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Zimbabwe's woes are bringing grief to its wildlife, too
Michael Wines, New York Times
October 25, 2003

HWANGE NATIONAL PARK, Zimbabwe - 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."

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