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| Customs officials show smuggled elephant tusks at airport customs in Bangkok on July 17, 2012. Thai Customs seized a shipment from Kenya of 158 pieces African elephant tusks, weighing 456.12 kilograms and with an estimated value of 22.80 million Thai baht ($722,000). (EPA Photo/ Narong Sangnak) |
Bangkok. Squealing
tiger cubs stuffed into carry-on bags. Luggage packed with hundreds of
squirming tortoises, elephant tusks, even water dragons and American
paddlefish. Officials at Thailand’s gateway airport proudly tick off the
illegally trafficked wildlife they have seized over the past two years.
But Thai
and foreign law enforcement officers tell another story: Officials working
hand-in-hand with traffickers ensure that other shipments through Suvarnabhumi
International Airport are whisked off before they even reach customs
inspection.
It’s a
murky mix. A 10-fold increase in wildlife law enforcement actions, including
seizures, has been reported in the past six years in Southeast Asia. Yet, the
trade’s Mr. Bigs, masterful in taking advantage of pervasive corruption, appear
immune to arrest and continue to orchestrate the decimation of wildlife in
Thailand, the region and beyond.
And
Southeast Asia’s honest cops don’t have it easy.
“It is very
difficult for me. I have to sit among people who are both good and some who are
corrupt,” says Chanvut Vajrabukka, a retired police general who now advises
Asean-Wen, the regional wildlife enforcement network. “If I say, ‘You have to
go out and arrest that target,’ some in the room may well warn them.”
Several
kingpins, says wildlife activist Steven Galster, have recently been confronted
by authorities, “but in the end, good uniforms are running into, and often
stopped by bad uniforms. It’s like a bad Hollywood cop movie.
“Most
high-level traffickers remain untouched and continue to replace arrested
underlings with new ones,” says Galster, who works for the Freeland Foundation,
an anti-trafficking group.
Galster,
who earlier worked undercover in Asia and elsewhere, heaps praise on the
region’s dedicated, honest officers because they persevere knowing they could
be sidelined for their efforts.
Recently,
Lt. Col. Adtaphon Sudsai, a highly regarded and outspoken officer, was
instructed to lay off what had seemed an open-and-shut case he cracked four
years ago when he penetrated a gang along the Mekong River smuggling pangolin.
This led
him to Daoreung Chaimas, alleged by conservation groups to be one of Southeast
Asia’s biggest tiger dealers. Despite being arrested twice, having her own
assistants testify against her and DNA testing that showed two cubs were not
offsprings from zoo-bred parents as she claimed, Daoreung remains free and the
case may never go to the prosecutor’s office.
“Her
husband has been exercising his influence,” says Adtaphon, referring to her
spouse, who is a police officer. “It seems that no policeman wants to get
involved with this case.” The day the officer went to arrest her the second
time, his transfer to another post was announced.
“Maybe it
was a coincidence,” the colonel says.
In another
not uncommon case, a former Thai police officer who tried to crack down on
traders at Bangkok’s vast Chatuchak Market got a visit from a senior police
general who told him to “chill it or get removed.”
“I admit
that in many cases, I cannot move against the big guys,” Chanvut, the retired
general, notes. “The syndicates like all organized crime are built like a
pyramid. We can capture the small guys but at the top they have money, the best
lawyers, protection. What are we going to do?”
Chanvut’s
problems are shared by others in Southeast Asia, the prime funnel for wildlife
destined for the world’s No. 1 consumer — China — where many animal parts are
consumed in the belief they have medicinal or aphrodisiacal properties.
Most
recently, a torrent of rhino horn and elephant tusks has poured through it from
Africa, which suffers the greatest slaughter of these two endangered animals in
decades.
Vietnam was
singled out last month by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) as the top
destination country for the highly prized rhino horn.
Tens of
thousands of birds, mostly parrots and cockatoos plucked from the wild, are
being imported from the Solomon Islands into Singapore, often touted as one of
Asia’s least corrupt nations, in violation of Cites, the international
convention on wildlife trade.
