New York Times Artikel Zimbabwe Wildlife

From The New York Times, 25 October


Zimbabwe's woes are bringing grief to its wildlife, too


By Michael Wines


Hwange National Park - Once this 5,700-square-mile expanse of wilderness,
Zimbabwe's largest, was one of Africa's grandest showcases of wild
animals. These days, it is exhibit A in the unfolding story of their
destruction. 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. 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 had
neither enough fuel to run them nor spare parts to repair the many that
were broken. The scene was but a small element in what Colin Gillies, a
wildlife expert with a private group here, 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 each year,
sustaining wildlife management programs 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 and income. Private wildlife
programs 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 activists. Some charge
that in a few parks, as many as 40 percent of the big-game animals have
been poached or illegally hunted down, but other local conservationists
say the damage has been mostly confined to scattered species like impala
trapped for their meat. No one disputes 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," H. A. de Vries, 69, said of the 400,000-acre
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. Mr. de Vries said he had been told that antelope 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 leveled by members in Zimbabwe's Parliament
in August. There is no easy way to verify such claims. Former farmers and
owners of conservancies like Mr. 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," Mr. Gillies, a vice president of the Wildlife and
Environment group, said in a telephone interview from his home in
Bulawayo, about 100 miles 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 neighbor, Gwayi Valley, are, however, prime examples of the collapse
of the nation's parks program. 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 Zimkbabwe's information minister, Jonathan Moyo, and
to senior officials of Zanu PF, the ruling political party. 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
organization, Born Free, reported on an Internet Web site this month that
antipoaching 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 13,000 acres 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. Mr. 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. Mr.
Kojwang and Mr. Gillies depicted the situation as not entirely hopeless.
Within the parks bureaucracy, they said, some officials are 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," Mr. 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, Mr. Gillies
said, members of his organization 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."

mariette van der veer
vizara rhodesian ridgbacks
www.vizara.com