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Ofir Drori
As an activist, you have an interaction with the world around you that is meaningful, that is where the energy comes from. We are not winning, but an activist doesn’t ask this question. It’s a luxury that we don’t have. We are fighters and we fight.
Gerry Ellis
Welcome to Talking Apes. When you think of apes, my guess is your first thought is probably not crime. In fact, for me it’s nowhere close to my first or my second, but for my guest today, it’s not only his first, but it’s been front and center for the past two decades. This time on Talking Apes we’re exploring the world’s fourth most profitable international crime, and it ranked only behind illegal drug trade, arms sales, and human trafficking. It’s the illegal trafficking of wildlife, and apes are at the very core of it. Wildlife trafficking has become a multi-billion dollar criminal activity. One that is not only a critical conservation issue, but it is also a threat to global security by transporting and spreading disease. And the illicit trafficking is not just of apes. Every year, along with wildlife parts like elephant ivory and rhino horn, it’s estimated that literally millions of birds and reptiles are stolen from the wild and smuggled into the shadowy world of the exotic pet trade.
Stopping illegal wildlife trafficking has become one man’s obsession. That man is my guest today and his name is Ofir Drori. The 40 year old Israeli born activist is the founder and director of the Eagle Network, which stands for Eco Activists for Governance and Law Enforcement. A coalition of NGOs in nine countries across Africa dedicated to helping governments crack down on wildlife trafficking and poachers. Eagle is what Ofir calls a new generation of nonprofit, one that’s focused not on education or policy, but on law enforcement. And to enforce that law in Central Africa, he says you first have to fight off corruption – corruption at every level and at every turn. I’m Gerry Ellis, and this is Talking Apes, where we explore the world of apes and primates with experts, conservationists, and passionate primate lovers from around the world. Talking Apes is the podcast that gets to the very heart of what’s happening with and to apes like us. The Talking Apes podcast is made possible by generous support from listeners like you to non-profit GLOBIO at GLOBIO.org. Our long-distance conversation today with Ofir was recorded from his base in Nairobi, Kenya. Between trafficking busts his teams were making in Gabon and Senegal.
Gerry Ellis
Ofir, welcome to Talking Apes. It’s incredible to have you on. I’m glad we were able to arrange this.
Ofir Drori
Thank you, Gerry.
Gerry Ellis
I feel like I should say a partial congratulations because we’ve been back and forth on WhatsApp over the last few days and I know you had a really successful bust in Senegal, so congratulations on that.
Ofir Drori
Thank you. Thank you.
Gerry Ellis
Just before we jumped on, you also mentioned that things didn’t go so well.
Ofir Drori
It was going on well in Gabon, and the one that didn’t work was in Senegal. So that’s just what a normal week looks like for us.
Gerry Ellis
And that’s why I got those mixed up. That’s what your normal week looks like, which I wanna jump into. You are working, as I mentioned in the intro, with the Eagle Network and you guys are in how many countries?
Ofir Drori
Well, right now, 10. Right now, 10 countries simultaneously.
Gerry Ellis
I can’t even imagine what your week must look like.
Ofir Drori
Never boring. I can tell you that.
Gerry Ellis
I actually wanna start to give people a bit of a background because you’re a well known name, I think you’re certainly a well known name in some circles because you probably are a thorn in people’s side in places like Interpol and CITES, and we’ll get into all of that. But for those who are joining us and don’t know, haven’t heard your name or don’t know your background, maybe we can start with that a little bit. Like you’re probably the world’s most famous anti wildlife trafficker around, or at least in my mind you are. And I wonder if you could just give us a little bit of background about how you started. I mean, how does one become a wildlife anti trafficker?
Ofir Drori
Wow, it’s kind of a long story. Basically I was on an adventure in Africa. I was just like anyone else, just sitting and saying, oh, why don’t I go to Africa and start traveling and see the world? And I loved it, and I fell in love with Africa, and I started traveling in real remote areas on a horse with a camel, on foot, in a canoe. I started doing these remote travels trying to find the most remote tribes in Africa, learn from them, absorb what I can, open my mind, trying to really find who I want to be. And in that process I fell in love with Africa, and falling in love with Africa, I felt an urge to give back. So slowly, slowly I started becoming an activist, but it was kind of like a natural thing that can happen to just anyone that goes somewhere and just throws themselves into an adventure.
Ofir Drori
And I started helping in humanitarian operations here and teaching in villages there. And just on my own, working a farm somewhere for somebody who just gave me his bed in a mud hut. And slowly I started each time seeing a situation and just trying to see what I can do to help, because that’s the urge I felt. And I went to war zones and then I became a journalist and a photojournalist just trying to shout out the poems in Africa, human rights issues and all this. And basically that’s how I rolled into what I do now because I was doing an article about human rights in Nigeria, stoning of women and children. And it started becoming tough. I crossed the border from Nigeria to Cameroon. Cameroon is a country of rainforest. And I basically wanted to take a break from the hard stuff.
