Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (51 page)

Then, in April 2011, a truck passing into Guangxi Province from Vietnam was stopped and inspected by border guards. More than 700 elephant tusks and thirty-two ivory bracelets, weighing a total of two tons, were discovered. It was one of the largest ivory seizures ever in China. Inside the truck was a single rhino horn. TRAFFIC has previously identified Vietnam as a ‘backdoor’ transit route for ivory to China, but believes the same is not true for rhino horn.

Vietnam’s dominance of the trade has been fuelled by its rapid economic growth, increases in disposable income, deficient law enforcement and, perhaps most significantly, a resurgent belief in the horn’s curative properties, fuelled in part by a cancer myth.

The origins of the urban legend can be traced to about 2006. On the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, a story slowly began circulating. With every telling, the tale evolved. Soon it went viral. The story went something like this: A senior Vietnamese Communist Party official – possibly a government minister or even a retired prime minister, depending on who you cared to listen to – had been diagnosed with cancer. Some said it was cancer of the liver, others of the stomach and lungs. The official was at death’s door. Doctors said there was no hope. Then a traditional healer was consulted. Regular doses of rhino horn, drunk with water or alcohol, were prescribed. Within a matter of weeks or months, the patient had made a miraculous recovery.

Like many urban legends, the story had the power to convince. In a short time, possibly egged on by the syndicates that were trying to flog their product, it gained relatively widespread acceptance. The wildlife NGO, Education for Nature–Vietnam (ENV), which set out to investigate its veracity, later concluded that the story was ‘most likely the result of artful journalism’.

Nevertheless, it would have far-reaching consequences. Within two years, rhino poaching figures sky-rocketed. In 2007, thirteen rhino were poached in South Africa. The following year, the figure rose to eighty-three, and it continued to rise every year after that: 122 in 2009, 333 in 2010 and 448 in 2011.
Zimbabwe was also hit hard, losing a record 126 rhinos in 2008. Elsewhere in Africa, the West African black rhino was officially declared extinct in late 2011. And there were dire warnings that the northern white rhino, a subspecies once found in Uganda, Chad, Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo, was on the brink of extinction. Only seven survived – all of them in captivity.

The ramifications would be felt in Vietnam, too. During the decades of war and afterwards there had been no recorded sightings of Javan rhinos in Vietnam. The animal was believed to have disappeared from mainland Southeast Asia.

Back in 1988, a Xtieng tribesman had shot and killed a rhino cow in an area that would later become part of the Cat Tien National Park. The following year, world-renowned biologist, George Schaller, led an expedition deep into the forests. Footprints and dung samples confirmed that at least ten, and possibly fifteen, rhinos lived hidden in the dense undergrowth. Camera traps later recorded the only images of them ever seen.

‘That the animal outlived the [Vietnam] war and the destruction wrought on its habitat by bombardment and defoliation is proof of a remarkable ability to survive,’ zoologist Charles Santiapillai marvelled in the journal
Pachyderm
, four years after the rediscovery. But, he cautioned, ‘Given the high price rhino horn fetches in the international market, the Javan rhino is worth more dead than alive to those Chinese middlemen in Ho Chi Minh City who trade in rhino horn.’

He was wrong in one respect. Its value would be to Vietnamese middlemen. In October 2011, WWF-Vietnam country director Tran Thi Minh Hien called a press conference. ‘The last Javan rhino in Vietnam has gone,’ he announced. ‘It is painful that despite significant investment in the Vietnamese rhino population, conservation efforts failed to save this unique animal. Vietnam has lost part of its natural heritage.’ A subspecies that was once endemic to Southeast Asia was extinct. There are now officially no rhinos left in Vietnam.

The skeletal remains were discovered in Cat Tien National Park in southern Vietnam in April 2010. Six months earlier, WWF researchers and park officials had embarked on a survey to determine how many, if any, Javan rhinos still existed there. Twenty-two dung samples were collected for analysis.
The 6 500-hectare ‘rhino core area’ – where traces of two rhinos had been found during an earlier study – was surveyed three times. Tests on the dung samples revealed that they all belonged to a lone rhino cow. Of the second rhino – last detected in 2006 – there was no sign. Then, on 29 April 2010, local villagers stumbled upon the carcass. It had been shot in the leg, probably in late 2009 or early 2010, and the horn had been removed. Samples of skin and teeth were taken and sent to Queen’s University in Canada for analysis. The results confirmed what the researchers had dreaded.

It was a tragic end to a subspecies that had somehow survived the devastation of the Vietnam War – the bombings, napalm and Agent Orange – only to fall to a poacher’s rifle.

To gain some understanding of why an urban legend about a politician, rhino horn and a cure for cancer would gain the traction that it did, I visited one of Vietnam’s few specialist cancer hospitals. Vietnam has a population of about 89 million people – the thirteenth most populous country in the world. Every year, according to the World Health Organization, up to 200 000 people are diagnosed with the disease, and there are between 75 000 and 100 000 deaths. But only about five major government hospitals are properly equipped to treat cancer sufferers. And, between them, they only have enough beds to accommodate 20 per cent of the crushing demand.

