"For the moment... Rwanda's gorillas have
escaped harm, which is splendid news. Still, the widespread sigh of
relief will be muted. Amid so ghastly a human catastrophe in Rwanda, one
may feel an uneasy twinge of guilt in worrying about the fate of
non-humans."
"In truth," says the Times, striking a Darwinian posture,
"all living things are bound together in this calamity, and gorillas are
a small evolutionary link away from Homo sapiens... Fortunately, a
census has accounted for all but two of the creatures whose passing
would now be almost like a death in the family."
This concern for 650 gorillas is one indication
of the extent to which Prince Philip's psychotic confusion of animals with
human beings has permeated society.
The Times editorial failed to mention that the
gorilla home, Virunga Mountain Park, also gave refuge to the guerrillas of
the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), who have been waging war on Rwanda since
October 1990, with full financing and backing of Ugandan President Yoweri
Museveni and his puppet-mistress, Lady Lynda Chalker, British Minister of
Overseas Development.
The double-use of the park as wild animal
reserve and as sanctuary to a British-owned insurgency goes to the heart
of the British royal family's grand strategy for Africa. The
segregation of large tracts of land as "national parks," "game reserves,"
"ecological reserves," has led to untold slaughter of humans and
animals throughout Africa.
Today, game reserves and national parks
occupy 1,988,168 square kilometers of sub-Saharan Africa - 8.2% of the land
area, an extent five times the size of California and eight times the size of the United Kingdom. Although some
countries, like Mauritania, have been relatively unscathed by the park
plague, Tanzania has 40% of its land locked in "parks" (not all shown on
map).
As in Rwanda, the parks have multiple purposes:
-
Taking huge tracts of land out of
circulation for economic productive purposes. Although the United
Nations magazine Choices predicts that "by the year 2000 nearly half
the country of Zimbabwe will be raising its cash from wildlife," the
creation of such parks is one of the biggest land-clearing
operations since Genghis Khan leveled Central Asia in the thirteenth
century.
As one British source put it:
-
"When the British wished to
keep people out of an area, they tended to make it into a game
reserve, which gave them a raison d'etre. 'This is a game reserve,
so you can't be here.' "
Over 17% of the land of tiny Rwanda is
locked up in such reserves.
-
While taking land out of circulation for
development, the reserves often squat on land that has potentially
wealthy yields of strategic resources. For example, the border-area
parks of Niger cover an undeveloped uranium field.
-
Park administration by extra-national
agencies such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is a direct
assault on national sovereignty. Under the guise of fighting
poachers, administration often involves paramilitary forces.
-
"The
function of the national park is to keep control of that land out of
the hands of the local government," one expert informed EIR. "The
national park is governed by a board of trustees, at least they
originally were... These were autarchies controlled by white
conservationists, all of whom were military people."
In five
countries in Africa - Cameroon, Zaire, the Ivory Coast, Kenya, and
Zambia - the WWF administers at least one park.
In five other
countries, the parks are administered by agencies such as the U.N.
Development Program, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, or
the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
-
The parks are safe havens and staging
grounds for insurgencies of all stripes. As documented below, many
reserves and parks straddle borders, with the parks functioning as
"militarized zones." Prince Philip's WWF was administering the
gorilla program in the Virunga park, while the RPF was using the
Virunga to maraud Rwanda.
In fact, RPF-sponsor Uganda has been
profiting from the dislocation of the gorillas caused by the RPF
operations. According to Africa Analysis, the RPF invasion had sent
Rwanda's gorillas running to Uganda, giving Museveni the opportunity
to launch his own "eco-tourism program."
Without the safe havens,
provided by the royal family's park system, the protracted civil and
border wars afflicting Africa since the 1970s would have been
impossible.
Mourning the tsetse fly
The parks have wreaked havoc with the
economies and ecologies of Africa.
The park system decreased the total
energy throughput in the entire ecological system, leading to the
proliferation of parasites and disease. This degradation of the human
environment has aided in causing the conditions under which new diseases -
such as
AIDS - are now coursing through a depleted population.
The case of the tsetse fly proves the point. African tribesmen had long kept
the tsetse fly - which carries the deadly disease
Trypanosomiasis, or
sleeping sickness - in check through extensive cultivation and bush
clearance. The tribesmen understood that the fly lived off wild game,
particularly antelope. For this reason, many tribal chiefs opposed the
creation of the parks, and the related ban on hunting, as a threat to their
herds.
In 1892, the Zulu protested that the rise of cattle sleeping sickness was
due to the increase of large game under the protection afforded by the
government.
This theory was proven in 1894 by Dr. David Bruce, who then
fought for a change in policy, with limited success. In the area run by the
British South Africa Company, colonial authorities suspended game laws and
began the elimination of game in an effort to stop the disease. The change
brought protest from the Society for the Preservation of Fauna of the
Empire.
Dr. George Prentice, a medical missionary, denounced the
conservation movement to the British Colonial Office:
"I hold that those who
are responsible for the game laws are responsible for the presence of the
tsetse, and that victims of Trypanosomiasis are martyrs to the foolish
policy of game protection. Any official, high or low, or any member of the
Society for the Preservation of Fauna who, in the face of known facts,
asserts the contrary, may prove the sincerity of his assertion by allowing
us to experiment upon him with our local forms of tsetse."
By 1925, some 22,000 square miles of southern Rhodesia were fly-infested.
Panic forced a policy of game control in areas near colonial activity. In
African-inhabited areas, the ban against hunting was enforced.
Today, according to the admissions of Lee and Gerry Durrell, writing for the
Conservation Monitoring Center at Cambridge, England, an entity financed by
the WWF,
"blood-sucking tsetse flies inhabit 10 million square kilometers of
tropical Africa, in a wide band across the continent that takes in 34
countries."
The authors bemoan modern-day spraying methods which have
rendered new areas tsetse-free.
In fact,
"the tsetse-free areas are growing
so fast that... there is a real possibility that the spread of livestock
onto marginal land will become a threat to wildlife.... The eradication of
the tsetse fly may be Africa's misfortune."
Or, as Bruce Kinloch, chief park ranger for Tanzania, Malawi, and Uganda,
mourns the decline of the tstse:
"The tsetse had long discouraged the often
destructive and frequently wasteful use by humans of extensive regions of
scenically beautiful, unspoilt wilderness, the natural home of the great
game herds."
Vector spraying in the national parks is strictly forbidden.
Trypanosomiasis
has been on the rise since the mid-1980s, especially in Lady Lynda Chalker's
Uganda.
The African parks were
created as a cover for destabilization
by Joseph Brewda
Examining a map of Africa which outlines the national park systems, is a
most instructive experience.
The sheer size of these parks and park
complexes is striking. South Africa's Kruger park, for example, is the size
of the state of Massachusetts, while the vast park complex of Zambia is
larger than Great Britain. What is also striking is the fact that a high
percentage of Africa's parks and reserves are sited on national borders. In
many cases, these parks come together to form binational and trinational
parks that straddle these borders.
These parks are not located in such border regions for aesthetic purposes.
Unlike Europe, for example, where most borders are naturally demarcated by
often beautiful mountain ranges and rivers, the boundaries of Africa's
states were arbitrarily drawn by the European powers at their imperial
conferences. There is nothing particularly singular on the borders of these
states that might not be found in the interior.
The placement of parks in
such regions has a different purpose: mass murder and the destabilization of
Africa.
Who set up the park movement?
There were two distinct phases in the
national park and game reserve movement in imperial Africa.
In the first
phase, the preservation phase, access to hunting was restricted to the white
colonial elite, allegedly to preserve dwindling stocks of favored game.
Colonial authorities often evicted native populations from their forest and
pasture lands, in order to establish "game reserves," while restricting the
native populations from hunting. This policy was a parody of what had been
the practice in medieval Europe.
