ALAMY, Recent sightings include tigers The independent
Andrew Buncombe reports on the battle to resurrect the wildlife of the killing fields
Monday, 2 June 2008
The dividends of peace are paid in different ways. For the people of Cambodia, scarred by years of fighting and the genocidal reign of the Khmer Rouge, the slow and stuttering transition towards security has provided economic benefits as well as an opportunity to see some of the regime's last remaining leaders brought before a court.
Yet there has been another, more unlikely bonus that has emerged in Cambodia in the past handful of years. In the far east of the country, a remarkable wildlife success story has quietly been taking place, a direct result of the conclusion of the long years of violence that traumatised this particular corner of south-east Asia.
In an area that was once a Khmer Rouge stronghold and organised poaching of big game was carried out to cash in on high prices for pelts in neighbouring countries, environmentalists have been seeing a steady return of some of the region's rarest wildlife. Elephants, tigers, leopards, wild ibis and ox have been spotted in numbers not seen for decades and experts are optimistic those numbers will only grow.
What's more, some of the very people who were once involved in the poaching and who threatened the existence of the wildlife are now intimately involved in the efforts to preserve it.
Men who once carried AK-47 assault rifles and wore the stained battle fatigues of the Khmer Rouge are now employed as wardens, tasked with protecting the animals.
"Obviously it's very slow and it will need many, many more years but what we have seen so far has been fantastic," said Dr Barney Long, a British zoologist and head of the Asian species programme of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) US. "It is only this year that we're setting up a rigorous scientific monitoring process but we keep hearing reports of what is being seen on patrol. There's no doubt that the prey species and large carnivores are coming back. We don't have statistics and we don't have graphs at the moment but it's very obvious that they're coming back."
This is a rare success story in a region where the natural environment is in a constant struggle for survival, trying to ward off encroaching development and the plundering of resources that is taking place in the Mondulkiri province of eastern Cambodia, close to the country's border with Vietnam.
The area, bisected by the Srepok river, was once abundant in wildlife. Indeed, in 1951 when an American zoologist, Charles Wharton, surveyed the area in a search for the rare and almost mythical kouprey – a species of wild cattle – he found it close to a naturalist's paradise.
Photographs he took show an area rich in wild cattle and deer and other animals. Such was the abundance of wildlife there Wharton himself described it as the "Serengeti of Asia".
But as remote as it may be, the region did not escape the impact of war that tore through the region. Firstly, the area was heavily bombed by the US as part of a secret and illegal operation carried out in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Nixon administration in an effort to disrupt North Vietnamese forces.
Then, after April 1975 when the Khmer Rouge stormed to power in Cambodia – their popular support cemented by the US actions – the area became even more cut off from the outside world.
Even when the Khmer Rouge regime was ousted from control of most of Cambodia, this difficult-to-access region became one of their strongholds. As late as 1999, the area was still controlled by remnants of the Khmer Rouge, even though the majority of its soldiers had surrendered several years earlier.
Dr Long said that, during the years of Khmer Rouge rule, and in the decade of chaotic years afterwards when Cambodia remained plagued by violence, the Mondulkiri area was controlled by poachers linked to the militant Maoist group.
The Khmer Rouge made money by controlling the poaching and being involved in the sale of hides, horns and animal parts to the region's thriving markets, particularly in China and Vietnam. By the time the last peace settlement was signed and the Mondulkiri area considered safe, most of the larger wildlife had either fled or been shot.
When the WWF decided to begin work in the area in 2002, it realised from the start that it would need to involve the local people and convince them of the need to protect the wildlife they lived alongside. Part of that process involved hiring and training former Khmer Rouge fighters to protect the wildlife from which some of them had once made their livelihoods.
"All the people who were living in the area were former Khmer Rouge. If you wanted to hire anyone who knew the forest, you had to hire the Khmer Rouge," said Dr Long. "This was an area where you were either Khmer Rouge or else you did not survive very long. Also this was a country where virtually no one had been to secondary school never mind university so there was a lot of intensive training that had to be done."
Among those poachers turned gamekeepers is Lean Kha. A teenager when the Khmer Rouge came to his village and forced him and the other young men to join its army, he fought in the forests of Mondulkiri against Vietnamese troops who pushed into Cambodia in response to Pol Pot's decision to invade the west of their country. When he fled from the ranks of the Maoist army, it was in these same forests that he survived, hunting tigers, elephants and other threatened species. He reckons he must have killed more than 1,000 animals, including 10 tigers. These days the 45-year-old, who is senior warden at the Srepok Wilderness Area, talks little about those dark days. But he does recognise the error of what he did. "At the time, I was ignorant and did not think there was a problem when I shot those tigers," he recently told National Geographic.
Yet he also says that the threat from poaching is linked to the problem of poverty, which remains widespread in Cambodia. "Some of these people are poaching from the forest to make a living," he added. "But there would not be so many poachers if you help them find other work, if you make them wildlife guides or give them jobs."
