Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (50 page)

She warns me about shopping for rhino horn in the traditional medicine streets of Hanoi’s Old Quarter. ‘Sometimes they sell you fakes. Buffalo horn, especially. It is never guaranteed that you are getting the right thing. If you buy it from a soldier, you are guaranteed.’

The Vietnamese army’s links to wildlife trafficking and environmental crimes have long been a subject of speculation. A 2011 report by the London-based EIA exposed the ‘pivotal role’ of the Vietnamese military in the illicit timber trade between Laos and Vietnam. Dr Scott Roberton, who heads up the international Wildlife Conservation Society’s Vietnam office, says there have been ‘anecdotal reports over the years of army vehicles being used to transport wildlife, army officers colluding with traffickers to facilitate cross-border trade in wildlife and other goods and, of course, the army hunting wildlife’.

Mrs Dung says the soldier who sold her the rhino horn also bought a large number of grinding dishes for the men in his unit. ‘They are my main
customers. Sometimes they give the dishes as a special gift. The army [is] in the forest near the Laos border and Cambodia border and there are a lot of animals there. Elephants, tigers, bears … So they bring back medicine from the animals for the family or as a special protection.’

And then there is China. ‘A few years ago in China they had a lot of horn, but now they don’t any more. At the time they didn’t have the proper pure dishes like we have, so they came to buy here. I remember, a few years ago I sold a thousand to the Chinese.’

As I pay for the two dishes, Mrs Dung says, ‘I know that in your country – in Africa – there are a lot of horns. Perhaps we can do business?’

A block away from Mrs Dung’s shop is the address I’d jotted down earlier outside the Hanoi racket store. A large blue and yellow signboard above the doorway reads in English: ‘
Thien Duc Porcelain Ceramic – To make contract porcelain ceramic for your demand
’. Inside the shop, neat rows of statues and vases – some exquisitely beautiful, others chintzy and kitsch – fill a long room bathed in cold, fluorescent light.

The shop’s owner is a man called Cong. His wife’s name is Lan. Unlike Mrs Dung, she seems reluctant, even unsettled by my questions. Tran, my interpreter, asks them about the advert. Cong, a toothpick dangling from his mouth, mutters something and his wife scurries wordlessly to the back of the shop. She returns a while later with a rustle of cellophane. In her hands is a blue box covered with a fine layer of brownish dust. Inside it is a white porcelain dish adorned with a simple ideogram and a cobalt lotus flower. Unfortunately, the design is ruined by the inclusion of the shop’s name, telephone number and a ‘100%’ quality guarantee. The price for the dish is 1 million dong (about $50). Not cheap in a country where the average monthly wage ranges between $100 and $185.

‘The product is different here than in other shops,’ Cong says. ‘Better quality and a higher price, so we only sell about 200 or 300 a year. We have some foreign customers, but many local.’ The toothpick twitches. ‘We make the very best quality. We use special pigments and we make them by hand.
We use only pure Japanese clay and German gas ovens. The dishes are baked first at 700 °C, then at 1400 °C. They are sterilised of all toxic substances.’

He’s warming to the subject now. A tea set is drawn nearer and he gestures for us to sit. In a large glass jar is his ‘special’ mix of herbal tea. ‘Normally I don’t enjoy tea,’ he says, ‘because it is bitter and I can’t sleep well. But this tea, I can drink every day. It is very good for health.’ He tells me his wife’s name means ‘orchid’. ‘Mine – Cong – means “power”,’ he laughs. ‘So, you want to buy rhino horn?’ he asks.

‘No, but I’m interested in its uses.’

‘It is very expensive …’

‘I know.’

‘One gram will cost you between 1 and 3 million dong [between $50 and $150]. The tip of the horn is the most expensive. It is also higher quality and you can use less for the same results.’ He leans closer. ‘I have some at home that I use.’

‘Ah, what for?’

Cong laughs. He mimes swigging something from a glass and then clutches his head and rolls his eyes. ‘Sometimes I drink a little too much. It is good for the head if you have a lot of alcohol.’

‘Really? You mean you use it for hangovers?’

‘Yes, it is the very best treatment.’

He pours another cup of tea. ‘You have many rhino horns where you come from, no? Here is my card. Contact me if you’d like to sell, but only for personal use.’

For a quarter of a century, from 1949 to 1976, Hong Kong dominated the rhino horn trade. More than 40 per cent of East Africa’s declared exports ended up there. Esmond Bradley Martin, arguably the world’s leading expert on the trade, believes that Hong Kong served primarily as a way station and that its importers were not involved in the ‘processing of rhino horn or hide for medicinal purposes’.

Instead the horns were sold directly to pharmaceutical firms or
re-exported to mainland China, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia’.

The Middle Eastern oil boom of the 1970s and the 1977 CITES trade ban saw Yemen supplant Hong Kong as the primary destination for shipments of horn. Between 1970 and 1977, Yemen recorded receiving 22.5 tons, which, Martin wrote, represents the death of 7 800 rhinos. The horn was used to make the handles of
jambiyas
, the ornate daggers that young men were traditionally given to mark their coming of age. By 2000, the trade in Yemen had faded, due largely to the availability of cheaper substitutes like water-buffalo horns, wood and plastic, a growing move away from traditional dress, and increasing levels of political and economic instability that followed September 11, 2001.