As far back as 1130, the Norman lords of
England had classified certain lands as forest reserves, where only the king
and his delegated officers could hunt.
The second phase, which took off after World War II, was the conservation
phase, in which hunting was increasingly forbidden to everyone and the
ritualized hunting obsession of the colonial elite was gradually replaced by
a Gaia-worshipping "ecological consciousness."
The "national park" replaced
the "game reserve," and the camera largely replaced the carbine.
There were various regulations restricting access to game in Africa dating
as far back as the Dutch colonial decrees in the Cape in 1657. But the
movement to lock up vast tracts of land as reserves only began in earnest in
1896 under the leadership of British Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister
the Marquess of Salisbury, when he called for the introduction of checks on
hunting throughout British Africa. In 1900, Salisbury convened a conference
of the European imperial powers on the issue in London.
The conference's agreements virtually eliminated the native ability to hunt,
even outside the reserves, by outlawing the use of traditional snares and
pitfalls as "inhumane." At the same time, it reaffirmed an earlier joint
agreement among the British, French, German, and Portuguese colonies'
authorities banning the native use of the firearm.
The Society for the Preservation of Fauna in the Empire, which later spawned
the World Wildlife Fund, was formed to ensure that the 1900 convention was
implemented.
From the beginning, the society, affectionately known as "the
Fauna," was associated with the British Museum, specifically the Natural
History division that had been created by Charles Darwin's "bulldog,"
Thomas
H. Huxley.
In 1933, another conference, following up the 1900 conference, was convened
in London. The British delegation was led by the Earl of Onslow, who was
also the head of the Fauna. The most important result of the conference was
a provision for the establishment of national parks in Africa. The enabling
legislation of most countries' game parks in Africa today, dates back to
colonial decrees enacted in the aftermath of the 1933 conference.
The national parks and reserves constituted by the 1900 and 1933 agreements
legally established internal frontiers within the African colonies that
could not be crossed by the native population, on the pretext of protecting
wildlife.
These internal frontiers, forming colonial enclaves, continued in
effect after the colonies gained independence.
The Kruger precedent
The first reserves in Africa predated
the 1900 London conference.
They were created by South African President
Paul Kruger in 1889. One of the reserves was the Sabi reserve, now Kruger
park, which was created along the border with the Portuguese colony of
Mozambique.
Kruger created the parks, but the Boer War between Britain and the
Afrikaners intervened. In the process, the park region was subjected to a
brutal campaign by Lord Kitchener in which crops were destroyed, cattle
butchered, and wildlife killed, in order to deny the Boers food.
This "ecological warfare" left the region
devastated.
MAP 4
Southern Africa protected areas and insurgency
* See above for definitions of protected areas and sources.
KEY TO MAP 4
Southern Africa
protected areas
-
Zambia:
Zambia was the
forward base of operations and safe haven for all the
"liberation movements" operating in southern Africa contesting
white minority or colonial rule in the 1960s, 70s, and'80s.
The Angolan UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of
Angola) and the MPLA (Popular Movement of the Liberation of
Angola) were both based in the huge Zambian park complex that
borders Angola, specifically the West Zambezi game management
area 1, in the 1960s and 1970s. The park was used as a
safe-haven and point of infiltration of Angola. After the
abandonment of colonial rule in 1975 and the coming to power of
the MPLA, UNITA continued to use the park as the base for its
17-year civil war with the MPLA government.
The Namibian SWAPO was based in the Sioma Ngwezi national park
2, contiguous with the West Zambezi game management area.
The ANC of South Africa was based just east of the Sioma Ngwezi
national park 3. There was another ANC base just east of the
Mosi-pa-Tunya national park 4, on the border with Rhodesia.
The ZANU and ZAPU (Zimbabwean liberation movements) were also
based just east of the Mosi-pa-Tunya park in the same area as
the ANC 4. ZANU later set up a base over the border in
Mozambique, opposite Zambia's Lower Zambezi park 6.
The Frelimo (of Mozambique) had a base of operations in Zambia's
Luana and West Petauke park, contiguous with the Lower Zambezi
park 5.
-
Rhodesia/Zimbabwe:
During
the period of white minority rule, Rhodesia's Ghonarezhou Game
Reserve, which borders Mozambique 7, was the base from which the
Selous Scouts, an irregular formation put together by the top
ecologist of the Rhodesian park system, launched raids into
Zambia and Mozambique.
Following the creation of Zimbabwe in 1980, the park continued
to be used as a military base, but this time to block Renamo's
raids. Renamo is an insurgent movement operating primarily
against Mozambique that was created by the former head of
Rhodesian intelligence.
In 1984, the Zimbabwe parks department created Operation
Stronghold (with WWF funding), allegedly to stop rhino poaching.
A least 145 "poachers" were killed, reportedly including
officers of the ANC military wing.
-
South Africa:
Renamo
safe-haven; reportedly trained there by the World Wildlife
Fund's Operation Lock. Similar training is being used to create
a civil war in South Africa through "black on black" terrorism.
Renamo's HQ is at Phalambora, one mile from the gate of Kruger
national park, which borders Mozambique 8. The park is also
Renamo's training area.
Kruger is bordered by several privately administered game parks
which have also reportedly been used for Renamo training and
safe-haven, including the Bongani Mountain Lodge, the Kapama
Game reserve, the Timbavati Nature reserve, and the Sabi-Sand
reserve.
Renamo also has a base in Ndumu park on the border with
Mozambique 9; in the Muzuli reserve in Natal; and in the parks
of the former KaNgwane homeland.
Reportedly, the Maputoland game reserve 10 and the Mkuze game
park 11 in Kwazulu, have also been used as bases for launching
"black on black," so-called "Third force" terrorism, intended to
provoke tribal war throughout South Africa.
-
Namibia:
The "Koevoet,"
"crowbar squad," allegedly trained to counter poaching in
Namibia's Etosha park 12, was later used to run black-on-black
killings in South Africa.
-
Angola:
The East Germans
trained the Cubans at the Bicuan and Mupa national parks during
the late 1960s and early 1970s 13, to help the MPLA government
counter UNITA forces. The East Germans also trained the West
German Baader Meinhof terrorists there.
Expansion plans
The vast complex of parks straddling the borders of southern African
countries is growing. According to understated IUCN figures, already
30% of Zambia; 13% of Zimbabwe; 17% of Botswana; 6% of Angola; 13%
of Namibia; 9% of Mozambique; and 5% of South Africa is locked up in
national parks and game reserves.
These existing parks are
arrayed in large complexes which often cross several borders,
constituting huge transnational park complexes outside the control
of any government. The total land area of the contiguous park system
of Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Angola is 259,000 sq km,
slightly larger than the United Kingdom.
Farther south we see the Kruger national park of South Africa
bordering Mozambique, 20,000 sq km by itself, about the size of
Massachusetts.
There are two vast new additions to this overall system being
planned: a huge complex in Mozambique across the border from South
Africa Kruger's park A, and a massive expansion of Botswana's park
system B. The Republic of South Africa is now negotiating with
Mozambique to integrate their border park systems into a single
binational authority.
The WWF is negotiating with Mozambique to
privatize its park system, making this South African takeover
easier.
In 1902, the park was reestablished by Britain's
Lord Milner, an associate of African empire-builder Cecil Rhodes, after
South Africa became a British colony. The park's first warden, Maj. James
Stevenson-Hamilton, had seen active duty in the Boer War in 6th Dragoon
guards.
Lord Milner instructed him to clean up the park
of "kaffirs" and white shareholders, and to "make himself thoroughly
unpleasant to everyone."
Over the next 45 years, until his retirement in 1946, Stevenson-Hamilton
carried out these instructions ruthlessly, clearing 11,000 square miles of
countryside of its original inhabitants and implementing a military
"anti-poaching campaign."