If the battle to save Cambodia's wildlife in the aftermath of Khmer Rouge-dominated years has been a slow and difficult process, so too has the struggle to bring the regime's leaders to trial and achieve a degree of reconciliation within the country. A total of five former senior figures within the regime have been detained by a UN-backed tribunal that is hearing charges of genocide.
But the process to deal with the five – Kaing Guek Eav, otherwise known as Comrade Duch and once the head of the S-21 interrogation centre; Nuon Chea, the righthand man of Pol Pot; former foreign minister Ieng Sary; his wife, former minister of social affairs Ieng Thirith; and former head of state Khieu Samphan – has met many difficulties and obstructions. Not least the Cambodian government has been accused of obfuscation because it does not with to draw attention to the former Khmer Rouge members who still serve within the administration.
Meanwhile, the UN tribunal has repeatedly complained that it does not have sufficient funds to proceed with the trials, which are not expected to begin before the latter part of this year at the earliest.
Yet, just as the process continues to move forward, there appears little doubt that the preservation and protection project in Mondulkiri is also making genuine headway.
Last year, the wardens and naturalists were even rewarded with evidence in the form of a photograph of a leopard, taken by the animal herself. In May 2007, a leopard and her young triggered camera traps which captured several images of the felines. "They are very secretive creatures and incredibly difficult to see, even with the best guides," said Nick Cox, a WWF officer based in the region. "But in the Srepok Wilderness Area, our rangers have had recent encounters with leopards that would make big cat biologists green with envy."
Dr Long said he, too, had been struck by how things had changed when he returned to Mondulkiri for the first time since 2000. "I was there in 2000 just after it had become stable. You could tell it was a pretty amazing place but there were not large amounts of wildlife there at the time," he said. "I went back earlier this year and the difference was pretty huge. I was very pleasantly surprised. There was just so much more wildlife.
A brutal four years of power
The Khmer Rouge, an extreme communist movement headed by Pol Pot, is believed to have killed 1.7 million Cambodians during its four-year rule. Given that Cambodia had a population of seven million when the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, the genocide was proportionally one of the world's worst.
*The bodies of those who died were spread in what are now known as the Killing Fields, vast mass graves that have become tourist sites. Thousands of victims' skulls have been dug up and put on display.
*Those executed in the Killing Fields were often murdered with axes, knifes and even bamboo sticks because bullets were so scarce. Many of the Khmer Rouge's other victims died through either starvation or disease.
*The term Killing Fields was coined by Dith Pran, a Cambodian photographer who survived the genocide. Dith, who died of pancreatic cancer earlier this year, spent four years in Cambodian labour camps where he survived by pretending to be a lowly peasant. His story became famous after it formed part of the 1984 film, The Killing Fields.
Andrew Buncombe reports on the battle to resurrect the wildlife of the killing fields
Monday, 2 June 2008
The dividends of peace are paid in different ways. For the people of Cambodia, scarred by years of fighting and the genocidal reign of the Khmer Rouge, the slow and stuttering transition towards security has provided economic benefits as well as an opportunity to see some of the regime's last remaining leaders brought before a court.
Yet there has been another, more unlikely bonus that has emerged in Cambodia in the past handful of years. In the far east of the country, a remarkable wildlife success story has quietly been taking place, a direct result of the conclusion of the long years of violence that traumatised this particular corner of south-east Asia.
In an area that was once a Khmer Rouge stronghold and organised poaching of big game was carried out to cash in on high prices for pelts in neighbouring countries, environmentalists have been seeing a steady return of some of the region's rarest wildlife. Elephants, tigers, leopards, wild ibis and ox have been spotted in numbers not seen for decades and experts are optimistic those numbers will only grow.
What's more, some of the very people who were once involved in the poaching and who threatened the existence of the wildlife are now intimately involved in the efforts to preserve it.
Men who once carried AK-47 assault rifles and wore the stained battle fatigues of the Khmer Rouge are now employed as wardens, tasked with protecting the animals.
"Obviously it's very slow and it will need many, many more years but what we have seen so far has been fantastic," said Dr Barney Long, a British zoologist and head of the Asian species programme of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) US. "It is only this year that we're setting up a rigorous scientific monitoring process but we keep hearing reports of what is being seen on patrol. There's no doubt that the prey species and large carnivores are coming back. We don't have statistics and we don't have graphs at the moment but it's very obvious that they're coming back."
This is a rare success story in a region where the natural environment is in a constant struggle for survival, trying to ward off encroaching development and the plundering of resources that is taking place in the Mondulkiri province of eastern Cambodia, close to the country's border with Vietnam.
The area, bisected by the Srepok river, was once abundant in wildlife. Indeed, in 1951 when an American zoologist, Charles Wharton, surveyed the area in a search for the rare and almost mythical kouprey – a species of wild cattle – he found it close to a naturalist's paradise.
Photographs he took show an area rich in wild cattle and deer and other animals. Such was the abundance of wildlife there Wharton himself described it as the "Serengeti of Asia".
But as remote as it may be, the region did not escape the impact of war that tore through the region. Firstly, the area was heavily bombed by the US as part of a secret and illegal operation carried out in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Nixon administration in an effort to disrupt North Vietnamese forces.
