animals
far in excess of previous government quotas, which limited kills of animals
each year.
-
- The quotas not only conserved wildlife populations but
ensured profit for both the conservancies and the Zimbabwean government
by putting a premium on hunting rights.
-
- Settlers now trap animals indiscriminately, both for
their own food and for a growing market in so-called bush meat.
-
- One conservation organisation, Born Free, reported on
an internet website this month that anti-poaching teams in Gwayi Valley
had found more than 1,400 wire snares in the conservancy in the last three
months.
-
- One former landowner said in an interview that he had
run a profitable conservancy with three other families on 5,000 hectares
of arid bush northwest of Bulawayo, until the government evicted him in
2001 and resettled 60 families there.
-
- "I told them it would never work," he said.
"Sixty families, and one bore-hole which barely supported the wildlife.
-
- "We had 70 eland, 150 impala, 30 sable, 200-plus
kudu. And what I've heard in the last couple of months is that there's
hardly anything left."
-
- The destruction of wildlife in Gwayi and other lands
next to national parks raises another ominous prospect: that valuable game
in the parks will migrate to the newly empty lands and become prime targets
for future hunters.
-
- Many fences on the conservancies have been torn apart
to make snares.
-
- Kojwang of the World Wildlife Federation said that about
one in 10 of Zimbabwe's 550 rhinos had died in recent years, largely because
of illegal safari hunting and wire snares set by local poachers.
-
- In the Gwayi Valley, snares and poachers have practically
wiped out scores of the fewer than 3,000 painted wild dogs, already an
endangered species.
-
- Kojwang and Gillies depicted the situation as not entirely
hopeless.
-
- Within the parks bureaucracy, they said, some officials
were battling corruption and political influence. In the last two weeks,
the government has banned hunting on land next to Hwange park, and there
are unconfirmed reports of the arrest of at least one safari operator.
-
- "The poaching is by no means alleviated," Gillies
said, "but there's a little more positive attitude adopted lately
than there has been in the past."
-
- But as the elephants' battle at Hwange showed, the government
is ill equipped to deal with even basic issues like fuel for water pumps,
much less enforcing hunting bans.
-
- During an animal census in Hwange this month, Gillies
said, members of his organisation encountered a half-dozen dead elephants
- victims not of poachers, but of dehydration and stress.
-
- That, he said, is a new phenomenon.
-
- "Zimbabwe was probably the best hunting land in
Africa - in southern Africa, for sure," said another former conservancy
operator, who refused to be identified.
-
- "I suppose it's improved in some respects,"
he added with irony. "Because there's nothing left to kill."
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