Even those natives who were not evicted had to
leave, as hunting had been their major source of meat; they poured into the
cities and mines, where they became virtual slave labor for the new British
regime. As a result of this policy, the major earned the epithet "skukuza"
("he who sweeps clean"). The headquarters, Skukuza, of Kruger park today is
named in his honor.
Stevenson-Hamilton's system of warfare against the native population, in the
guise of wildlife protection, in which he and his game wardens constituted
themselves as virtual dictators, was explicitly cited as the basis of all
subsequent national parks policy in Britain's African colonies by Col.
Mervyn Cowie, who created the first colonial park in Kenya in 1946. Cowie
ran the parks system there for 20 years.
On his retirement, he reported how
he had confiscated tens of thousands of square miles of land from the native
inhabitants, implemented a mass-resettlement scheme, and turned native
property into 30 parks.
"I copied every idea in StevensonHamilton's book
South African Eden," which lays out his system, he reported.
The Mail Mau model for genocide
From 1952 to 1960, the British
colonial authorities in Kenya, led by park warden Colonel Cowie, oversaw a
state of emergency allegedly dedicated to combating a native revolution.
The methods employed against the Kenyan people under the guise of
combating
this alleged revolution became the model for all subsequent British efforts
to destabilize the continent, and, as in Kenya, these destabilization
efforts continue to be run out of the game parks.
The supposed focus of this Kenyan revolutionary conspiracy was the Mau Mau,
an alleged secret society within the Kikuyu tribe, the largest and then
dominant tribe of the colony.
The existence of the Mau Mau had been
discovered by anthropologist and British agent Louis Leakey. As far back as
the 1930s, Leakey ad done a 1 million-word study of the Kikuyu for British
intelligence.
Allegedly to combat this conspiracy, the colonial authorities forced the
mass resettlement of Kikuyu and other peoples from their lands and, in their
efforts to crush the conspiracy, burnt down whole forests. This assault was
largely led by the paramilitary personnel of the game park system
established by Cowie.
The Mau Mau conspiracy proved to be a strange one.
Whereas only 22 whites
were killed in the insurrection, an estimated 18-30,000 natives were killed,
primarily in fighting among Kikuyu factions and with other tribes.
Agriculture in the white regions was untouched, and the Mau Mau failed to
even attack the vulnerable transportation network or any key facility in the
cities.
Col. Frank Kitson, in his 1960 book Gangs and Counter-gangs, revealed that
the British were leading large-scale Mau Mau units, and that many (if not
all) Mau Mau units were synthetically created by the colonial authorities.
Through orchestrating violence between their "gangs" and "counter-gangs," the
British ensured that only native slaughter, and not revolution, would
result.
The Mau Mau gangs and counter-gangs were directed by Gen. Sir George Erskine,
who had been responsible for civilian food distribution in occupied postwar
Germany. Erskine was aided by Colonel Cowie, the manager of the parks
system, and Bill Woodley, his intelligence chief who largely developed the
gang-countergang doctrine described by Kit-son and later systematically
applied throughout Africa.
Cowie, Woodley, and Leakey were veterans of the World War II Kenya regiment,
whose top intelligence officer, Charles Pittman, was the chief warden of the
Ugandan park system.
The Kenyan regiment was an elite unit within the
British Commonwealth Armies in Africa, commanded by Gen. Jan Smuts, who was
also the President of the British Union of South Africa. Smuts had once
called for creating a single park system stretching from Kenya to South
Africa.
Several of Woodley's subordinates later found work in Kenya's game parks
after the emergency, including Stan Bleazard, who took over the Marsabit
National Reserve, and Maj. Temple Boreham, who became chief warden at Masai
Mara park. David Sheldrick, a former Kenyan regiment intelligence officer
who had served directly under Pittman, took over "anti-poaching" operations
in Tsavo elephant park.
Woodley himself became chief warden at Aberdares
Mountain park, while Cowie remained in charge of the entire Kenya park
system until the 1960s.
Guerrillas in the mist
In the 1960s, the British initiated
their "winds of change" policy, whereby the peoples of Africa achieved
nominal independence.
"The wind of change is blowing throughout the
continent," visiting Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said in Cape Town,
South Africa in 1960. "Whether we like it or not this growth of national
consciousness is a political fact. Our national policies must take account
of it."
Within five years, most of British Africa was nominally decolonized, and an
often bewildered native comprador class was elevated to become the new
governing elite.
But while the British flag was lowered in one colony after
another, much of the old colonial apparatus remained, with key posts in the
ministries continuing to be staffed by British nationals.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the parks system, which, by the time
of independence, locked up upwards of 20% of the African colonies' lands.
The chief game wardens, park police chiefs, and the parks department staff
largely continued to be British nationals.
Moreover, in a malicious
innovation, increasingly large numbers of these parks, and in some cases the
entire parks system, were put under the control of private non-governmental
organizations, managed by international boards of trustees outside the
oversight of the government.
Today, the parks systems of Kenya, Tanzania,
and Zaire are privately managed by international boards of trustees. Until
1992, Louis Leakey's son, Richard Leakey, was the chairman of the private
"Kenya Wildlife Services" which runs Kenya's parks.
When Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere proclaimed in his 1961 "Arusha
Declaration" that the peoples of Africa would preserve the national parks
bequeathed to them in perpetuity, he was admitting that the existence of
these colonial enclaves would go unchallenged. Some 40%. of the land area of
Tanzania today is locked up in its national park system, administered by the
"Tanzania National Parks" nongovernmental organization.
These parks, following the Mau Mau precedent, continue to be the
headquarters, training sites, and safe havens of the gang-counter-gangs. On
the one hand, these parks have been the centers of nominally "anti-western"
Warsaw Pact-linked subversion targeting white minority or colonial rule.
On
the other hand, they have been the center of "pro-western" efforts to
overthrow alleged Soviet client states radiating revolution throughout the
continent.
For example:
Rhodesia-Zimbabwe
Beginning in 1961, the Zimbabwe Peoples
Union (ZAPU), and two years later, the rival Zimbabwe African National
Union (ZANU), conducted a guerrilla war to overthrow the white
minority-ruled Rhodesian regime. The Rhodesian effort to crush the
insurgency was carried out by the Rhodesian Army, and its irregular
guerrilla formation, the Selous Scouts.
ZANU and ZAPU cadre were trained by Russian KGB instructors at the
British-created Queen Elizabeth park and Gorilla park in Uganda. ZAPU
was also trained by Chinese military instructors at the Serengeti and
Ruana national parks of Tanzania.
The ZANU and ZAPU forward bases of
operation against Rhodesia were in Zambia, just outside the Mosipa-Tunya
park, and also in the Lower Zambezi park.
MAP 5
East African protected areas and insurgency
* See page 24 for definitions of protected areas and sources.
KEY TO MAP 5
East African
protected areas
-
Uganda/Sudan:
The only
remaining stronghold of the Sudanese People's Liberation
Army (SPLA) in Sudan is in the town of Nimuli, on the border
with Uganda. This stronghold is supplied out of adjacent
Nimuli national park 1 on the Sudanese border with Uganda.
It is also supplied out of the Kidepo valley national park 2
in nearby northern Uganda. Kidepo park is also the SPLA
command and training center. Ugandan army personnel often
serve as officers of the SPLA.
Since at least the 1960s, several Uganda governments have
used Kidepo park as a base for subversive operations in
southern Sudan.
The park was created in 1962, over the protests of local
conservationists who argued that the siting of the park was
unreasonable; some claim that the only reason the park was
created was to aid British subversion of Sudan which became
independent in 1956. World Wildlife Fund founder Peter Scott
was also the long-time chairman of the Ugandan National
Parks department.