Then, after April 1975 when the Khmer Rouge stormed to power in Cambodia – their popular support cemented by the US actions – the area became even more cut off from the outside world.
Even when the Khmer Rouge regime was ousted from control of most of Cambodia, this difficult-to-access region became one of their strongholds. As late as 1999, the area was still controlled by remnants of the Khmer Rouge, even though the majority of its soldiers had surrendered several years earlier.
Dr Long said that, during the years of Khmer Rouge rule, and in the decade of chaotic years afterwards when Cambodia remained plagued by violence, the Mondulkiri area was controlled by poachers linked to the militant Maoist group.
The Khmer Rouge made money by controlling the poaching and being involved in the sale of hides, horns and animal parts to the region's thriving markets, particularly in China and Vietnam. By the time the last peace settlement was signed and the Mondulkiri area considered safe, most of the larger wildlife had either fled or been shot.
When the WWF decided to begin work in the area in 2002, it realised from the start that it would need to involve the local people and convince them of the need to protect the wildlife they lived alongside. Part of that process involved hiring and training former Khmer Rouge fighters to protect the wildlife from which some of them had once made their livelihoods.
"All the people who were living in the area were former Khmer Rouge. If you wanted to hire anyone who knew the forest, you had to hire the Khmer Rouge," said Dr Long. "This was an area where you were either Khmer Rouge or else you did not survive very long. Also this was a country where virtually no one had been to secondary school never mind university so there was a lot of intensive training that had to be done."
Among those poachers turned gamekeepers is Lean Kha. A teenager when the Khmer Rouge came to his village and forced him and the other young men to join its army, he fought in the forests of Mondulkiri against Vietnamese troops who pushed into Cambodia in response to Pol Pot's decision to invade the west of their country. When he fled from the ranks of the Maoist army, it was in these same forests that he survived, hunting tigers, elephants and other threatened species. He reckons he must have killed more than 1,000 animals, including 10 tigers. These days the 45-year-old, who is senior warden at the Srepok Wilderness Area, talks little about those dark days. But he does recognise the error of what he did. "At the time, I was ignorant and did not think there was a problem when I shot those tigers," he recently told National Geographic.
Yet he also says that the threat from poaching is linked to the problem of poverty, which remains widespread in Cambodia. "Some of these people are poaching from the forest to make a living," he added. "But there would not be so many poachers if you help them find other work, if you make them wildlife guides or give them jobs."
If the battle to save Cambodia's wildlife in the aftermath of Khmer Rouge-dominated years has been a slow and difficult process, so too has the struggle to bring the regime's leaders to trial and achieve a degree of reconciliation within the country. A total of five former senior figures within the regime have been detained by a UN-backed tribunal that is hearing charges of genocide.
But the process to deal with the five – Kaing Guek Eav, otherwise known as Comrade Duch and once the head of the S-21 interrogation centre; Nuon Chea, the righthand man of Pol Pot; former foreign minister Ieng Sary; his wife, former minister of social affairs Ieng Thirith; and former head of state Khieu Samphan – has met many difficulties and obstructions. Not least the Cambodian government has been accused of obfuscation because it does not with to draw attention to the former Khmer Rouge members who still serve within the administration.
Meanwhile, the UN tribunal has repeatedly complained that it does not have sufficient funds to proceed with the trials, which are not expected to begin before the latter part of this year at the earliest.
Yet, just as the process continues to move forward, there appears little doubt that the preservation and protection project in Mondulkiri is also making genuine headway.
Last year, the wardens and naturalists were even rewarded with evidence in the form of a photograph of a leopard, taken by the animal herself. In May 2007, a leopard and her young triggered camera traps which captured several images of the felines. "They are very secretive creatures and incredibly difficult to see, even with the best guides," said Nick Cox, a WWF officer based in the region. "But in the Srepok Wilderness Area, our rangers have had recent encounters with leopards that would make big cat biologists green with envy."
Dr Long said he, too, had been struck by how things had changed when he returned to Mondulkiri for the first time since 2000. "I was there in 2000 just after it had become stable. You could tell it was a pretty amazing place but there were not large amounts of wildlife there at the time," he said. "I went back earlier this year and the difference was pretty huge. I was very pleasantly surprised. There was just so much more wildlife.
A brutal four years of power
The Khmer Rouge, an extreme communist movement headed by Pol Pot, is believed to have killed 1.7 million Cambodians during its four-year rule. Given that Cambodia had a population of seven million when the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, the genocide was proportionally one of the world's worst.
*The bodies of those who died were spread in what are now known as the Killing Fields, vast mass graves that have become tourist sites. Thousands of victims' skulls have been dug up and put on display.
*Those executed in the Killing Fields were often murdered with axes, knifes and even bamboo sticks because bullets were so scarce. Many of the Khmer Rouge's other victims died through either starvation or disease.
*The term Killing Fields was coined by Dith Pran, a Cambodian photographer who survived the genocide. Dith, who died of pancreatic cancer earlier this year, spent four years in Cambodian labour camps where he survived by pretending to be a lowly peasant. His story became famous after it formed part of the 1984 film, The Killing Fields.
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