May 12, 2005
By Bernard Unti
As famine looms for millions of his poorer citizens, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has declared open season on one of his nation’s greatest treasures—its wildlife. Invoking the populist rhetoric that has characterized his whole career, Mugabe has ordered rangers at Zimbabwe’s National Parks to cooperate with rural authorities in the wholesale killing of wild animals, including elephants.
The expressed goal of the political strongman who has dominated Zimbabwe since it gained political independence in 1980? To feed a hungry rural constituency whose support ensured him a majority of seats in Zimbabwe’s March 2005 parliamentary elections.
An indeterminate number of wild animals were killed by authorities during the run up to the March elections, with at least ten elephants barbecued as part of the March 18 celebrations commemorating the 25th anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence. Four of the elephants were shot by park rangers, reportedly in the presence of tourists near the Matusadona National Park bordering Lake Kariba. The others were killed by a farmer at the request of a local rural council in the Urungwe Safari Area bordering the Mana Pools National Park.
Rangers killing elephants is nothing new. They’ve been shooting a limited number of these animals for years in an attempt to minimize human-wildlife conflicts on the borders of Zimbabwe’s parks, but in the wake of Mugabe’s order, these actions have taken on an ominous cast to many observers. Specifically, Mugabe’s Operation Nyama, or “Operation Meat,” which kills elephants to provide meat for starving villagers, has come under fire for being nothing more than a front for illegal ivory poaching.
The Politics of Famine
This latest threat to Zimbabwe’s wildlife is inextricably tied to the politics of food. Notoriously scornful of western nations, Mugabe has rejected international offers of food aid and denied the claims of his political opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), that Zimbabwe cannot meet the challenge of its food shortage without help. The MDC has urged the government to seek international assistance.
A recent communiqu&rom the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) confirms Zimbabwe’s dire condition. The agency issued an emergency alert on May 2 saying that Zimbabwe’s summer grain harvest will not satisfy the food needs of its residents. The country’s population exceeds 12 million, of whom an estimated four million rural poor are affected by food shortages.
Mugabe has acknowledged that Zimbabwe faces a threat of famine, and has sworn that he will not let his people go hungry. During the March elections Mugabe essentially campaigned on a Vote for Us or Starve platform. But Mugabe faces many crises at the moment: Once the engine of a promising postcolonial state, Zimbabwe’s economy is in free fall, with high unemployment, hyperinflation, and shrinking capital investment. The country also faces water, electricity, and fuel shortages, and an accelerating crime rate.
Given all the country’s problems—and Mugabe’s resistance to outside aid—the U. S. Congress recently questioned whether the international community’s policy of isolating Mugabe’s government was the right approach. Members of Congress instead called for a concerted effort at strategic engagement, with the United States and members of the African Union, especially South Africa, pressing Mugabe to reform.
Responding to Mugabe's proposal, Andrew Rowan, executive vice president for operations for The HSUS, sent a letter on May 2 asking that Zimbabwe reconsider its position on accepting food relief from international agencies. Rowan's letter to Mugabe pointed out that outside assistance would help Zimbabwe's people and its animals, preventing further damage to the nation's wildlife sector and setting the stage for Zimbabwe's future as a premiere venue for wildlife-related tourism.
Land Redistribution
Even before Mugabe’s latest decree, Zimbabwe’s wildlife was in serious peril, especially from the controversial land redistribution program sponsored by his government.
In 2000, Mugabe ordered the confiscation of white-owned farms for redistribution to peasants and political supporters. This marked the culmination of two decades of battles over land policy that pitted Mugabe against white farmers, political opponents, and the United Kingdom, which as a colonial power once governed the nation formerly called Rhodesia.
With Mugabe’s encouragement, thousands of black Zimbabweans invaded the nation’s farms. The destruction that ensued caused white farmers to flee, crippled the economy, and ushered in widespread commodity shortages, as the commercial farming sector, once an important source of exports and jobs, was devastated.
The presumed beneficiaries of land redistribution did not fare very well, either. With poor soil quality and low rainfall, many of the subdivided properties proved too barren to sustain crops. Thus, thousands of Zimbabweans turned to poaching as a source of food and income, trapping animals for their own sustenance as well as for an expanding market in bush meat.
The new settlers were indiscriminate in their killing of animals, but their main targets were antelopes (kudu and impala), buffaloes, elephants, giraffes, leopards, wildebeests, and zebras.
The Spread of Dis-Ease
Hunting and wildlife-related tourism were once the source of millions of dollars annually for Zimbabwe’s economy; millions of acres of lands too arid or rocky for farming could sustain wildlife, and proved well-suited for photographic and shooting safaris. Despite his promise that the compulsory acquisition of white-owned lands would be limited to agricultural farms, it was not long before private reserves and conservancies were under siege. Mugabe loyalists, politicians, police officials, the landless poor and other parties participated in a virtual invasion of private and state-owned conservation areas, killing animals for their meat and skins.