-
Uganda and Zaire:
During the late 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet KGB trained
various of the "liberation movements" of southern Africa in
national parks in Uganda and Zaire. Among the movements were
Zimbabwe People's Union (ZAPU), and it split-away, the
Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU); the South African
National Congress (ANC), and its split-away, the Pan-Africanist
Congress (PAC).
The parks used for Soviet training were part of the complex
of contiguous national parks in western Uganda and eastern
Zaire including the Virunga park in Zaire 3, the Queen
Elizabeth park complex 4 in Uganda, and the nearby Gorilla
park 5 in Uganda - parks which were later used in the Uganda
invasion of Rwanda in 1990 and 1994.
-
Tanzania:
The Chinese
military carried out extensive terrorist training projects
in Tanzania in the 1960s and 70s, including training of the ZAPU, ANC, and PAC. Training was conducted in the
British-administered Serengeti National Park, particularly
in the Ngorongoro Crater area 6 which is also a major site
of World Wildlife Fund operations. These same groups were
also trained at the British-administered Ruana National Park
8.
-
Kenya:
The Rhodesian,
and then South African-based, Mozambique National Resistance
(known as Renamo) had rest and training camps in the Galana
area which abuts Tsavo park 7. Renamo had originally been
created by the Rhodesian intelligence service, after
Portugal achieved its independence.
A waterhole
at Kruger National Park in South Africa.
The park is
the size of the state of Massachusetts;
in 1902, it
was brutally cleared of its non-white inhabitants to turn it
into a game preserve for the oligarchy.
That policy
is being continued by Prince Philip's "conservation"- groups
today.
The decades-long President of Zambia,
Kenneth Kaunda, has been one of the more important British agents in
southern Africa. The Selous Scouts, the Rhodesian opponents of ZANU and
ZAPU, were mustered by the chief ecologist of the Rhodesian park system.
In 1980, ZANU chief Robert Mugabe became head of state of the newly
created Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia). But even after black majority rule
was established, the civil war continued. The fleeing Rhodesian elite
largely emigrated to neighboring South Africa.
The Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo), which had earlier been
created by Rhodesian intelligence to destabilize Mozambique after its
independence from Portugal, was now deployed against Zimbabwe. The
headquarters of Renamo is one mile from South Africa's Kruger park; it
was trained in South African regional parks in Natal, and in the parks
of the nearby KaNgwane homeland.
In 1984, the Zimbabwe Department of National Parks and Wildlife
Management began an anti-poaching campaign with WWF support, which has
killed at least 145 "poachers" since that time.
At least some of these
poachers are said to have been leaders of the rival African National
Congress military wing.
Angola
In 1956, the Popular Movement for the
Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was formed to overthrow Portuguese colonial
rule. In 1966, its rival, the National Union for the Total Independence
of Angola (UNITA), was also formed.
A waterhole at Kruger National Park in South Africa. The park is the size
of the state of Massachusetts; in 1902, it was brutally cleared of its
non-white inhabitants to turn it into a game preserve for the oligarchy.
That policy is being continued by Prince Philip's "conservation"- groups
today.
A civil war against foreign rule began. Following the evacuation of
Portuguese forces in 1975, the conflict continued, but this time between
the new MPLA government and UNITA.
The civil war continued for another 17 years.
The MPLA and UNITA were headquartered in the West Zambezi game
management area in Kaunda's Zambia during the period of Portuguese
Angolan rule.
After the MPLA took over the Angolan government, UNITA continued to be
based in the same park. Meanwhile, Cuban troops were invited into Angola
to defend Angola from UNITA.
These Cuban troops, and the MPLA, were
trained by the East German Stasi at Bicuan and Mupa national parks. (The
West German Baader-Meinhof gang was also trained in the same parks.)
Mozambique
The Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo)
was formed in 1962 to overthrow Portuguese rule in Mozambique.
It was headquartered in Luana and West
Petauke national parks in Zambia; it also received training from Russian
instructors in the park systems of Uganda. In 1975, the Portuguese left
and Frelimo formed a government. But the civil war continued, this time
under the guise of a struggle between the Frelimo government and Renamo,
now based in South Africa's Kruger park.
Reportedly, at least one of the major
factions of Renamo has been trained by WWF personnel with the aid of
British Special Air Services founder Col. David Stirling, who had been a
close associate of Mau Mau controller and Kenyan Parks department
director Col. Mervyn Cowie since the 1940s.
The oligarchs' real game is
killing animals and killing people
by Allen Douglas
"Crack! The rifle shot hits its target, and
a mother rhino dies. Its little calf, now abandoned, is also condemned
to death. As another of our endangered species is pushed nearer to
extinction, the poachers' blood-lust grows."
- World Wildlife Fund circular of July
17, 1987 condemning the "proud men of the Middle East" for their
"criminal ignorant waste" of the rhino, because they use its carved horn
as handles for their ceremonial knives.
In January 1961, a few months before he would
launch the new "Noah's Ark," the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to save the
world's endangered animal species, Prince Philip accompanied Queen Elizabeth
on a royal tour of India.
Among the attractions that one of his hosts, a
local Rajah in Jaipur, put on for the royal party was a tiger hunt. From a
platform high in the trees out of all danger, Philip shot one of the famed
Indian tigers, which had been lured by the tethered goats which the rajah
had staked out.
The photo of Philip standing proudly by his victim, nearly
10 feet long from nose to tail, caused a worldwide outcry.
Philip, president of the
World Wildlife Fund, on the left,
looking after a tiger just
killed.
Shaken, the royal consort continued his tour, arriving in Kathmandu with a
conspicuous bandage on his trigger finger, explaining that an injury would
prevent his participation in the king's "traditional hunt," which he would,
nevertheless, accompany.
Philip and Elizabeth rode perched atop some of the
300 elephants which were used to flush the game, as the Queen whirred away
with her camera. Several tigers were killed that day, none officially
attributed to Philip. Nor did Philip receive official credit for another
animal killed that day, an exceedingly rare Indian rhinoceros. Only 250 were
then left in the world, after British tea planters had finished slaughtering
them to make way for their crop.
As the elephants lumbered on, a female rhino with an infant calf became
trapped within their closing circle. One of the royal party, Lord Alex
Douglas-Home, known as one of the finest shots in England, fired near the
animal in an attempt to scare it away.
But the rhino blundered on, into
Philip's path.
"To everyone's horror, Philip shot it," Ian MacPhail, the
WWF's first international appeals director, later told a British film crew.
The dead rhino's terrified calf escaped by darting away through the
elephants' legs.
Said MacPhail,
"It must have died as well. It was far too
young to have managed on its own."
The whole business was covered up, MacPhail explained, for plans were
already afoot to found the World Wildlife Fund.
"I was a party to the
cover-up," he told the film crew in 1990, believing that the greater good
was to save various animal species as a whole.
Reflecting on the WWF's utter
failure to do so over the three previous decades, he concluded:
"But with a
heavy heart I have to report to you that I was wrong. The rhino, the
elephant, and the panda missed the boat, and the new Noah's Ark sailed on
without them."
Philip's personal behavior has characterized that of his World Wildlife Fund
as a whole.
From 1961 until the present, the WWF has presided over, and in
many cases organized and financed, including the purchase of weapons, the
systematic slaughter and near extinction of the most prominent species under
its self-appointed control. And, under cover of concern for the animals, it
used substantial portions of the several hundred million dollars it has
raised to date, to finance the slaughter of human beings, in particular in
sub-Saharan Africa.
In the account to follow, it must be understood that the WWF was, from the
outset, the personal fiefdom of Philip, who oversaw its operations almost
down to the smallest detail.
Sir Peter Scott, a WWF founder and longtime
chairman, explained to EIR in an interview conducted in the early 1980s why
Prince Bernhard, rather than Philip, became the WWFInternational's first
president:
"When we started WWF, a British president would have looked too
colonial."