Ofir Drori
I said, okay, I’m here for a few weeks. I was just roaming from country to country at the time, trying to get some adventures and do some good somewhere. And in coming to Cameroon, I said, What can I do that is easy and good? And I went after the words of Jane Goodall, the primatologist, and she was saying that in 15, 20 years we are going to lose apes and many other endangered species because of the illegal trade in their meat. And I would say, okay, well look, that’s a good thing for me to write about. Let me write about it, put it in an inflight magazine or something where people have money to donate to people or to those who are fighting in the front lines against this illegal trade and go back to the real stuff, to Nigeria, to the human rights things.
Ofir Drori
And I thought it would be an easy thing to do, and it ended up to be very complicated. I started writing my article, and this was pretty easy to understand because going to Cameroon, I could see ape heads and ape meat, chimp meat, gorilla meat parts sold quite openly. And I decided to stay in checkpoints, police checkpoints and wildlife officers checkpoints. And I could see that not only that it’s all over the place. This illegal trade is actually run by those wildlife officers and police officers. So everything was pretty clear that those wonderful creatures are racing towards extinction and there is a law that is there to protect them. But the real opposite is happening in the field. The illegal trade is rampant. It’s clear how it works, and it’s clear that the illegal trade is done by high people, high authorities that are actually consuming it because it’s far bigger money than anything else but you could maybe eat in the country. And that it is rooted in corruption. Not only because I saw the wildlife officers and police officers running the trade to start with, you could see the bribing going on in all different levels. So I started writing a 20 page article and I had most of it after two weeks because everything is quite in the open. And the story was pretty clear.
Ofir Drori
And from past articles I knew that if you write all the bad things that happen, it doesn’t motivate people for action. And it’s another kind of bad story from Africa. And it doesn’t lead us to something positive or constructive. And so after writing three quarters of my article, I wanted to dedicate the end to the light at the end of the tunnel. Those who are fighting in the forefront against illegal trade, fighting corruption to get the law applied and fighting for the future of those gorillas and chimps. And that’s when I went to the NGO world. That’s when I went to the nonprofits, the conservation organizations and to the international bodies, some of the World Bank and so on, those that I thought are a part of the solution. And as a journalist, it was very difficult for me to even find answers, to even get interviews.
Ofir Drori
And when I got interviews I was kind of shocked. I didn’t get what I wanted, I didn’t get what I thought. I got some people in offices talking to me about seminars and workshops. And when I said, hey, what about the law applying the law enforcement? They were saying, no, that’s not for us, that’s for the government. And I said, well wait a second. So if you don’t help in that or push for that, what about corruption? I mean everything is corrupt. You can see it from start to finish. Where are you standing in that? And at that time, they were even afraid to pronounce the word corruption in an interview. So I didn’t know what to do. And in the meanwhile I could see the four by fours driving around town, really beautiful and shiny and very far away from solving the problem. Meanwhile just 500 meters, 300 meters from their offices, you could see ape meat being sold.
Ofir Drori
Just for those who don’t know, ape meat is considered an exclusive kind of delicacy. So it became like a status symbol, just like caviar, let’s say. That will be the caviar of Central Africa. So if you are rich, you are wealthy, you want to impress your guests, you try to bring ape meat. That would be the parallel of a caviar, a bit more harmful than caviar. And in any case, that was the thing, I was completely frustrated. I didn’t know what to do and I knew that I had to find something new to do as an activist to have a meaningful interaction with this problem, with what I see, with what I experience because that’s what activists do. So I was completely frustrated. I didn’t know what I’m going to do, but I knew I needed to do something and I went out of the capital to a small town and went in the public transport, went down and within five minutes I was talking to people, just sitting in a bar, having my coke and talking to people, they could tell me, hey, look, yeah, here on the right, this is where we sell the gorilla meat.
Ofir Drori
And here on the left you can sell some of the chimps, and we also have some live ones. And I was like, where are the live ones? And basically if we find baby apes, baby chimps, baby gorillas in the trade, they’re basically survivors of the trade in the meat of apes. When a poacher goes to the forest, he shoots an ape. Basically, if it is a chimp for example, then the chimps will try to protect each other. So they’d end up shooting several chimps of the same family that are just fighting to protect themselves against guns. And baby chimps and baby gorillas stay on the back of their mother for the first, let’s say three years of their lives. And they’re totally dependent on the mother. So typically a mother’s body will fall from the tree down dead and a baby chimp cannot run away. They’re totally dependent on the mother. So they’ll typically cling to the mother’s body and just cry. And a poacher would lift that baby and say, okay, well let’s calculate. I can cut it right now with a machete and sell it for the meat. Or I can speculate and try to see if I can sell it as a pet.
