On the front lines

On an extended visit to Kaziranga in 2008, I spent a few days with Dharanidhar “D.D.” Boro, who was then a range officer. There were two things he showed me in his office that I’ll never forget. One was a smelly, heavily secured vault that held dozens of confiscated rhino horns. The other was an album of moldering photos: evidence.

There were pictures of he and his men standing over piles of seized arms and ammunition. In chest-up mug shots, sullen prisoners held small blackboard slates carefully chalked with their name and the word “poacher.” There were photos identifying those who’d been killed.

Boro pointed out one particular image of two men who’d died in a massive shootout with 26 rangers and police officers. The men were former soldiers believed to be connected with an international smuggling operation. “This is why it’s so hard to fight them,” he’d said. They were outfitted with AK-47s and Russian-made night vision glasses. He and his men carried World War II-era .303 Enfield rifles — antique weapons that the guards still carry. Since then, some poachers have upped their game, using M-4 or M-16 assault rifles that can fire hundreds of rounds, says the International Rhino Foundation’s Rahul Dutta. Meanwhile, budget constraints mean that rangers sometimes lack basic gear, like walkie-talkies and flashlights.

It’s usually the “Level Ones” — the poachers — who are apprehended. “It’s very often a local who is arrested close to the poaching scene, possibly in the park or in a nearby village in possession of a horn,” says EIA’s Aron White. In India, some have been arrested a second or third time without ever having made it to court for the initial offense — or their cases are thrown out for lack of evidence. The percentage of successful prosecutions has been extremely low, and that often comes down to evidence, says Rahul Dutta. He’s been training rangers, park officials and police on how to collect evidence from a wildlife crime scene that will stand up in court. As a result, two poachers convicted in January were sentenced to seven years in prison and fined US $765.

White and his colleagues at EIA recently mapped both seizures and thefts of rhino horn, creating a snapshot of the situation over the past decade. The most significant finding, he says, is the vast role played by Chinese and Vietnamese nationals and organized criminal syndicates.

Ramesh Pandey, who worked at India’s Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, notes that the trans-border syndicates who mastermind this trade are organized and very dangerous “because the stakes are very high.”

Geography is a factor. Assam, India’s easternmost appendage, straddles ancient Golden Triangle trafficking routes that have long moved contraband including drugs, guns, and now, illegal wildlife, through the region. The major smuggling routes run north into Nepal and east through Manipur and Nagaland to Myanmar, says Pandey, headed for Vietnam and China.

Vietnam has become the largest hub, trafficking at such levels that the CITES Standing Committee issued a warning last fall stating that the body will not tolerate its failure to enforce the ban on international trade in rhino horn trade. Failure to do so could spark sanctions.

Guards under attack

It’s hazardous work protecting an endangered species that’s a walking gold mine. Kaziranga’s rangers are stationed in any of 178 anti-poaching camps on three-month rotations. They’re out on patrol day and night, mostly on foot, though some monitor the park in jeeps, by boat or on elephant back.

They must avoid possible attack by tigers, elephants, rhinos, cobras and a host of other dangerous animals, says Keshav Varma, former director at the World Bank and founding director of the Global Tiger Initiative. “The terrain that needs to be defended is absolutely vast and treacherous,” he says, and poachers with sophisticated weapons present a constant threat.

Criticism of the forest department’s methods has recently come from England, from the nonprofit indigenous rights group Survival International (SI) and the BBC, which covered the group’s claims about Kaziranga in a recent documentary called “Killing for Conservation.”

In an email campaign launched in early March, SI alleged that Kaziranga is “the most infamous example of” an “inhuman trend” of tribal people being “tortured and killed in the name of conservation.” It also charged that “tribal children have been shot … in the name of conservation,” that guards shoot intruders on sight, are given legal immunity and forest officials evict indigenous communities from their homes.

Survival International also urged dozens of travel agencies to stop trips to the park, according to Sophie Grig, one of the organization’s campaigners. On April 3, a month after posting, the group’s online petition to boycott Kaziranga had just 43 signatures.

A government-sanctioned “shoot on sight” policy is a myth that dates to the 1970s, according to Hemendra Panwar, the founder and former director of the Wildlife Institute of India, one of the country’s premiere science centers.

Singh, the park’s director, called the claims and the BBC film, “wrong reporting not based on fact. There is no such “shoot-to-kill policy,” he says.

Indeed, no such policy has ever been issued by the government, according to lawyer Ritwick Dutta, who has fought for environmental protection in Supreme Court cases. Guards are given initial immunity from prosecution until an investigation is completed: there is an official inquiry into the circumstances of every bullet fired by rangers, he explains.

More people were killed by rangers after the government granted immunity, Dutta notes, but there was also a rise in poaching at the time, from three rhinos killed in 2011 to 11 in 2012 — and 27 in both 2013 and 2014. More people coming in to hunt means more confrontations with forest guards, he says.

Conservation and human rights organizations across the globe have debated the merits of excluding local populations from protected areas. For rangers in Kaziranga who face heavily armed poaching gangs, the answer seems simple. Since Kaziranga is a national park, “no one can enter without prior permission, much less with firearms,” says Panwar. “It would be naive to expect ‘law enforcement squads’ to carry loudspeakers to unilaterally warn poachers that they have been spotted and should surrender, when…the response is bound to be a spray of fatal bullets.”

Both Survival International and the recent BBC film lead people to believe that seven-year-old Akash Orang was purposefully shot by the forest department. It was, however, an accidental shooting. In July 2016, park guard Manas Bora fired in the air, trying to chase a rhino out of a village on Kaziranga’s periphery, says Singh, and the boy was struck by a stray bullet. Bora was suspended and is in police custody. The forest department paid for the boy’s medical care and gave the boy’s family more that $3,000.

When local people are shot in Kaziranga, protests often erupt in their villages, though some, like Rahul Kutum in 2010 and Gaonburha Kealing, three years later, sparked larger protests. Guards were not charged in either case.

The BBC also ran footage of a police clash with villagers who were being evicted from their homes in the region last year. Their removal was ordered by the Gauhati High Court and was led by district authorities and police. Some of the people had lived there for years, but they were squatters who did not own that land, says Singh, although they were given stipends to move.