But, Scott emphasized, it was Philip, not his friend Prince
Bernhard, who was the driving force - testimony echoed by others in the WWF
hierarchy.
Longtime Director General Charles de Haes told a journalist,
"Prince Philip is brilliant, he has a remarkable knowledge. He's been
involved with WWF since its founding in 1961. He's incredibly active. He
chairs all the executive committee meetings. He's involved right down to
every aspect of policy."
Added the WWF's Dr. Anne Schiotz,
"The Duke of
Edinburgh devotes perhaps one-fourth of his time to the WWF - he is
remarkable."
The WWF is best-known for its efforts to conserve four animal species, all
of which were in vastly better condition in 1961 than they are today. Two of
these, the panda and the African black rhinoceros, are near extinction,
andtwoothers, the African elephant and the Indian tiger, are rapidly heading
in that direction.
At numerous times during the past 33 years, the WWF has been made aware,
often through reports it has itself commissioned, of the approaching
extinction of various species. In each case, it has suppressed, sometimes
brutally so, the information.
Three of the more notorious instances include:
The "Black Ebur Report"
In 1972, WWF founder Sir Peter Scott
commissioned a Nairobi-based big game hunter, Ian Parker, to look into the
lucrative and burgeoning illegal trade in animal products such as elephant
tusks and rhino horn.
Among other things, Parker found that the family
of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta were notorious traders in illegal
products, and that his daughter Margaret was the secretary of a company
which sold rhino horns and elephant tusks to the Far East, a trade which had
probably done more to decimate Kenya's large animals than any other single
cause. Parker also named many of Kenya's most prominent "conservationists"
as poachers.
Within hours of turning his report over to Scott, Parker was picked up,
taken to the Kenyan Special Branch's notorious Langatta Road station, beaten
for three days and told to shut up about what he had written or his wife
would be killed.
The report, then the most comprehensive inquiry into
African wildlife slaughter ever conducted, remained suppressed until 17
years later, when Irish filmmaker Kevin Dowling unearthed it to use for his
scathing expose of the WWF, "Tenpence in the Panda," for Britain's
Independent Television network.
At almost the same time that Parker was being beaten, then WWF-International
President Prince Bernhard bestowed on Kenyatta his specially created "Order
of the Golden Ark," for "saving the rhino." Bernhard was well aware that
vast numbers of animals had disappeared during Kenyatta's tenure, because he
had received - even signed for - a copy of the Black Ebur Report.
When word leaked out that Bernhard possessed
this devastating report, WWF Director General de Haes claimed that this was
not a WWF corporate affair, that it was merely Bernhard's "private
investigation."
The Phillipson Report
In late 1989, Oxford professor John Phillipson
completed his internal audit, commissioned by the WWF, of the organization's
effectiveness.
Phillipson's 252-page report, excerpts of which are made
public here for the first time, was a scathing indictment of WWF's
outrageous incompetence and blundering, or worse. It concluded that what the
WWF had adopted as its special mission - saving individual species - was
what it was least good at.
Upon receiving a copy of the report, Philip
immediately sent a secret memo to Director General de Haes, directing that
Phillipson be urged to tone down his findings or, failing that, that the
report's key findings be suppressed.
Operation Lock
Under this code name, in 1987, the WWF authorized a lavishly
funded "emergency effort to save the rhino." The premise of this extremely
secret operation was to organize infiltration, from a base in South Africa,
of the continent's wildlife smuggling rings in order to stop the animal slaughter. By all accounts, a vast amount of
information was gathered. Once again, nothing was done with it, except to
suppress it.
Of course, as many conservationists noted at the time, trying to stop
wildlife poaching "at the source" was a ridiculous proposition, akin to
trying to stop the world's drug trade by rounding up local pushers, while
leaving the bankers who finance the trade and launder its hundreds of
billions, untouched.
The center of trade in illegal wildlife products
was, as with the drag trade, the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.
Saving the animals?
Let us review some of the WWF's most
highly publicized, as well as lucrative, efforts to save individual species.
Counter posing these efforts by what might seem
at first to be merely a gang that can't shoot straight, to the most
sensitive mission WWF has ever launched, Operation Lock, lays bare WWF's
true purpose.
-
The panda
At the time of its formation in November
1961, the WWF proclaimed that it had the answer to what it claimed
was the threatened extinction of many species: "There is only one
hope for them symbolized by the loveable giant panda. He was saved
from extinction because man acted in time. Now the panda is the
emblem of a world crusade to beat the 20th century death flood - the
World Wildlife Fund." , .
The WWF claimed that "scientific breeding" had saved the panda, an
approach which now must be applied to all other species. After
raising money off the symbolism of the cuddly mammal for 23 years,
the. WWF suddenly discovered that it, too, was an endangered
species. In 1987, Philip launched a new appeal for still more
millions to "save the panda."
The WWF's efforts, which included "relocating" thousands of poor
Chinese peasants out of their homes in the pandas' "range," and
building an expensive laboratory in an attempt to breed pandas, were
appraised by consultant Phillipson.
After noting that WWF had spent
4,493,021 Swiss francs on eight projects since 1980, Phillipson
observed that,
-
"despite a staff of 43 (23 allegedly science-trained),
panda breeding has not been a success and research output
negligible.... The laboratories, equipped at a cost to WWF of SFr
0.53 million, are essentially non-functional. .. . A lack of proper
advice, inadequately trained staff, and poor direction have resulted
in a'moribund'laboratory.... The obvious conclusion must be that WWF
has not been effective or efficient in safeguarding its massive
investment.... WWF subscribers would be dismayed to learn that the
capital input has been virtually written off."
Finally, wrote Phillipson,
-
"It must be accepted that WWF activities
in China are largely in disarray.... The policy of widening WWF
involvement to cover other interests has, in my opinion, been
counterproductive and, in view of the virtual cessation of support
for all forms of panda research, amounts to an abrogation of responsibility for the much publicized 'Panda
Program.' "
After 30 years of raising money off the animal, Prince Philip was
forced to admit in 1990 that the panda was "probably doomed."
-
The elephant
A study by noted animal population
ecologist E. Caughey in 1988 concluded that there were 3 million
elephants in Africa in the early 1950s. By all accounts, there was
little or no decline in elephant numbers during the colonial period,
that is, approximately up to the "Winds of Change" policy enunciated
by British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan in 1960, almost
contemporaneous with the founding of the WWF.
The first systematic
field survey, done in 1976 by the Scottish Kenya-based
conservationist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, found 1.3 million elephants
alive at the time.
Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, the WWF stoutly
maintained that there was no "elephant crisis," fighting the efforts
of various conservationists to ban trading of the animals' valuable
ivory. By the time the "Year of the Elephant" was declared in
1988-89, the WWF maintained that there were 750,000 left, a number
that mounting evidence forced them to revise downward to 650,000.
However, a survey done in 1988 by the former WWF president in
France, Pierre Pfeffer, who was forced off the board, found that
there were only 400,000 left. That number has dropped still further,
till various experts interviewed in the 1989 British film "The
Elephant Man," spoke of the great beast's looming extinction.
Once again, the WWF had done its bit. In 1963, WWF-International
Chairman Peter Scott, in a report to the Ugandan Parks Board,
recommended the "culling" of 2,500 elephants. The job was contracted
to game hunter Ian Parker, who massacred 4,000 hippos while he was
at it.
Scott had recommended the slaughter on the malthusian premise
that "overpopulation" required the killing of many individuals in
order to "save the species." In reality, as it later emerged, Scott
wanted to create a valuable mahogany plantation in the forests where
the elephants fed, and they were in the way.