Ofir Drori
And if he decides to sell it as a pet, then that baby still survives for a little bit more. Chimps can survive. Baby gorillas don’t last much longer. You can feed them, you can give them milk, water, food, but without love and care and hugs and attention, they will just snap and die. That’s just a behavior, that’s a phenomenon with baby gorillas. They have real needs for emotion and if this isn’t met, then they will just snap and die. Their immune system will collapse. Baby chimps have a different kind of technique, different kind of strategy. They just lock down their emotional world and their behavior actually really kind of reminds us of humans that are in shock, for example, rocking themselves. Just rocking, rocking, rocking nonstop throughout the day, day by day, that is a human behavior. And that’s exactly what chimps in captivity would do.
Ofir Drori
And they will die at a certain point in any case. If either they are sold in the trade – and the rate of survival is really low there – or they will just remain in the poachers’ place and die there. So I went in and long story short, I found myself in front of a baby chimp with poachers who were trying to sell him to me. And he was sick, abused, tied in the waist, like many others, tied in the waist in a rope that was giving him bloody wounds. And he was about to die. He was sick, very tiny, about a year, a year and a half old. And everybody treated him like a rat and that’s how he behaved. They kind of poked him with a stick and he was snapping his teeth and you couldn’t see any emotions in the complexity of emotions that we see in chimps.
Ofir Drori
And I knew I had to save this baby chimp because it’s a year and a half old and is going to die. Chimps can live in captivity up to 60 years in nature, a bit less. In any case, here’s a baby chimp that’s such a magnificent animal, and he could die in a few months or if not a few weeks, but if I managed to save him, he can outlive me. And I knew I didn’t want to give the money to buy the baby chimp because that will just send them back to the forest to kill more chimps. It would encourage them to see that there’s real good market for pets. So I went to the wildlife station, I went to the wildlife station on there on the wall, there was a poster of the law in Cameroon up to three years imprisonment for anybody even touching a protected species.
Ofir Drori
It was there. And I come to them and I’m saying, listen, there’s a baby chimp. We need to rescue this baby chimp, get him to the zoo in the capital, to a sanctuary later on and we need to confiscate this baby chimp. And they looked at me and said, Well, give us money. They wanted a bribe. And I tried to explain to the wildlife officials, I said, listen, look, you don’t understand there is a baby chimp, it will die. Let’s just go there. It’s about less than a kilometer from your office. Let’s go there. And they say, well, facilitate our transport. I didn’t know what they meant. Well later I understood it, these are key words the NGOs were using to basically give bribes. And I said, well look, this is the situation here. The law is on your wall. And they said, well give us (?). All these are code words that NGOs were using in order to give pocket money to these officials. And after 40 minutes I’m just struggling and explaining and trying to push them to do this thing and saying, look at me. I don’t have money. I’m a traveler.
Ofir Drori
They ended up trying to sell me another baby chimp. They said, hey white men, what do you want? Do you want a baby chimp? Don’t complicate things. We can sell you another one cheaper. So everything was right in my face. That was everything. All the story I was writing about was just in front of me. Only now all of it, including the frustration from the NGOs, from conservation, was now in the eyes of this small baby chimp tied in a small corner. And I went to my small motel and I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t sleep the whole night. So the whole night I started writing. I circulated my small table, and just being very annoyed and writing a few words and continuing. And I wrote about my criticism about the entire system, about corruption and how nobody can fight it and conservation just being a part of the problem.
Ofir Drori
And that the law is not applied, that somebody has to do something, real activists have to really do something about it. So half the night I was just fighting all my criticism about the lack of measurable standards of conservation and the lack of real, tangible results on conservation. They could just do their projects and give a prospect of some nice apes, nice chimps from sanctuaries. And then all this is happening in the field, the complete opposite of what is their objective. And they do nothing. So somewhere along the night I said Ofir, Why are you so angry? What were you expecting to find? Why are you so shocked? And then I started writing it. And I started writing. That’s what is needed. Activists like me are needed to have a real NGO, not just nice one with four by fours, but fighters that will fight corruption to get the law applied, fight corruption to get those traffickers in jail and get those wildlife officials that were just in front of me in jail for being corrupt, for being a part of the trade.
Ofir Drori
And I started writing it down. I said, okay, well how will that work? It will work like an NGO that will be based on activists and activism and African activists and it needs to have real tangible results and real measurable indicators for succeeding or not. And take a country that’s wildlife law has not been applied a single time for any trafficker, no trafficker ever getting to jail and put it on a rate of one per week. I just put it like that one per week. One major trafficker arrested and then put in jail per week. And for that we have to, an NGO like this will have to really do everything, fight corruption on every step. They’ll have to run undercover investigations on their own and infiltrate a trade and start climbing up the chain and getting the bigger traffickers and the wildlife officials and police officials and politicians started behind this illegal trade.
