Lewis Mudge: Vote for H.297, but don’t link ivory to terrorism

Editor’s note: This commentary is by Lewis Mudge, who is from Vershire and currently lives in Africa with his family where he works as a researcher. He has worked extensively in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and the Central African Republic. This commentary is written in a private capacity.

[I] left New England years ago to take up work in Africa. I met my future wife in Rwanda and it has been a thrill and a blessing for us to introduce our sons to the continent. We love so much about Africa, but nothing is more humbling than seeing its game on the savannah. When we leave Nairobi and move back to Vermont, we know we will long for a continent that is firmly in our hearts. And we hope the elephants will still be there for our grandchildren to gaze at in wonder.

It is beyond dispute that Africa’s elephants are being decimated and the vast majority of illegally procured ivory makes its way to Asian market. In an attempt to curb the trade, Vermont lawmakers have before them a bill, H.297, which will prohibit ivory sales within the state. Lawmakers should be honest with themselves: This initiative will have almost no effect on the worldwide illegal ivory trade. And yet the rate at which elephants are being slaughtered is a blight on humanity’s conscious and any effort to stop it is one worth supporting. More importantly, the bill gets people talking about wider issues and it represents the passionate and local way of tackling the world’s problems that makes me proud to call Vermont home.

But lawmakers should be clear as to why they are voting for H.297 and the conclusions of Ivory Free Vermont, an advocacy group working to get the bill passed, must be taken with a grain of salt.

In a 10-minute video by the organization, earnest children explain why this bill should pass. The principal reason given by the organization is that it will contribute to the global fight on terrorism. Just after the two-minute mark ivory is linked to al-Qaida cumulating with an impassioned and powerful statement by a girl: “Every piece of illegal ivory purchased has an associated trail of blood that leads … ultimately to the killing of human beings in terrorist attacks.”

This is not true.

The only terrorist group that has a reliable link to the ivory trade is the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a murderous Ugandan militia that spread into the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. The group has committed unspeakable atrocities. However, this group is a “terrorist” organization in name only, a designation given by the United States and the African Union. It has no expansionist agenda and no ideology beyond its own survival. While it continues to commit human rights abuses, it is not al-Qaida or the Islamic State. The LRA is not going to commit acts of terror as most Vermonters define them.

My wife and I were on vacation in September 2013 and we watched in horror from Vermont as the news broke of al-Shabab gunman storming the Westgate mall in Nairobi. We often had coffees on a café terrace where bodies were now strewn over the screen. It was a pure act of terror and we see its effects every day in the heavily armed soldiers now guarding the city.

In the days after the Westgate attack Hillary Clinton made the public connection between al-Shabab and ivory, citing “growing evidence” of their linkage. The evidence most likely rests in a blog post “report” by the Elephant Action League, which includes photos of “ivory brokers” around a bar, makes dubious connections based on one anonymous source and somehow draws a conclusion that poached ivory could be paying up to 40 percent of al-Shabab’s fighters’ salaries.

Kathryn Bigelow, of “Zero Dark Thirty” fame, recently joined the fray with her film project “Last Days” which aims to teach viewers about the “diabolical intersection of two problems that are of great concern – species extinction and global terrorism.”

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Brussels last week, the ivory-terrorism link is quickly being rolled out again.

The ivory trade and terrorism do not drive each other. Poached African ivory is shipped to Asia via criminal networks. Corruption is the oil that keeps their supply chains moving.

We have lumped our condemnation of terrorism and our desire to stop the ivory trade together. And why not? Both terrorism and ivory poaching are bad, so what’s the problem? This hypothetical was recently asked by journalist Tristan McConnell, who warns that “global terrorism and the international ivory trade are distinct problems, requiring different strategies; conflating the two risks undermining the fight against both.”

McConnell’s point can’t be stressed enough: Not only is the ivory-terrorism link wrong, this reductionist approach actually kills more elephants by avoiding the difficult work of addressing corruption and supply chains from Africa to Asia.

The Royal United Services Institute issued a report last year in which they offered an explanation for the myth, writing, “The ivory–terrorism narrative is … an easier call to arms against the illegal ivory trade than ‘corruption in Africa’, which lacks the same emotional resonance.” Tackling corruption in Africa is complicated – it’s certainly not sexy. Link the ivory trade to terrorism and you have a slam dunk advocacy tool. Link the trade to corruption and criminal networks and the water is muddied.

I don’t want to live in a world without elephants and I think symbolic initiatives like H.297 have merit. But lawmakers should not be distracted by shiny objects like metro bombings, mall shootings and global jihad.

I assume Ivory Free Vermont’s intentions in pushing this bill is to save elephants. However, the organization is misleading Vermonters when it calls ivory poaching a global security crisis.

If interest groups and legislators are really interested in doing their part in addressing elephant poaching they would audit the state’s portfolios and divest from any multi-national corporations or countries where there are reliable allegations of corrupt practices where ivory networks exist. This type of due diligence may not be sexy, but it would save more elephants.