While Parker shot the elephants, WWF directors made a tidy profit
from the business. Scott tipped off fellow WWF founder and Prince
Philip's Extra Equerry, Lord Aubrey Buxton, that the slaughters were
to happen. Buxton, chairman of Survival Anglia, makers of some of
the world's leading "nature documentaries," and on whose board Scott
also sat, arranged to film the slaughter.
In the early 1970s, the bloody Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was
installed in power by British intelligence, and maintained there
until 1979. The British government watched benignly as Amin
slaughtered thousands and thousands more elephants.
Today, there are fewer elephants left in Uganda than Scott had
ordered Parker to kill in one drive.
In 1975, the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, founded by U.S.
WWF President Russell Train, contracted with Parker to kill
virtually all the elephants in Rwanda, on the basis that the
Rwandans could not protect both the mountain gorilla and the
elephant, so the elephant had to go.
One of gorilla expert Diane Fossey's assistants later charged that the elephants had been killed
because the land they lived on was ideal for the production of
pyrethrum, a natural "nonpolluting" insecticide.
Within a few years,
an artificial substitute for pyrethrum was found and production
collapsed.
Now cleared of trees, the slopes where the elephants had
lived lost their topsoil through erosion, while the rivers backed up
with sediment and flooded.
The slaughter continued
In 1986, former Rhodesian bush fighter Clem Coetzee of Zimbabwe was awarded
the WWF Conservation Award by Director General de Haes for overseeing a
campaign in which 44,000 elephants were killed.
This was necessary, said the WWF, "to protect the environment" of Zimbabwe's "overcrowded" national
parks. De Haes lauded Coetzee's work as "exemplary and a model for all
Africa."
While other conservation groups worldwide were screaming about the plight of
the elephant and calling for an ivory trade ban, the WWF was still
maintaining things were fine.
When the WWF belatedly rang the alarm bells in
1989, the "Year of the Elephant," their assistance to the elephants of
Uganda was most curious. With funds raised through tear-jerking campaigns
"to save Nell the elephant," the WWF set up a camp to rescue the beleaguered
behemoths, into which the standard extensive paramilitary gear was flown.
This camp was near the Mountains on the Moon on
the Rwandan border, despite the fact that virtually all of Uganda's
elephants were in Murchison Park, nearly 1,000 miles away.
But it was from precisely this area that the
Rwandan Patriotic Front was to invade Rwanda a short time later.
-
The black rhino
The WWF was launched in London with a
special "shock edition" of the Daily Mirror on Oct. 6, 1961. Virtually
the entire front page of the newspaper was given over to a banner
headline, "Doomed - by Man's Folly, Greed and Neglect," and to a giant
picture of a black rhinoceros.
Only 100,000 "short-sighted and likeably
ugly rhinos" like Gertie, as she was christened, who stood there with
one of her infant calves at her foot, survived in the wild, Mirror
readers were told. And they were dwindling fast. If the rhino were to be
"saved" in the troubled times ahead, the whole African herd would have
to be "scientifically managed."
Support from the Mirror's working-class readership poured in.
Widows
sent their pension money, and children their pennies saved up for
school. In all, £45,000 was collected, a huge sum for the time. The WWF
thus obtained "a basis for its financial security," and it was off and
running. Yet it spent virtually nothing on saving rhinos until almost 10
years later, and sponsored only two rhino projects in its first two
decades!
Behind its trumpet blare of concern for the
rhino, the WWF had by 1980 spent only 118,533 tax-sheltered Swiss
francs, out of more than $110 million raised, to "save the wild black
rhino," whose population in the meantime had declined by 95.5%. And when
the WWF finally did sponsor "rhino projects," the rhinos invariably
died, or at best were sent off to zoos or, more frequently, private game
farms.
Today the black rhino is virtually extinct in the wild.
Exemplary of the WWF's work for the "likeably ugly beasts," is a
sampling of the rhino projects scathingly criticized by the Phillipson
report, chronicled below.
In 1965, a Kenyan resident gave the WWF SFr
36,300 to move six white rhino from Natal, South Africa to Meru Game
Reserve in Kenya, which, according to the WWF Yearbook 1965-67 "was felt
to contain the right sort of habitat."
From 1961 until the present, the
WWF has presided over, and in
many cases organized and financed,
the systematic slaughter and near
extinction of the most prominent
species under its self-appointed
control. And, under cover of concern for the animals, it used substantial
portions of the several hundred
million dollars it has raised to
date, to finance the slaughter of
human beings.
Said Phillipson:
"The project was ill-conceived and
indefensible in conservation terms; the Southern White Rhino has
never, at least in historic times, occurred in Kenya: More over,
there is no evidence that the Northern White Rhino ever roamed the
lands which now constitute the 87,044 hectare Meru National Park.
The assumption must be that in the mid 1960s WWF was either
scientifically incompetent, hungry for publicity, greedy for money,
or unduly influenced by scientifically naive persons of stature."
Phillipson concluded,
"The program came to
an abrupt end in November 1988, perhaps mercifully in that it removed a
constant source of embarrassment. Insurgent Somali poachers shot all the
remaining white rhino in an act of defiance, an unfortunate end for the
rhino but no doubt a welcome relief for concerned conservationists.
Project 0195 is not a project that WWF should look back on with any
pride."
Nor was Project 917, in which 85 "surplus rhino" from Natal were shipped
into Mozambique; all of them died. Nor was the Lake Nakuru National Park
rhino project in Kenya.
Half of all the money the WWF spent on Kenya has
gone into what it calls "the protected area management" of this park.
Originally set up as a bird park, with hundreds of thousands of
flamingos and many other varieties of tropical birds breeding on the
lake and its environs, WWF decided by the late 1980s to turn it into a
rhino park in which to place the last of the Kenyan rhinos. Seventeen
black rhino were translocated, and penned in behind an electric fence.
Soon it became obvious that the project was a disaster.
As Phillipson
remarked with biting irony:
"The logic behind the choice of Nakuru
as a site for the release of black rhinos remains something of a
mystery. About one-third of the park is a lake and another third is
open grassland, quite unsuitable in the normal course of events, as
rhino habitat....
Nakuru was a daft place. What price walking
safaris for birdwatchers now that there might be a rhino around the
next bush? The park was, after all, created for the birds."
WWF Director General de Haes was notorious
among his staff for his reported statement that he "couldn't give a
continental f***" about the rhino. But if the WWF has not been saving
endangered species, as it clearly has not, then on what has it been
spending its hundreds of millions of dollars?
A look at the WWF's "Operation Stronghold,"
and its sister, "Operation Lock," two more "save the rhino" gambits,
gives the answer.
Operation Stronghold
Funded with 1 million Swiss francs and coordinated with Operation Lock,
Stronghold was nominally to enable the Zimbabwe Department of National Parks
and Wildlife Management to save the 700 black rhino left in the Zambezi
Valley, the last major population in the wild in Africa.
Chief Game Ranger
Glen Tatham toured the United States, announcing that, with WWF's help, he
and his rangers "were going to war" against the poachers allegedly coming
over the border from Zambia.
On Nov. 10, 1988, Tatham and two of his assistants were brought before a
court in Zimbabwe and charged with murder. It was alleged that they had set
up a sting operation against poachers, who, when they approached the meeting
place, had been shot dead from ambush without warning by the accused. It
soon emerged in a parliamentary debate that Tatham and his men had killed 70
poachers since early 1987.
A law was rushed through parliament, the
Protection of Wildlife (Indemnity) Act, which gave game guards immunity from
civil and criminal prosecution for killings or woundings carried out in the
course of their duties.
Ten parliamentarians opposed the bill on the grounds
that it would "legalize murder."
As one of them, Mica Bhebe, put it,
"We are
giving people a blank check to kill people."
Official figures show that between July 1984 and September 1991, some 145
"poachers" were killed.
