Armed Squads Aim for Poachers, Loggers in Cambodia

Wildlife Wars

Clearing out the forest is dangerous work. Loggers and poachers are often ex-Khmer Rouge guerrillas. Chey receives death threats at least once a month. Last summer, seven park rangers took shrapnel when a grenade was thrown from the bushes after raiding a logging camp. All seven were hospitalized.

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"A lot of weapons are floating around Cambodia," observes Knights. "We are all generally anti-gun individuals at WildAid, so it's ironic we've ended up in weapons training, but there's no choice. The thing is, rangers are trained to avoid and diffuse conflict, not create it."

Beefing up protection in wilderness areas clamps down on the supply of illegal products, but that's only part of the equation. WildAid also aims to shrink demand.

They've drummed up a series of ads denouncing consumption of wildlife products, starring Asian celebrities like Jackie Chan and director Ang Lee. Their ads blanket China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, and Thailand, among others; reaching an audience of over 500 million a week.

Another prong of WildAid's Cambodia campaign is to knock out the middlemen who link the jungle to the store. A special police squad called the Wilderness Protection Mobil Unit, or MU, uses undercover informants to crack down on traders who are the conveyor belts of the illegal wildlife trade.

The MU's senior officers travel in a white pickup truck, others follow on motorcycle. They weave through the crammed streets of Phnom Penh on daily patrols, past vendors, pedestrians, honking cars, and rickshaws.

Pet Store Raids

Stashed in the dark back room of a downtown pet store, the MU discovers cages holding two slow lorus, primitive primates hunted for traditional medicine, and two crested serpent eagles, prized as glamorous pets. The animals were bound for the black market. One of the eagles is too dehydrated to lift his head off the bottom of the cage. His yellow eyes are glassy and dull, his beak hangs open.

After confiscating the animals, the MU heads for the Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center outside Phnom Penh. On the way, they spot an emaciated baby gibbon hanging in a birdcage at a nearby gas station. Like the lorus, gibbons are an endangered species.

"We've rescued over 7,000 animals in just the first nine months of operation," says the MU's chief, Tauch Ratana. His unit has also turned up over a hundred different species including elephants, macaques, sunbears, leopard cats, pythons, and pangolins. He compares what's happening to a faucet turned wide open at blast speed, disastrously draining his country of its wildlife.

The pressure is growing on Cambodia to get its house in order. The country's big donors—like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Asian Development Bank—are threatening to withhold some of Cambodia's annual $600 million in aid unless it makes more progress protecting its forests and wildlife.

Guardians of the Forest

The UN appointed Global Witness in 1999 to act as an independent monitor of forest crimes in Cambodia, a role they fulfilled until April 2003. Jon Buckrell is the head of their forestry department.

"Those donors aren't making a pro-conservation statement, it's just sound business practice," explains Buckrell. "They're investing a lot of money to spur development in Cambodia and they want to know the government is going to use their natural resources sustainably to fuel that development over the long run. We all think the wildlife there is important in its own right, but that's not the motive for the donors."

Jon also points out that local people are the ones hardest hit by the rampant, illegal destruction of their forests. "Rural Cambodians depend on the forest for subsistence living, so they are completely undermined by uncontrolled logging. And since very little of the eventual revenue actually goes into government treasury, they lose twice."

For Cambodians to keep their international funding, not to mention their natural heritage and a shot at a better future, they need to become effective guardians of their forests.

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