Ofir Drori
And then it cannot just give the information to the police. The police are corrupt. I’ve seen them selling apes, I’ve seen them running the trade. So they will have to supervise arrest operations in the field, take these people in hand and fight corruption in the field that was bound to happen, to make sure that these people are arrested and fight the corruption real time and then bring them for interrogation. And then we cannot just take those people and bring them to the courts because I’m sure the courts are corrupt as well. It’s not for nothing that zero violent prosecutions have ever happened in a country like Cameroon, all of the countries we’ve known before we arrived. So we need to have private prosecution, we need to have a prosecutor from our own side to prosecute those cases. We need to have legal advisors that will go and check what’s happening in the judge’s office and in the court trying to find and intercept corruption that comes in and combat it in real time.
Gerry Ellis
But if you have corruption, if you found corruption at the judicial level with judges, how do you even… if you can find attorneys, lawyers that will fight your case and work on your side, how do you cut through that barrier?
Ofir Drori
That point, I didn’t know all the answers, but as an activist, I knew I would do it. I knew that this is how it needs to be done. I knew that it has to be done and there must be a way to do that to fight corruption in court. It wasn’t about trying to find the good people. It wasn’t about that. It was about intercepting and fighting corruption. I didn’t put my faith in a good prosecutor. I put my faith in activists that will fight to find when he’s taking a bribe, although we thought he is good. So that was what I was writing all during the night. And I said, Well, this NGO, this new thing has to also publicize it so that everybody will know that the law is applied now and that people get to jail so that it will create some kind of deterrent.
Ofir Drori
And I wrote this entire thing and in my mind I still was thinking, okay, I’ll write this article. I finish this thing, I’ll save this ape, I’ll save this chimp and I’ll give it to somebody to make it. And I’ll continue moving from country to country doing my thing. I went in the morning to the wildlife station and I told them, listen, I don’t need you to do anything. Just gimme the book of law and I will do everything. And I took the book of law, I went back to the trafficker’s house, I told them, and I opened the book of law to the article that gives three years imprisonment for anybody even touching his chimp. And I put it there and I said, well read it. And they read it and they looked at me and they looked at the book again and they looked at me and they were totally unimpressed.
Ofir Drori
They were unimpressed because they knew this is like, what is the law in the book? It’s like, what, a $3 bribe, $4 bribe? So then I said, well listen. And I started bluffing them using what I wrote during the night. I said, listen, I am a part of this new big NGO, a new non-profit that is fighting corruption to get the law applied. And my only job is to make sure you don’t bribe your way out and the judge is waiting for you and there is a car coming to take you. I’m sorry, but that’s my work. My job is to make sure you go to jail. Now they go totally hysterical. My bluff worked fantastically. They were totally hysterical. And I let them boil in the juices a bit and I did as if I’m calling an imaginary headquarters saying yes, no, they’re on the way.
Ofir Drori
They’re collaborative, don’t worry, the judge is waiting. Okay, good. You’ll see them today. Very good. And after a while I told him, listen, I know that you brought me to your house. I feel bad about it if you remain my informants, and you give me information about who activates you in this big chain of illegal trade, maybe there’s something I can do for you and you are pleading, please do something for us. And of course at this point they just wanted to get rid of this baby chimp. So I went in and I was untying the baby chimp from those ropes in the waist. And they were afraid because they were short of this baby chimp that was acting like a rat and just ran away. But I knew what was inside, locked inside this baby chimp. And I untied him and I just stretched my hand, my arms forward and he climbed my body very tiny, very tiny baby chimp, climbed my body and gave me one big hug.
Ofir Drori
And in that moment he transformed from a rat to a baby chimp, to a baby chimp with endless need in love and care. And this hug became permanent. Now I named him, I named this baby chimp Future because that’s what I wanted to give him. And I was thinking, okay, good. He hugged me, he adopted me at that moment as his father and mother. And I couldn’t take him away from me from that second onward, but I was still under the impression that I’m going to go to the capital, give the baby chimp to the sanctuary and take what I wrote to somebody in the capital, an imaginary activist and say, take this, do it, things will be better. You can fight for the future of the species as well. Go and do it and go and continue traveling.
Ofir Drori
I went to the capital and everything changed. The sanctuary couldn’t receive him. So I was basically having a baby chimp and I was father and mother and now it’s permanent. And I found myself with this piece of paper, all these things that I wrote and thinking, well, who the hell can do that? These people wear suits in the conservation NGOs, and here’s the guy in the World Bank that has never left his office. And basically this Future – this baby Future forced me to stay in Cameroon and apply what I was writing to prove that it is possible. And that’s how it started. And that’s how I got into the whole thing. And that’s how I set up the first wildlife enforcement NGO in the world, basically. To fight corruption, and what I wrote that night is what we do today.
Gerry Ellis
And that’s LAGA, that first one that you set up?