Of the 84 killed in the Zambezi Valley, most were
shot from a helicopter paid for by WWF and manned by WWF contract employees.
According to the Game Department's figures, of the 228 people killed or
taken prisoner, only 107 guns were recovered.
Given that another 202
individuals were recorded as having fled, some badly injured, some of
whom
would have lost or been unable to carry away their weapons, this means
that Tatham et al. failed to recover weapons from three-quarters of
those killed,
taken prisoner, or driven away. This raises the question of whether
those
targeted by the guards were in fact armed poachers at all.
According to
sources interviewed by the British film crew which made Ten Pence in the
Panda, several of the dead were in fact associated with the military wing of
the African National Congress.
And what happened to the rhino?
From the moment that the project was agreed to in February 1987, the WWF's
aim had been "to translocate rhinos captured in the valley to safer areas
elsewhere."
Drugged and immobilized, the rhinos were shipped off to
privately owned game farms in Zimbabwe, elsewhere in Africa, and to the
United States and Australia. In other words, the WWF paid to slaughter human
beings, in order to destroy the last living rhino herd in the world. The
reason for the "relocation" became quickly clear - aside from the immense
profits it generated for private, WWF-associated interests.
It emerged that
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), then dictating a "restructuring" of
Zimbabwe's economy, had mandated that a beef ranching business be set up in
the Zambezi Valley, in the rhino range, to provide beef to the European
Commission.
After the rhino had been "relocated," squads of animal
exterminators moved into the valley and killed scores of elephants and 5,000
buffalo to make way for the IMF-mandated beef ranch, which soon collapsed
into bankruptcy, leaving large debts and no rhinos.
Operation Lock
In late 1989 and early 1990, a scandal broke into the British and European
press which threatened to cause immense damage to the green oligarchs at WWF.
One of WWF's most secretive operations, code-named "Operation Lock,"
ostensibly an aggressive attempt to save the endangered rhino by sending an
elite squad of British Special Air Services (SAS) operatives into southern
Africa to penetrate, expose, and neutralize the illegal wildlife smuggling
cartels, had gone badly awry.
A million pounds sterling had disappeared, and it appeared that the SAS team
had started dealing in the very products, in particular rhino horn and
ivory, which it had been sent to stop. There were also, as in Operation
Stronghold, whispers of rising death tolls of "poachers."
WWF hastily prepared its own version of the matter. In 1986, they said,
Prince Bernhard and the new head of the WWF's Africa Program, John Hanks,
became alarmed while on a tour of Africa, at the rapidly dwindling rhino
numbers. The two cooked up the notion of sending a team of elite trained
sabotage experts and killers, SAS men, to Africa to deal with the problem by
unorthodox means.
Prince Bernhard, unbeknownst to WWF, put the £500,000 or
more he received from the sale of a valuable painting into the project, and
off it went. It was completely secret, so the story goes, from the WWF
headquarters in Gland, Switzerland, even though Bernhard was at the time
president of the Netherlands WWF and two other national WWF organizations.
The SAS team, which had been organized into a company named KAS Enterprises
Ltd. for the purpose, was led by Col. David Stirling, the legendary founder
of Britain's SAS regiments during World War II, and the veteran of dozens,
if not hundreds of special operations all over the Mideast and Africa in the
postwar period.
Stirling chose the intials to echo those of his earlier
Capricorn Africa Society (CAS), whose purpose had been to "preserve
apartheid in a sugar coating," in the words of Kenya governor Sir Philip
Kerr.
Capricorn's treasurer had been Mervyn Cowie, the architect of the
Kenyan Park system and controller of the Mau Mau, while its chief
propagandist was Elspeth Huxley, the wife of Julian Huxley' s cousin Gervas.
Curiously, the most detailed revelations about Operation Lock, which
obviously relied on internal WWF documents, came from the newsletter Africa
Confidential, widely regarded in Africa and elsewhere as an MI-5 asset, and
which had been founded in Stirling's flat in London.
The issue, as defined by Africa Confidential and its editor, who left the
newsletter at this time and authored a series of exposes on Operation Lock
in the British and Dutch press, became:
-
Who in the WWF bureaucracy knew
about this crazy, if deadly, scheme and when?
-
Was this another "offline"
operation by Bernhard, as the "Black Ebur Report" supposedly had been, or
was this official WWF policy?
It soon emerged, contrary to the lies that the WWF leadership and its
Director General de Haes spread, that the entire operation from the
beginning was official policy, and that a WWF project description - later
called a "mistake" - explicitly called for the purchase of arms.
Files
existed in the Gland international office titled "Anti-Poaching Units,"
which operations had indeed been funded by WWF.
Though scandalous, the various exposes missed the point of Operation Lock.
First, as anyone familiar with Africa's parks is well aware, the main
"poachers" are usually the guards themselves, often financed and armed by
the WWF. Second, the man whom Bernhard (again, according to the received
version of events) approached to carry out this delicate "save the rhino"
work, was a man who had not only founded the SAS and who had extensive
covert operations experience in Africa, but who had been the "Gold Stick" at
the coronation of Elizabeth II as queen in 1952.
Though an Anglo-Catholic
educated at the Benedictine monastery at Ampleforth contemporaneously with
Lord Buxton, Philip's Extra Equerry, and with others of the WWF crowd,
Stirling was chosen for the extraordinary honor, coveted among all British
peerage,
Special Offprint 37 to be the personal defender of the body of the queen,
the head of the Protestant Church of England. And, as do all the men of SAS
as well as MI-5, MI-6, and the Life Guards, he had sworn his loyalty not to
the British state, but to the person of the monarch.
Throughout the postwar period, Stirling had carried out dozens of the most
sensitive political-military operations for the British Crown. A Scottish
aristocrat, he was close personally to the Queen Mother, Elizabeth
Bowes-Lyon, herself of the very cream of the Scottish aristocracy. The aging
Stirling chose as the operational officer for his KAS company, Lt. Col. Ian
Crooke. Crooke was also a legend.
Decorated with the rarefied Distinguished
Service Order for his service during the Falklands campaign, he was the
hooded "man on the balcony" who commanded the SAS team which stormed the
Iranian Embassy in London in May 1980, and whose picture was flashed round
the world. His brother Alastair was a British consular official in
Islamabad, Pakistan, reportedly in charge of arming the Afghan mujahideen.
Crooke's number two man in Operation Lock,
Nish Bruce, was reportedly the
most highly decorated British soldier in the Falklands fighting.
(Curiously, WWF founder Lord Buxton's daughter was in the Falkland
Islands "birdwatching"
just as the fighting broke out.) Others on the team had extensive
service in
Northern Ireland, and were specialists in hunting down IRA men.
Thus the unit pulled together to "stop poaching" comprised some of the very
elite of the British special forces.
Crooke was the head at the time of the 23rd SAS Regiment, the part-time SAS
unit which is used, as are dozens of "private" security firms in London such
as Stirling's, for operations sanctioned by Her Majesty's Government, but
ones which "HMG" prefers to deny.
That Operation Lock was official
government policy is obvious:
The chain of command in the WWF led to Prince
Philip, the royal consort, and Stirling even admitted to the press that he
was in close contact with the British Ministries of Defense and Foreign
Affairs.
One SAS member familiar with Operation Lock reported that there
were regular toasts to the Queen Mother in SAS's favorite pub, while
another, himself a Lock participant, stated in writing that among Lock's
consortium of financial backers was the Queen Mother.
Another subscriber to
Lock was Laurens van der Post, the tutor to Prince Charles and at the time
Mrs. Thatcher's chief adviser on Africa policy.
What was KAS really?
Stirling was a curious choice to save
Africa's wildlife.
