A Quote by Ben Fogle
Ivory is quickly becoming the new blood diamond of Africa and one that fuels militia battles. Some of the most notorious armed groups on the continent, including the Lord's Resistance Army, are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy weapons.
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Illegal killings of elephants are being linked to organized crime and the funding of armed militia groups. Many consumers in Asia do not realize that by buying ivory, they are playing a role in the illegal wildlife trade and its serious consequences.
Armies and former soldiers are working in the field to help protect elephants. Some have suggested staining the ivory; cameras and trackers have even been embedded within the tusk; others have arranged for tusks to be removed pre-emptively by conservationists.
We have all seen these circus elephants complete with tusks, ivory in their head and thick skins, who move around the circus ring and grab the tail of the elephant ahead of them.
Seized ivory stocks around Africa are recycled back into illegal trade due to corruption. Ivory stocks should be burnt together with the hopes of traffickers for any "legal" way to allow them to slaughter our elephants.
It's estimated that across Africa 100 elephants are killed for their tusks every day. It takes nothing more than simple math to get to what that adds up to in a year, and it's a distressing figure.
There's enough sedative in these darts to bring down a werewolf, which is exactly what we're hunting. Why would we want to bring down an elephant if we're not hunting elephants?
I was pretty shocked to learn that as many as 30,000 elephants are being killed every year to fuel the ivory trade, despite an international ban since 1989, and that 60% of forest elephants have already been wiped out. At this rate, experts say populations will become extinct in the next decade. No one needs ivory.
What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty ... Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.
In my view, nobody is really effective in tackling those organized crime networks that are making connections from Africa to Asia to fund and facilitate the poaching of massive volumes of ivory, and then selling it on the Asian market. Very few people have tried globally to tackle that serious organized crime threat that is also linked to militia groups. That needs to change. You need to bring the full weight of government attention to dealing with that.
I am honoured to be asked to take on this role, especially as it comes at such an integral time for our relationship with South Africa and the African continent. There shall be many new challenges and opportunities ahead and I look forward to embracing them with great anticipation [on becoming the UK's high commissioner to South Africa]
Let us be clear: there are no Salafist armed groups in Syria. Those carrying arms are mostly members of the dissident army. The armed groups are defected soldiers. But they are not all organized. After they defect, they often disappear into different neighborhoods as they struggle for their safety. They need salaries, they need guarantees for protection, they need livelihoods. That is the way everyone will be brought together.
Lebanon, of course, is a country with great problems. Traditionally, they have religious-national groups or ethnic-national groups. They have the Druses. Even the two Moslem sects, the Sunnis and the Shiites, are apart. Then they have the armed groups. Everybody's got a private army.
You can fit two United States and maybe a third one into the entire continent of Africa, but on a map we make the entire continent of Africa look like the size of the United States, which is why a lot of people don't know that Africa is a continent. They think it's a country because it looks as big as we do.
Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa's souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind? How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go? How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?
Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.
Our own objective is to make Africa overcome its difficulties, to make Africa a continent of hope, to make Africa a continent of the future, to make Africa a pillar of the world in which we live - not seen as a problem but seen as an opportunity.
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