Ofir Drori
The first NGO we built was the Last Great Ape Organization and the face of Future is LAGA. And then we started applying it. We started getting arrests, we started really arresting, managing to arrest people, and got the first ever prosecution of a wildlife trafficker in the country. And when it happened, it went to all the international media. We realized, wait a second, it’s not just in Cameroon, it’s in all of the range of all great apes, all of Central Africa, of African great apes. And then we started replicating that, replicating that model. I went to the next country and started setting this up again in the same way and went to another country and tried to recruit local activists to try to make this happen in the next one. And then we went to other countries that are not great ape countries, and so that it was the same in other countries.
Gerry Ellis
I just wanna pick up on that, Ofir. In the creation of LAGA, it sounded like you were becoming the de facto wildlife department. I’ve met with some of your team in Cameroon and one of the things that was a bit shocking – it shouldn’t have been – but one of the things that was a bit shocking to me was the fact that I had to park down the street from their offices. Somebody came down and got me. Then we went up through this kind of twisted way up through a neighborhood and then I came into these offices and here’s this group of people working in there. And then I went out on the back deck overlooking this neighborhood and we had our interview and conversation in that, and in that we talked about the fact that they get death threats, their families are threatened and there is a level of secrecy that they have to have about what they do and not be able to tell people because people will be bribed. So I’m curious, you set this thing up initially in Cameroon with LAGA and now it seems like you would be running against all the powers that be, the corrupt politicians, the corrupt wildlife officials, the corrupt police.
Gerry Ellis
How is it that they’re going to let you even operate? Especially you being a foreigner.
Ofir Drori
Well first, I mean, it’s interesting because an activist never asks for somebody to let him do something. It’s the opposite here. It’s the opposite of the perspective. And it’s funny because indeed I had a lot of problems with that from the conservation world that has that kind of dogma like, okay, what will we be allowed to do without annoying anybody wasn’t our approach from the start. It wasn’t my approach from the start. I knew this has to be done and I’m doing it as an activist. And then of course nobody would let me. Of course it wasn’t even a question who would let me. The corrupt police would let me supervise them? The corrupt judges would let me record them and catch them on corruption and get them removed?
Ofir Drori
Who? Of course not. The idea wasn’t to replace a system that is dysfunctional because it is dysfunctional. I talked about corruption, so I can tell you that when I was rescuing Future, it was clear, but later we could get the statistics to support it. In all four cases now in different countries 85% of our arrest operations, we document, we intercept corruption attempts, bribing attempts, traffic of influence sabotaging DRS by police officers, all of those things, 85%. Now imagine how dysfunctional is a police force that 85% of the time ends up in corruption. It’s a miracle that you’ll get somebody arrested. And if that person is arrested and been one of these unfortunate ones that end up not bribing then you get to the court. In the court, our statistics is 80% of the time we intercept corruption. 80%. So imagine how dysfunctional is a justice system that 80% of the time doesn’t produce justice.
Ofir Drori
So it’s very clear why there was no persecution of wildlife trafficking for almost all the countries in Central and West Africa. All of the range of what we’re talking about, not even a single one. When you look at corruption, it’s very clear but we don’t just intercept, we don’t just detect corruption. We are not a watchdog group. We are a law enforcement NGO. We are fighting corruption in real time. So I don’t ask if you let me fight with you corrupt police officer, let me fight with you physically. Do you let me come into your office and record you? Do you let me? No, of course you don’t, nobody’s letting you affect the change. That is what activism is all about. You go with your own convictions, you go with your own passion and you take your own responsibility in making the change that you want. There’s this quote from Gandhi that is becoming a cliche, be the change that you want to see. And in a way, that’s exactly what it was.
Gerry Ellis
But that change has a risk.
Ofir Drori
Yeah, but what I’m saying is that that’s exactly what I was doing because what I wanted to see was in my article, I wanted to see those people and they were not there. So I had to turn into that. And by the way, I never finished my article.
Gerry Ellis
Well it’s not too late.
Ofir Drori
I know, I’m in the forefront. I jumped from writing about it to actually when I saw that that is not the tool to use to actually try to create it. And that’s what we created.
Gerry Ellis
But that’s what I wanna get to. I mean you are in the introduction to this podcast. I talked about the fact that this is the fourth most lucrative transnational crime in the world and which may come as a shock to people, but it’s often intimately linked to this first, second and third, which is arms trafficking, human trafficking, drugs. And when you’re talking about incredibly powerful people who have huge amounts of money at stake and it just seems, I’m curious as I’m sure anyone would be, I mean when you start messing with that group of people and interrupting their flow of money, you become a serious threat. And how do you stay out of your own harm’s way?
Ofir Drori
Well, first of all, I mean it was a given for us. It was clear to us we are fighting real criminals. I mean we saw it. We understand the idea that there’s a few poachers hunting some apes and trying to sell them is ridiculous, is ludicrous. Of course it’s an organized crime and it’s very much rooted in corruption and complicity. And these are very organized groups, and we’re talking about apes. We started with apes and we continued to ivory and the ivory trade, and leopard skins and lion skins, and very endangered kinds of parrots, and now pangolin scales. I can explain that later.