By burning grazing lands and chopping down trees along the way, the mostly impoverished legions decimated Zimbabwe’s natural environment, even as they took a fatal toll on their nation’s wild animal population. After all, the indigenous savannah woodland that characterized many ranches and conservancies provided suitable habitat for many rare species, including African wild dogs, cheetah, black rhino, and roan and sable antelope.
While these game ranches were never perfectly “safe” for animals, they were at least guarded by scouts, and animals enjoyed relative safety when not within the sights of a trophy hunter’s rifle. What’s more, during the 1990s, such ventures enjoyed a measure of protection from the Mugabe regime, which viewed them as a reliable revenue source.
Making matters worse, once the land invasions began, trophy hunters, biltong hunters, and illegal safari operators from South Africa and elsewhere took advantage of Zimbabwe’s unstable circumstances, bribing their way into conservation areas at a pittance, to shoot cheetahs, elephants, leopards, lions, and other animals.
Food or Trophies?
By some estimates, the combined effect of the lawlessness and disorder of the last few years has been the loss of 80% of the wild animals in Zimbabwe’s wildlife conservancies and game farms—and about 60% of the animals in its national parks. The grim toll has shaken wildlife protection advocates. Until the mid-1990s, the relative abundance of certain species in Zimbabwe had given advocates hope that Zimbabwe could become a haven for wildlife.
Until 2000, for example, Zimbabwe had the world’s single largest concentration of black rhinos, approximately 500 in number, having recovered from a critical two-decade decline. But in 2004, Johnny Rodrigues of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force estimated that only 200 rhinos remained. The slaughtered rhinos’ horns, hacked off by poachers and others, are highly valued in East Asia, where they can bring up to $90,000.
Elephants, too, had been thriving in Zimbabwe until the recent turmoil. In 2001, the Zimbabwe Department of National Parks and Wildlife, together with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), placed the number of elephants within the country at 84,000—a figure that Zimbabwe and others regularly used to justify their ongoing efforts to cull elephants or ease trade restrictions. For example, in 1999, amidst bitter international controversy, Zimbabwe received permission from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to sell ivory to Japan on a limited and strictly monitored basis.
Mugabe’s latest plan, Operation Nyama, may be even more controversial. Some believe that the campaign to provide elephant meat to starving villagers in northern Matabeleland is providing cover for an officially sanctioned poaching ring that moves ivory out of Zimbabwe and into illicit markets. Operation Nyama was to have ended in December, but in early March, it was reportedly still going strong.
Zimbabwe already has huge stockpiles of ivory, an estimated 24,000 kilograms. Worldwide demand, were it not hampered by the CITES prohibition and steady political pressure to maintain the ban, would make ivory a ready source of foreign exchange revenue for Zimbabwe were the international markets to open up.
The Wisdom of Elephants
In December 2003, British journalist Michael Durham published a story in The Guardian about elephant “refugees” who fled Zimbabwe by wading across the Zambezi River into Zambia to avoid being killed by poachers, marauders, and illegal trophy hunters. The elephants’ movement seemed to exceed normal rates of seasonal migration and a Zambian game warden told Durham that it was not a coincidence. “Elephants are quite intelligent and can communicate. They know they are safer on this side of the river.”
The wisdom of elephants notwithstanding, it won’t be possible for the majority of Zimbabwe’s wildlife to evade the long shadow cast by President Mugabe. Should Mugabe’s orders take hold, Zimbabwe’s national parks, where wildlife losses have not been as high as those on game farms and conservancies, will be in trouble. Dispatching armed rangers into parks with orders to kill animals for their meat would provide no real answer to Zimbabwe’s food crisis or its other problems. It would be a disaster and should it occur, treasures such as Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe’s largest park and one of Africa’s outstanding havens for wild animals, will become nothing less than hollowed-out monuments of a nation’s political, social, and ecological collapse.
What You Can Do
Please send an appeal to President Robert Mugabe in care of the Republic of Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to the United States, Simbi Veke Mubako. Ask President Mugabe to accept the offer of international food aid, and tell him that his simple decision will not only help his starving people, but also save Zimbabwe’s already imperiled wildlife.
His Excellency Simbi Veke Mubako, Ambassador
Embassy of Zimbabwe
1608 New Hampshire Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20009
202-332-7100
Fax: 202-483-9326
E-mail: zimemb@erols.com
If you wish, send a copy of your letter or communication to the following people:
Representative Christopher H. Smith
Chair, Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights, and International Operations
The Committee on International Relations
United States House of Representatives
2170 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Fax: 202-225-2035
E-mail: HIRC@mail.house.gov
The Honorable Condoleezza Rice
Secretary of State
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20520
E-mail: Contact Secretary Rice via her web form.
Bernard Unti, senior policy advisor and special assistant to the president, received his doctorate in U.S. history in 2002 from American University. His book, Protecting All Animals: A Fifty-Year History of The Humane Society of the United States, is available from Humane Society Press.