He was very close to, among other well-known traffickers
in wildlife, the Unita organization of Jonas Savimbi, who in 1988 admitted
that his men had killed some 100,000 elephants in order to finance their war
against the MPLA government in Luanda.
Furthermore, internal KAS documents
showed that Stirling's company planned to make a profit out of trading in
the very ivory, rhino horn, etc. which they had ostensibly been sent to
Africa to stop.
Under Crook's command, 25 SAS veterans set up a fortified headquarters
in Pretoria with sophisticated computer equipment and imported (illegally,
due to the embargo then on against South Africa) large amounts of highly
sophisticated weaponry. But, if they weren't saving the rhinos, what were
they doing?
Zimbabwean Minister for National Security Sydney Sekerayami had an idea.
According to the Dutch paper de Volkrants of Aug. 24, 1991, he,
"plainly
stated in public that he suspected KAS of being a cover for the
destabilization of southern Africa."
Numerous other governments, including
wildlife officials in Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia were suspicious of the
Lock men, and refused to work with them.
Rowan Martin, director of research
in Zimbabwe's wildlife department, declined to cooperate with Crooke, who
flew from Johannesburg to see him because Crooke was "vague about his
sponsors and the objectives of his mission."
It also seemed odd to Martin
that,
"they seemed more interested in military technology than wildlife...
They hinted at some pretty irregular methods."
South African Military Intelligence, evaluating the "antipoachers" as
obviously an elite British intelligence unit, sent their own man in to
infiltrate the Lock crew.
Crooke managed to work out liaisons with Namibia
and Mozambique, and with elements of the South African special forces and
intelligence community. Then in a war against the African National Congress
(ANC), South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), and the
majority-ruled front-line states, some South Africans viewed the
paramilitary training capabilities of the British as an asset.
From an operational headquarters in Bophuthatswana's Pilanesberg Park, and
in numerous other parks such as Etosha in Namibia and in the game parks in
the KaNgwana homeland on the South Africa-Mozambique border, the KAS crew
turned out "anti-poaching units."
One such unit which Crooke' s men trained, and the political circumstances
in which it operated, is of particular interest.
The 'third force'
From before Nelson Mandela's release
in 1990 until the present, well over 10,000 black South Africans have been
killed through black-on-black violence.
Observers have attributed much of
this murder and mayhem to the agent provocateur actions of a mysterious
"third force," which is neither the ANC, nor its Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom
Party rival. The third force, by attacking each of the rival groups in turn
- which then blame each other - keeps the deadly violence going. Such
activity must be gridded against the work of Crooke's unit in Namibia.
After being taken from the Germans following World War I, South West Africa
became a protectorate of South Africa.
In the 1980s, as the SWAPO guerilla
force of Sam Nujoma waged war against the South African-backed,
white-dominated government of the country, South African special forces
trained the notorious "Koevoet," Afrikaans for "crowbar," black
special warfare units, whose savagery was notorious. Crooke and his
crew
retrained the Koevoet men as "antipoaching units."
Simultaneously, they set
up liaison with the then-minuscule "stock theft unit" of the South African
Police.
In late June 1992, shortly after the notorious Boipatong massacre of June
18, in which 39 were killed and many more injured by mysterious "third
force" assassins, a joint task force of ANC intelligence, the Goldstone
Commission (an inquiry into violence), and a special police unit raided the
premises of the British-owned Gold Fields firm.
There, to their surprise,
they discovered a "stock theft unit" of 40 men, mainly re-trained Koevoet
veterans from Namibia.
According to the South African Weekly Mail of June
26-July 2, 1992,
"The African National Congress says it has witnesses who
will testify before the [Goldstone] commission on the unit's role in the Boipatong massacre."
Gold Fields was chaired by Robin Plumbridge, an Oxford graduate and a
Trustee of the South African Nature Foundation, the WWF's South African
affiliate.
As the Weekly Mail put it,
"The presence of a 'third force' on a
British-owned mine will have major international repercussions."
Though £1 million had been spent,
"As one of [Operation Lock's] employees
himself put it, there is no proof that the [project] ever even saved one
single rhinoceros," according to the Dutch newspaper de Volkrants.
Population controller John Hanks
The story that Prince Bernhard and
John Hanks ran Operation Lock as a rogue operation out of their back pockets
is nonsense, but it is clear that Hanks did play a key role in the affair.
His career and specialties help shed further light on the operation. Hanks
had gotten his start in the conservation business cutting up elephants in an
abattoir in Zambia, where elephants were butchered to feed the workers in
southern Africa's mines. He spent some time in Rhodesia where, according to
his own account, he worked for military intelligence.
In the mid-1970s, he
became the chief parks officer of the National Parks Board at Pietmaritzburg
in Natal.
But his overwhelming preoccupation from 1976 on, was with human population
control. In numerous speeches, he railed about how "Durban will [soon] be
worse than Bombay."
The problem, he said, was that,
"African women are among
the world's most prolific breeders, with the average woman bearing 5.2
children."
With all these mouths to feed,
"demands are being placed on our
natural resources which are not sustainable and can only lead to chronic
environmental degradation."
In 1977, he called for a "national population
control policy," and the liberal use of contraception, abortion, and
sterilization.
In 1979, Hanks became the first director of the Institute of Natural
Resources in KwaZulu, founded with a grant from the K.E. Taeubner Management
Trust, named for a member of
the 1001 Club. He continued to specialize in
population matters, and became an executive member of the Family Planning
Association of South Africa. In 1986, he became the head of the Africa
Program of the WWF.
When Operation Lock was exposed in 1990 (at least certain aspects of it), it
caused a bit of a stink, and Hanks was forced to leave the WWF.
He issued a
statement on Jan. 4, 1990:
"My own involvement in the project ceased when
Prince Bernhard's funds had been exhausted in late 1989. I am aware that
similar operations are continuing, but I am no longer involved in any way."
He took up the post of executive director of the WWF's South African branch,
the South African Nature Foundation, which Prince Philip called "an elegant
solution" to the embarrassment of what to do with him.
However, the Dutch
paper de Volksrant reported on Aug. 24, 1991,
"He still works on operations
like Lock, together with some of the former British soldiers who also took
part in the original project."
Indeed, as an internal KAS situation report of Jan. 18May 31, 1989 marked
"Secret" stated,
"KAS should seize this opportunity to become the leading
expert on all forms of anti-poaching training throughout Africa."
The
document furthermore noted that "the experience gained so far in SWA/
Namibia has proved invaluable."
Who are the poachers?
The nominal purpose of Operation Lock and
Operation Stronghold was to "stop poachers." But as the case of the
120-square-mile Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania demonstrates once again, it is
usually the WWF which is paying the poachers.
In the late 1950s, WWF founder-to-be Dr. Bernard Grzimek of the Frankfurt
Zoo took an animal census in the Ngorongoro Crater, claiming to find that
wildlife was disappearing.
This Grzimek blamed on the Masai pastoralists,
who herded their cattle across the area, but who rarely killed anything
except the lions which attacked their flocks. As a result of the hysteria
Grzimek and his allies kicked up, in particular around the associated
Hollywood film "Serengeti Shall Not Die!" the Masai were banned from
entering vast areas of the national park around the crater, their
traditional territory.
In 1964, some 108 rhinos had been individually photographed and given an
identity, the most carefully documented population in Africa. A WWF program
was set up to "save" them.
Despite the WWF-financed game guard program, by
1981 there were only 20 left. Not one poacher had been caught by the three
anti-poaching teams in years.
In that year, an eyewitness wrote to the
offices of the African Wildlife Leadership Federation in Nairobi, shedding
some light on the disappearing rhino herd. The WWF-financed game guards, she
reported, had shot dead two large tame males and wounded a female, "all in
broad daylight."
She concluded,
"Isn't it fairly obvious what is going on in
the crater?"
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