Ofir Drori
The legal trade is vast and yes, it is powerful. And we started climbing up the chains. So at the beginning we started getting some traffickers and we managed to get them in jail. We managed to get some legitimacy to climb up and now put the bigger guys in jail, to put the police commissioner in jail, to put the colonel in jail, and the army captain in jail, to put the politician in jail. We managed to put a wildlife director that would be the person in charge of the entire wildlife protection of his country in jail because he was the biggest trafficker. We managed to remove deputy ministers, we managed to get governors behind bars, climbing the chain happened gradually for us and we managed to climb up. We managed to remove magistrates from the system. We managed to arrest conservation NGO personnel, everything that we were talking about where we saw corruption, we managed to climb up to those levels.
Ofir Drori
So yeah, the threats are many. They have been there from the onset. It’s very natural for someone that you manage to put behind bars to tell you, I will get out and I’ll kill you. This is somehow usual. But we have more serious threats than that when people are far more powerful when you have a police commissioner you manage to put behind bars and he’s saying that he will kill you. So we have physical threats that are pretty common for all of our team and we have political threats because obviously a lot of this is connected to political systems and politicians are involved in organized crime everywhere in the world. So we have political threats as well. And we have legal threats of course we have politicians that were getting out and big traffickers are trying to use corruption within the court, trying to get us into jail. So all of those threats exist.
Gerry Ellis
You’ve mentioned NGOs a couple of times and I just, I’d like to follow that up. It seems as though there’s a conflict between you and many of the NGOs that purport to be working on the ground to do all this saving of landscape and species. It’s like, can you talk about that?
Ofir Drori
Sure. Look, from the onset, even from my criticism on that day where before rescuing Future the baby chimp, it was all about criticism. I was shocked by the conservation world. I was talking about trying to find the light at the end of the tunnel when I was writing my article. But in fact what I found was a light of a train just heading right towards me because it was a disaster. I was shocked by the hypocrisy and I was also shocked by the corruption. Definitely we identified later on personal NGO vehicles, conservation NGO vehicles used for trafficking itself. And why wouldn’t it?
Ofir Drori
These are the only four by fours moving in areas which are prone for trafficking. And so traffickers are using those vehicles and striking deals with the drivers and sometimes project managers. So we’ve seen that a lot. And this criticism has never stopped an activist, we’re not there to try to be in good relations with the world. We are here to change things and therefore we’ll be vocal whenever there is injustice and that is injustice. So some of the things have changed during the years. And some of the organizations still are rampant with corruption, and that directly affects poaching inside national parks. And so we are kind of trying to push conservation throughout – to deal with corruption, understand this is the first, second and third obstacle for all of our conservation goals, definitely for enforcement. Secondly, do not hide away from enforcement because the illegal trade in wildlife is really, especially in Africa, a major cause for the race towards extinction of many species. And the third is to fight corruption within themselves, put measures inside themselves to not be behind corruption. If you are functioning in any kind of organization inside what is a corrupt environment, if you don’t have specific checks and balances, then it will be prone to become corrupt and there’s no reason why it would be an exception.
Gerry Ellis
Even with your own organization, I mean now that you’re the Eagle network, you’re spanned across 10 countries, that must be a constant battle for yourself keeping corruption out of your own organization.
Ofir Drori
Of course, it starts with the activists and then with who you recruit. And it continued with lots of very strict systems that have indicators and tangible results for every step of the way. And if you don’t get it, you are out at any case. So it’s not about trying, if you don’t get traffickers behind bars, you are out. And of course we have our own internal investigations, we have our own ways of verifying things so that if corruption arrives and when corruption arrives or if you have somebody who is trying to be tempted then he will find himself or herself out very fast. It’s not because we have an ethos that will be protected from corruption. It’s about systems and how we build the systems and about anti-corruption being your objective and understanding that corruption is not a side thing. Your main objective should be fighting corruption in accordance to your context.
Ofir Drori
And we talked about the issues, one side of the threats that we get, you get constantly for anybody on our teams, but there’s also the other side, there’s the bribes. Okay? And the bribes can arrive at astronomical figures. We had an activist in Gabon and I’ll tell you a small story to just get the idea of what people have to face and how it is. And he was leading an arrest operation with the police and the wildlife for two people, a trafficker and a poacher. And they came to a place in a clearing somewhere next to town and the police just went, they just disappeared. So he found himself saying the traffickers are here and they’re about to leave and the police are just out there. The wildlife was hiding. And when they started running, he ran after them. He ran after them and tried to stop them himself, which happens to us a lot, which does happen to us when we get operations going down, we just jump on traffickers. Sometimes even when police are trying to sabotage the operations, then we have to fight to try to arrest them. This in spite of the police efforts to release them.