The Vietnam National Cancer Institute – better known as ‘K Hospital’ – is situated in the heart of Hanoi in an attractive French-colonial building with green shutters and neo-classical arches. A pediment with Roman lettering recalls the hospital’s Gallic heritage:
Institvt Dv Radivm De L’Indochine
. Its doors first opened in the 1920s, and it shows. Dark wooden card-catalogues line the main hallways. Slides of tissue samples are packed in ancient wooden trays piled up next to modern microscopes. Some of the equipment is still marked ‘Made in the USSR’. There are rooms that don’t appear to have changed much since the fifties and sixties. The luckier chemotherapy patients receive their treatment reclining in split-leather armchairs that spill foam through the cracks.

Every day, a swarm of scooters and motorbikes surrounds the hospital. Hundreds of patients crowd a courtyard. The wait is interminable. The relief when a patient’s name or number is called out over a tiny loudspeaker mounted on a pole is almost palpable. Some days as many as 700 or 1 000 people will push their way into the hospital. Doctors can average up to 100 patients a day. Many of them are from small rural villages and towns, and have scraped together what little they have to seek treatment. Often it is too late.

The wards in Vietnam’s cancer hospitals are hopelessly overcrowded. It is not uncommon to find three, even four people sharing a bed and a few more sleeping underneath it. In 2011, the hospital’s children’s ward was reported to have twenty-five beds for sixty-six patients. Beds are only for those who can afford them. The poor have to sleep on the floor or curled up on mats in the corridors and stairwells. Some sleep on the streets.

Rampant corruption affects almost every aspect of Vietnam’s tangled bureaucracy. And it extends to the heart of the country’s state hospitals, where underpaid doctors, nurses and administrators readily supplement their income with bribes. Their willingness to accept these supposed ‘tokens of thanks’ is unsurprising. A doctor with ten years’ experience earns a salary equivalent to about $200 a month. A chief nurse with fifteen years’ experience will probably earn $175 a month.

Patients know that to get proper treatment, a ‘tip’ is often required. Usually it is cash, sometimes the offer of an ‘opportunity’ to a medical doctor or nurse. The latter can involve anything from discounts in a shop owned by the patient’s family to enrolling a doctor’s children in expensive schools or arranging the purchase of an apartment for them at a greatly reduced ‘corporate price’. The practice is commonly referred to as
tê nan phong bì
or ‘envelope evil’.

A detailed survey published in September 2011 by corruption watchdog Transparency International found that large ‘envelope payments’ frequently accompanied operations where there was a ‘high chance of mortality’. The amount paid was usually based on the gravity of the illness.

Tran, my interpreter and guide through the hospital, is fatalistic. ‘The rich people get treatment outside Vietnam. If you are seriously sick in Vietnam and you can’t go to Thailand or Singapore, then you have to accept to die. A
lot of people who go to Hanoi and Saigon for treatment are in the final stages and it is too late, because in the local areas they don’t have medical facilities. More and more people are getting cancer. There is a lot of pollution in Vietnam today. There are factories poisoning the water with chemicals. In the countryside the soil is polluted and it affects the food. People smoke a lot of cheap cigarettes. And there are chemicals like Agent Orange, which poisoned the soil during the war.’

‘It is a harrowing experience for patients,’ says Dr Scott Roberton, the Wildlife Conservation Society country rep. ‘In Vietnam, if you are diagnosed with cancer, you are going to die, and that’s how the doctors approach it. For them, there’s no point in trying to treat someone with cancer, and they make no effort to try and protect patients from infection. Often it is the untreated, opportunistic infections that kill them and not the cancer.’

Roberton has lived in Hanoi for more than a decade. His wife is Vietnamese. ‘My brother-in-law died of cancer and for eighteen months we went with him through hospitals here, in China and in Singapore. It opened so many doors. It was like being in another world and it helped me gain an understanding of the real challenges we face in tackling the use of rhino horn, tiger bones, bear bile and other animal parts. Radiation therapy makes you ill, so people here don’t trust it. This is faith-based medicine. The traditions have existed for thousands of years. People believe in them. You can’t dispel the myth of rhino horn’s curative properties with Western science, because it works like a placebo. And there’s such an interest here in alternative remedies. Patients will try everything and, if they can afford it, they will try rhino horn. It doesn’t matter if there is anything real behind it or not.’

In a hospital in China where his brother-in-law, like many other financially well-off Vietnamese, went for treatment, Roberton was astonished at what he saw. ‘People openly showed us their rhino horns, although there were quite a lot of fakes. There was a Taiwanese bloke, a famous architect, and someone had gifted him an adult stuffed tiger. You’d walk into this big fancy hospital room and there was this tiger, which was meant to give him strength in his fight.’ There were similar scenes in Singapore in a hospital popular with Vietnamese patients. In the oncology ward, ‘every single Vietnamese person had rhino horn’, Roberton says.

Medical doctors in state hospitals often promote the use of rhino horn to their patients. ‘I’ve tried everything, including rhino horn powder every day,’ a businessman in his eighties told the news agency AFP in May 2012. ‘Now the doctors have told me I’m in a stable condition. I have lots of money, I am old [and] I just love to live. I have no reason not to spend money on buying the expensive rhino horns and drinking its powder if it helps me.’

At ‘K Hospital’ there is a thriving department of traditional medicine, where I was told that medical staff regularly encouraged patients to use rhino horn in conjunction with standard cancer treatments. And a doctor at Bach Mai hospital – Hanoi’s largest – has been secretly filmed in his office grinding up rhino horn in one of the Bat Trang dishes and sharing the mixture with a visitor.

‘I use this every day,’ the doctor can be heard saying. ‘Look at me. Can you believe I’m sixty? The more the better, I say.’