We reported on this seizure and the surprising lack of concern by Tanzania that Vietnam was about to auction seized ivory that was smuggled from Tanzania. Now Tanzania seems to have woken up …lets hope we find out what is really going on here

Saga of the elephant tusks smuggled from Tanzania to Vietnam: Govt finally takes action

ThisDay

March 25 2009

TANZANIA has set the ball rolling for a formal investigation into the

recently reported episode whereby just over six tonnes of elephant tusks

said to have been smuggled out of the country, have now been seized by

Vietnamese customs officials and set up for auction in that country.

According to the Director of Wildlife at the Ministry of Tourism and

Natural Resources, Erasmus Tarimo, official feelers have been extended

to determine whether an international poaching network may have been

behind the alleged smuggling of the jumbo tusks.

The international police network (Interpol), Convention on International

Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and the anti-poaching Lusaka

Agreement Task Force (LATF) office in Nairobi, Kenya have all been

contacted and requested to help, Tarimo said.

This represents a U-turn from the government’s initial stated position

of ’complete unawareness’ about the whole situation, even as authorities

in Vietnam announced their own plans to put the tusks, valued at $29.41m

(approx.40bn/-), up for auction.

If the Vietnamese government should actually go ahead and implement such

a plan at this stage of the saga, Tanzania as a nation would surely

stand to lose billions of shillings.

Customs officials at Vietnam’s Hai Phong Port were earlier this month

reported to have discovered a total of 6,232 kilogrammes of elephant

tusks originating from Tanzania, hidden in hundreds of boxes of plastic

waste inside a container which had been transported from Tanzania

through Malaysia.

There were more than 200 pairs of tusks in the haul, the reports said.

Vietnamese officials are said to have received information about the

consignment when it was initially loaded aboard a ship in Dar es Salaam

in January this year, and had been waiting for the consignee to turn up

at the Hai Phong Port.

The consignee of the shipment was identified through the ship’s waybill

as a local (Vietnamese) company called Phuc Thien Ngan. Hai Phong police

have since been looking for the company’s director Vu Ngoc Tuan, but

reportedly to no avail.

Vietnamese officials described the shipment as ’’the biggest ivory haul

ever in Vietnam,’’ and the Hai Phong customs bureau gave a cash reward

equivalent to $572 to the inspectors who made the discovery.

Early investigations indicated that the container appeared to have been

loaded onto a ship in Dar es Salaam and transported to a port in

Malaysia, before arriving at Hai Phong aboard a Malaysian-flagged vessel.

Vietnamese authorities believe the tusks would have then been

transported to China, either by sea or road.

In a telephone interview with THISDAY yesterday, Tarimo said the

Tanzania chapter of Interpol had since contacted their colleagues in

Vietnam in the wake of the reports.

He said although the Vietnamese Interpol has yet to respond, some

information has started trickling in from CITES, whose representatives

in Vietnam are understood to have seen the container and reported its

markings to indicate that its original point of shipment was indeed the

port of Dar es Salaam.

Tarimo did not disclose the exact date of shipment from Dar es Salaam,

but said further details would be provided in the coming days.

LATF in Nairobi is described as a law enforcement institution which is

also secretariat of the Lusaka Agreement on Cooperative Enforcement

Operations Directed at Illegal Trade in Wild Fauna and Flora. The

parties to the agreement are Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Lesotho,

and the Republic of Congo, while Ethiopia, Eritrea, Swaziland and the

Republic of South Africa are also about to become signatories.

International agreements like the Lusaka Agreement and CITES aim at

protecting animal species from being poached illegally and traded

without following prescribed procedures.

Tarimo said any local officials found to have been involved in the

shipment of the jumbo tusks to Vietnam would bear the full brunt of the

nation’s laws, regardless of what happens to the foreign collaborators

’’We will not spare any official involved, whether they are from the

wildlife department right here in the ministry, the Tanzania Revenue

Authority (TRA), or any such institutions,’’ he asserted.

According to international wildlife laws, seized animal trophies have to

be destroyed wherever they are seized, in order to discourage the

smugglers involved.

According to Tarimo, the same international wildlife laws also say that

if such animal trophies are captured having been transported illegally,

they become of ’zero value’. Meaning that this consignment seized in

Vietnam valued at approximately 40bn/-, may now be of little or no value

at all.

’’I am deeply concerned about the elephants that were killed in order

for the tusks to be poached. However, as for the consignment in Vietnam,

it has lost its value from the moment it was seized,’’ he remarked.

Article at the following link:

http://www.thisday.co.tz/News/5505.html