Ofir Drori
And he was running and he was running after them and they ran away and one of them, the poacher was holding a gun and he was during that kind of running away and he’s running after them. He moved backwards and shot and that guy jumped back and he shot basically his butt. And it was Christmas and this activist from the Gabon team was in the hospital on Christmas and TV came to him and interviewed him and he said, this only strengthened my result. That means that I’m only stronger because of this and I promise and vow here on TV that these people who ran away, I will get out of the hospital and I will catch them and I will put them in jail where they belong. And you know what, he did get better. And three months after he got them arrested and behind bars. And besides that, besides all these risks you have bribing, and we had another activist in Gabon that arrested a head of a logging company, a Chinese head of a logging company. And when they tried to threaten and didn’t work, they came directly to that activist and they came to him and they offered him 30,000 euros and a woman. And a girl.
Gerry Ellis
That’s an enormous amount of money.
Ofir Drori
They gave him a girl.
Gerry Ellis
So they were giving him a girl. Unbelievable.
Ofir Drori
And this is a part of corruption. There are many times corruption gets exactly this kind of effect. So you can see how much of a corrosive effect it has on society, how destructive it can be on so many levels and not just wildlife. And that’s why for us it’s a privilege to work on corruption through wildlife because a lot of times we managed to have an impact in the fight against corruption that was never there before where we managed to show people what is possible in the fight against corruption. And corruption is not necessarily that kind of invisible –
Gerry Ellis
So what percentage of the people that you bust in these activities, what percentage would you say is, are these people also involved in other types of crime activity?
Ofir Drori
Well it’s hard to think about it statistically, but I can tell you that we have a lot of times when we have many times in which we can see that illustrated. For example, one of the best we had was of a trafficker that was a drug trafficker and an ape trafficker going to Nigeria. And we have this photo when we arrested him with his car. In the back of the car you see huge sacks. The entire back is full of huge sacks of marijuana and some cocaine up in a container. And in the middle of this entire picture you see between the sacks, a baby chimp squeezed in with a diaper and a feeding bottle.
Ofir Drori
And so it’s difficult to have a visual of that kind of link between a drug trade and the ape trade and wildlife, and understanding that traffickers are traffickers, they’re just trying to look at their illicit margin of revenue, how much money they can make per kg, per volume and wildlife. Some of the wildlife can bring more money than drugs. So definitely drug traffickers will do it. And we had a case in the Ivory Coast on a Vietnamese syndicate and we found pages in his house, in a house search, pages that showed the picture of the girl and who she is and that in Africa we have female circumcision. And it was us, are you circumcised there or not? And when we started interrogating the Chinese from that Vietnamese syndicate, he said, I just tried to get them jobs in China, and that was human trafficking for prostitution of Africans in China. And we started getting in touch with those girls that were about to leave or decided not to leave at the last moment after filing and things. And they were saying yes, he was touching us, he was asking us to undress and he promised us that we’ll go to China and we’ll have work. And then later he said that we’re going to dance but we can be naked.
Ofir Drori
So these are the phases of the traffickers that we manage to get arrested and we find the links to the drug trade, arms trade, human trafficking and all sorts of the worst of, I would say the worst of humanity.
Gerry Ellis
And I would assume that on that list of trafficking items – I mean it was interesting what you said, it’s like they’re trafficking per kilo, it doesn’t really matter what the thing is they’re trafficking, it’s the amount that you’re trafficking. And that’s where the money is. But I would assume that on that list of trafficked items, wildlife is probably lowest on the list in terms of prosecution.
Ofir Drori
So I would say that if you think, after all my explanation about corruption in the judiciary and the enforcement system, if you think that a lot of drug officers are actually getting to jail and even if they get to jail, I didn’t mention that. But even after people are getting to jail and prosecuted and we accompany them to see that they’re actually getting to jail, we still have to visit them every week in jail to check that they’re well fed and that they’re in good health and that they are there. Because when you have the money you try to bribe your way out – and a lot of these trafficks have the money and have the influence for it – we have people that we go to visit in jail and they are not there because of course they brought their way out.
Ofir Drori
In that case we have to go to the prison head and say what happened? And he would lie and say he escaped, and so we signed an arrest warrant and went to kick him back in jail and then that’s a part of our work. So it’s never ending. So I don’t think it’s a lot different for the drug traffickers and the arms traffickers and anybody else who is powerful that is connected to organized crime. It’s a general problem. It’s a general problem where you have real wealthy powerful individuals and whether our enforcement systems and justice systems are able to be a strong tool against them. And again, it’s not only in Africa, you could see wherever you have mafias that this is what is going on. We have to understand that organized crime kind of captures the same systems that are there to remove it. Well when explaining this to some of the police officers that are better working or judges that are champions that got some good persecutions. I’m saying you are the soap, you are the superhero soap of our society and if our soap is getting dirty, there is nothing, there’s no society, there is no governance, there’s nothing. So your responsibility. And indeed if that is done, it’s finished.
