Traded illegally, offered as exotic gifts to rich sheikhs or exploited to lure tourists: great apes are badly exposed by a legal system designed to protect them but too often blatantly ignored, according to experts.
They voiced their concerns at an international conference in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, on saving primates from the danger of imminent extinction.
John Sellar, who heads the fight against trafficking with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), said the main problem is tracking down those behind the trade.
”The illegal trade generates millions of dollars, and we are involved in a real fight against organised crime: corrupt bureaucrats, false documentation, Mafia-style clashes with armed groups engaged in smuggling,” he said.
He said the trade in great apes, among the most menaced species but also, theoretically, afforded the most protection by the Cites treaty, is strictly forbidden apart from very rare exceptions.
But it still goes on.
”The first difficulty is finding the proof,” Sellar said. ”We know, for example, that there are gorillas in the private collections of sheikhs in the Gulf countries. The animals are often gifts from sycophants and it is very difficult to track back to the source of the trafficking.
”Once we found four young gorillas from Nigeria in a zoo in Malaysia, with certificates bought from corrupt officials. But there again it’s difficult to find proof of corruption.”
He said that while the Cites treaty has been signed by 169 countries, the problem is implementing legislation.
The Kinshasa conference has gathered representatives from the 23 so-called ”great ape range states” and wildlife experts to consider a raft of proposals for ensuring the survival of the primates.
It is the first at governmental level of the United Nations-backed Great Apes Survival Project (Grasp), an ambitious scheme launched in Paris in 2003 to sustain and begin to boost their dwindling populations by 2010.
Disease, war, deforestation and the bush-meat trade have pushed the great apes — highland and lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans in south-east Asia and bonobos in Africa — to the verge of extinction.
Experts predict their complete demise by 2055 without urgent action.
The good intentions so far will be meaningless ”as long as governments have not strengthened their capacity” to implement and enforce legislation, said Ian Redmond, a British official with Grasp.
Boniface Nyakageni, an expert with the Burundi environment ministry, said the struggle needs international cooperation.
”The most important thing … is to achieve mastery over the illegal trade networks” and develop sophisticated new techniques to tackle traffickers that are currently beyond the capacity of individual countries.
Sellar said one such technique, already starting to be used by Rwanda, is to extract any bullets found in dead primates and send them to Europe or the United States for ballistic analysis.
The analysis, conducted free of charge, then helps investigators hunt down the traffickers. — Sapa-AFP