Chad's President Idriss Deby Itno has detached 400 regular army soldiers to defend the remnants of a once-thriving elephant population decimated by poachers, the country's top conservation official said.
"The soldiers are taking positions in and around Zakouma National Park as we speak," Abakar Mahamat Zougoulou, who is in The Hague to attend a meeting of the international body that regulates the trade of endangered species, told AFP on Monday.
"Twenty years ago we had 40,000 elephants," said Zougoulou, whose main mission at the 171-nation Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is to lobby and vote for a 20-year, worldwide ban on the trade in ivory.
"Today we have less than 6,000, and the decline is almost entirely due to poaching. The moratorium is our best hope to reconstitute our elephant patrimony," he said.
American conservationist and ecologist Michael Fay estimates that the number of elephants in a region bridging southern Sudan, southeastern Chad, and eastern Central African Republic has dwindled since the 1970s from several hundred thousand to less than 10,000.
Zakouma Park at the southern end of Chad is not big by wildlife refuge standards, covering just over 3,000 square kilometers (1,200 square miles). But it is still too much ground to secure for Zougoulou's 89 guards, who are being killed off along with the elephants they are trying to defend.
"I have lost seven guards over the last year," Zougoulou said in an interview. "They simply can't cope with poachers who are increasingly well armed and numerous."
Beginning two years ago, he explained, poachers began using heavy arms, including M14 assault rifles and AK-47s. During the most recent attack, they showed up in regular army uniforms.
"We think that they are connected with rebel forces" encamped along the border with Sudan, explained Zougoulou, who said that his forces are involved in two or three clashes every week.
Twenty African nations led by Kenya and Mali have called for a 20-year moratorium on trade in ivory, arguing that a total ban is the only way to guarantee the long-term survival of the species.
Limited trade simply encourages poaching and smuggling, they say, pointing to a sharp increase in illegal commerce since occasional sales of ivory resumed in 1997 after an eight-year ban.
But four other countries on the continent -- South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe -- are seeking to loosen the restrictions on the international sale of ivory, especially to Japan.
CITES delegates will vote on the measures next week.
Zougoulou said that the Chadian President decided to take action after a group of up to 50 poachers launched an attack in January that lasted two days, in order to steal a stockpile of more than two tonnes of ivory culled from killed animals.
Idriss Deby came to the region along with other top officials to preside over the burning of the ivory stock, to discourage further attacks.
An investigation by the government traced poached ivory through several middlemen all the way to Hong Kong. Asia is the principal market for both legal and legal ivory.
