Like blood diamonds from Sierra Leone or plundered minerals from Congo, ivory, it seems, is the latest conflict resource in Africa, dragged out of remote battle zones, easily converted into cash and now fueling conflicts across the continent.<\/p>\n
Some of Africa\u2019s most notorious armed groups, including the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army, the Shabab and Darfur\u2019s janjaweed, are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy weapons and sustain their mayhem. Organized crime syndicates are linking up with them to move the ivory around the world, exploiting turbulent states, porous borders and corrupt officials from sub-Saharan Africa to China, law enforcement officials say.<\/p>\n
But it is not just outlaws cashing in. Members of some of the African armies that the American government trains and supports with millions of taxpayer dollars \u2014 like the Ugandan military, the Congolese Army and newly independent South Sudan\u2019s military \u2014 have been implicated in poaching elephants and dealing in ivory.<\/p>\n
Congolese soldiers are often arrested for it. South Sudanese forces frequently battle wildlife rangers. Interpol, the international police network, is now helping to investigate the mass elephant killings in the Garamba park, trying to match DNA samples from the animals\u2019 skulls to a large shipment of tusks, marked \u201chousehold goods,\u201d recently seized at a Ugandan airport.<\/p>\n
The vast majority of the illegal ivory \u2014 experts say as much as 70 percent \u2014 is flowing to China, and though the Chinese have coveted ivory for centuries, never before have so many of them been able to afford it. China\u2019s economic boom has created a vast middle class, pushing the price of ivory to a stratospheric $1,000 per pound on the streets of Beijing.<\/p>\n
High-ranking officers in the People\u2019s Liberation Army have a fondness for ivory trinkets as gifts. Chinese online forums offer a thriving, and essentially unregulated, market for ivory chopsticks, bookmarks, rings, cups and combs, along with helpful tips on how to smuggle them (wrap the ivory in tinfoil, says one Web site, to throw off X-ray machines).<\/p>\n