In Asia, Taiwan was a significant end-user and exporter, trading directly with apartheid South Africa, which supplied it with at least half a ton of horn between 1978 and 1985. It also sourced large quantities from Hong Kong, recording imports totalling nearly three tons between 1966 and 1985, when imports and exports were officially banned. But the government did little to enforce the ban, and trade – particularly in Asian horn and white rhino horn from South Africa – continued to thrive for much of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Piet Lategan, the former police colonel who headed up South Africa’s Endangered Species Protection Unit for nearly a decade, remembers rhino horn being openly sold in Dihua Street in Taipei’s Old Quarter. ‘If you asked someone how much it cost, they would ask you straight up, “Are you buying, selling or investigating?”’ he laughs.

Internal trade was banned on the island in 1989. A register of rhino horn stockpiles, compiled in 1990, lists 1.4 tons of horn held by 410 registrants. But a subsequent survey showed that there were 1 800 pharmacies in Taiwan that all stocked rhino horn and suggested that the sizes of stockpiles were probably closer to between four and nine tons. Martin and his wife Chryssee observed in a 1991 article published in the conservation journal
Oryx
that ‘Taiwanese self-made millionaires are notorious for their conspicuous consumption of rare and exotic wildlife, and the Chinese traditional adage that animals exist primarily for exploitation is nowhere more pronounced than on this island’.

At the heart of the trade, though, lay China. For at least 2 000 years, rhino horn has been an integral component in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Since the eighth century, China has been a major importer of rhino horn, first from Asia and later, via Arab traders, from Africa. During the Tang Dynasty – China’s ‘golden age’, which lasted for nearly 300 years from 618AD – historians recorded the existence of vast numbers of rhinoceroses along the Yangtze River. They were said to be so numerous that ‘hunting expeditions would round them up by the scores, or even a hundred or more at a time’. By the mid-nineteenth century, China’s rhinos were all extinct.

In the 1950s, under Chairman Mao Zedong, the country saw a dramatic revival in TCM practice. Specialist research institutes and colleges flourished and, at Mao’s behest, there was a determined push to integrate Eastern and Western medical practices. In the late 1960s and 1970s, during the excesses of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, thousands of peasants were trained as primary health-care workers. They became known as the ‘barefoot doctors’. Their training was designed to give them a basic grounding in hygiene, first aid, and traditional and Western medicines.

Writing in 1982, Martin said that ‘one consequence of the resurgence of traditional practice has been a significant increase in demand for rhino horn in China’. Between 1949 and 1976, China directly imported 13 per cent of East Africa’s declared exports. Little is known about the stocks it imported from other countries or entrepôts like Hong Kong and Taiwan.

In the mid-1970s, anywhere between two and four tons of rhino horn a year was going to China. Between 1982 and 1986, long after the imposition of the CITES trade ban, China imported at least ten tons of horn. Much of it is believed to have come from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and North Yemen, with smaller quantities smuggled in from Singapore and Thailand.

In 1988, the Chinese CITES management authority ordered that all medicine factories and import and export companies register their stocks of horn. The final tally came to nearly ten tons. The China National Corporation of Traditional and Herbal Medicine in Beijing had the largest stockpile at just over 3.4 tons, followed closely by the Guangdong Drug Corporation with 1.5 tons. It was estimated at the time that between 600 kilograms and 700 kilograms of horn was used annually in medicines.

Martin wrote that if demand continued at that rate, there would be sufficient stocks for fifteen years – enough horn to last the Chinese market until 2003.

Vietnam’s emergence as the leading destination for rhino horn in the world – beginning in 2003 – took South African authorities and conservationists by surprise. For years, the focus had been on China’s black market.

In May 1993, the People’s Republic had announced a blanket prohibition on the sale, purchase, importation, exportation and possession of rhino horn. Traders were given six months to dispose of their remaining stock, including medicines. Rhino horn was also deleted from the country’s voluminous, state-sanctioned pharmacopoeia.

Surveys conducted by TRAFFIC in 1994, 1995 and 1996 found that while a worrying residual black market remained, China had made a ‘substantial effort to implement the ban … The results of these surveys could indicate that China has been highly successful in implementing the domestic ban on trade in rhinoceros horn …’

The benefits seemed to extend to southern Africa, where poaching levels remained consistently low between 1994 and 2000. The beginnings of the current crisis can be traced to 2002. Twenty-five rhinos were poached in South Africa that year, sharply up from six the previous year. A decade later, 448 rhino would be poached in a single year.

Vietnam’s first forays into the rhino horn market were detected in 2003, when the earliest pseudo-hunts took place in South Africa. By 2010, the Vietnamese accounted for as many as 70 per cent of all ‘legal’ rhino hunts. Oddly, Chinese involvement in hunts seems to have been relatively low. Records compiled by South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs show that, since 2007, Chinese nationals have only acquired and exported twenty rhino trophies. But questions persist about the extent of China’s links to the trade, and there has been some speculation that Vietnamese syndicates may be acting as proxies for Chinese interests. But there are few recorded seizures of horns passing through Vietnam’s northern borders
with China. In December 2009, a man was arrested by Chinese authorities after he crossed the border with two rhino horns he had bought from a Vietnamese dealer for $63 000.