According to Traffic, the international body
monitoring wildlife trade, the imported birds are listed as captive-bred, even
though it is widely known that the Pacific Ocean islands have virtually no
breeding facilities.
Communist
Laos continues to harbor Vixay Keosavang, identified as one of the region’s
half dozen Mr. Bigs, who has been linked by the South African press to a rhino
smuggling ring. The 54-year-old former soldier and provincial official is
reported to have close ties to senior government officials in Laos and Vietnam.
Thai and
foreign enforcement agents, who insist on anonymity since most work undercover,
say they have accumulated unprecedented details of the gangs, which are
increasingly linked to drug and human trafficking syndicates.
They say a
key Thai smuggler, who runs a shipping company, has a gamut of law enforcement
officers in his pocket, allowing him to traffic rhino horns, ivory and tiger
parts to China. He frequently entertains his facilitators at a restaurant in
his office building.
According
to the agents, Chinese buyers, informed of incoming shipments, fly to Bangkok,
staying at hotels pinpointed by the agents around the Chatuchak Market, where
endangered species are openly sold. There they seal deals with known middlemen
and freight operators.
The sources
say that when they report such investigations seizures are either made for
“public relations,” sink into a “black hole” — or the information is leaked to
the wrongdoers.
Such a
tip-off from someone at Bangkok airport customs allowed a trafficker to stop
shipment of a live giraffe with powdered rhino horn believed to be implanted in
its vagina.
“The
100,000 passengers moving through this airport from around the world everyday
are oblivious to the fact that they are standing in one of the world’s hottest
wildlife trafficking zones,” says Galster.
Officials
interviewed at the airport, one of Asia’s busiest, acknowledge corruption
exists, but downplay its extent and say measures are being taken to root it
out.
Chanvut
says corruption is not the sole culprit, pointing out the multiple agencies
that often don’t cooperate or share information. Each with a role at Bangkok’s
airport, are the police, national parks department, customs, immigration, the
military and Cites, which regulates international trade in endangered species.
With poor
communication between the police and immigration, for example, a trader whose
passport has been seized at the airport can obtain a forged one and slip across
a land border a few days later.
Those
arrested frequently abscond by paying bribes or are fined and the case closed
without further investigation. “Controlled delivery,” effectively penetrating
networks by allowing illicit cargo to pass through to its destination, is rare.
Thailand’s
decades-old wildlife law also awaits revision and the closing of loopholes,
such as the lack of protection for African elephants, and far stiffer
penalties.
“The bottom
line is that if wildlife traffickers are not treated as serious criminals in
Southeast Asia we are just going to lose more wildlife,” says Chris Shepherd,
Traffic’s Southeast Asia deputy director. “How often is anyone arrested? They
just run off, they must be the fastest people on earth.”
Chalida
Phungravee, who heads the cargo customs bureau at Suvarnabhumi, says just the
sheer scale makes her job difficult. The airport each year handles 45 million
passengers and 3 million tons of cargo, only some 3 percent of which is X-rayed
on arrival. The main customs warehouse is the size of 27 football fields.
But
seizures are made, she said, including boxes of tusks — the remnants of some 50
felled elephants — aboard a recent Kenya Airlines flight declared as
handicrafts and addressed to a nonexistent company.
“We have
cut down a lot on corruption. It still exists but remains minimal,” she said,
citing recent computerization which has created a space, dubbed “the Green
Line,” between customs officials, cargo and traffickers.
Galster
says unlike the past, traffickers are no longer guaranteed safe passage,
describing a daily battle at Suvarnabhumi with “undercover officers monitoring
corrupt ones and smugglers trying to outwit them all.”
Such
increased enforcement efforts in the region have slowed decimation of
endangered species, he says, “but there is still a crash going on. If
corruption is not tackled soon, you can say goodbye to Asia’s tigers, elephants
and a whole host of other animals.”
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