Gerry Ellis
Well speaking of responsibility, I mean there is an international body that’s supposed to be part of this solution and it’s called CITES – convention on international trade in endangered species – which I’ve always found to be kind of an ironic name in the fact that the trade in endangered species is part of their title. It should be the non-trade in endangered species. But where do they fit in all of this if they’re supposed to be this umbrella organization that sort of controls some of this?
Ofir Drori
Let’s talk about the expectation because when people are listening to us they think, okay, well there is a convention, UN convention for endangered species. Then you’re thinking, well I know that there is a convention for human rights, its job is to protect human rights. I know that there is a convention on whatever, you know you have the World Health Organization. It’s supposed to take care of the health. CITES in that way is a very funny UN convention. It’s a UN convention and it’s not supposed to protect animals. It’s supposed to balance between protecting animals to a commercial interest to make money out of animals. I don’t think there is any other convention that does that. It would be, hey, let’s have a convention on the rights of children, but let’s make sure that some countries can make money out of these children. So let’s make sure that this money continues. We’ll balance the interest. No, we never did it. We said, no, children shouldn’t work. They should go to school. That is the essence of that convention. So in a way CITES is kind of like an exception in that way and that’s the heart of the problem.
Ofir Drori
But it gets so in the way. For us, CITES is a sort of damage control situation. We have a trade protection, trade slash protection convention. What does it do actually? It gives permits for illegal trade and it says look, if we have a permitting licensing system, then things will be more organized. And then if something is illegal, it’s completely illegal. So ivory should be illegal, but guess what? Ivory is illegal on one side and then it’s legal in another way. So if you have a permit, it’s legal. So in a way for us, CITES is a very big laundering machine of the illegal trade.
Ofir Drori
You take an ape from one side and a corrupt official, a high official is putting a permit and writing this baby chimp is sent this way and all of a sudden this chimp is legal. So imagine how it is from a law enforcement point of view where I just have to follow one thing and all of a sudden it becomes legal because of CITES. So first of all it’s a damage control situation that we have with this UN convention. The second thing is that there is corruption inside the convention, which means that a country like Japan that is having very strong financial interest in whaling and whales and sharks because they want shark fin soup on the tables in Japan, it’s a huge industry. Guess what? In CITES, you have people with suits and ties and they call themselves the head of the association of ivory carvers, head of the association of shark exploitation.
Ofir Drori
So when CITES is trying to say let’s bring up the protection for sharks or whales, Japan is bribing countries to vote this or that. There were articles written about that and it was called checkbook diplomacy. I think it describes very well the idea of it, but also intimidation. I was intimidated as a part of a delegation of a government and all of us were intimidated and were given texts to read. So when a big country like Japan tells a delegate, a person who is representing his country, that Japan will write his precedent, that this small guy that is supposed to represent his country was doing something that is a declaration of war on Japan, then a small guy like this says, yeah, yeah, tell me what to read. And you have an orchestrated kind of symphony that Japan can just wait for different countries to read what they’ve written before. There was one country in this specific debate that I’m talking about, just the example of whaling, that was saying we are against putting those sharks in this because it will hurt the fishermen, the poor fishermen in our country. It was a landlocked country.
Ofir Drori
So that is CITES, and I could say that even the Secretary General of the convention, every UN convention has a Secretary General. The Secretary General of the convention has been there for I think eight years if not more. The day that he left he was granting interviews and he was saying, you know what you need to put on the S of the CITES? Put two lines. It’s all about the money, it’s all about corruption.
Gerry Ellis
Where is the future? Where is the hope? I mean I know that sounds like a ridiculous word but, you know, I mean I read in your book and for anyone who wants an incredible read, it’s called The Last Grade Ape and it was published in 2012 I think. And one of the things in that book is you talk about that and you mentioned it earlier, Jane Goodall, sort of pessimistically saying if we don’t do something in 15, 20 years these apes are gonna be gone. I heard that same thing and that was one of the things that motivated me to start doing some of the things that I was doing and we’re having this talk. Talking Apes actually is trying to create greater awareness because people just don’t understand, especially people outside of the countries we’re talking about.
Gerry Ellis
They really don’t understand the depth and the scope of what’s going on in terms of wildlife trafficking and corruption. And Jane always talks about hope, but at times I’ve written that it’s almost like pixie dust of hope. It’s like we keep sprinkling it around thinking it’ll make everything better if we just have hope. But where is the real hope? Because you have to find motivation every day. I mean you are facing this every single day. Yeah, I mean just as we began today in the podcast we’re talking about you had a bust in Gabon two days ago and then you had one that didn’t quite go the way you wanted in Senegal yesterday. How do you keep going every day? What’s the motivation?
Ofir Drori
Look for an activist, there is no point of achievement and there is no luxury to sit back and say, wow, that is fantastic, that is great. Because as an activist you have an interaction with the world around you that is meaningful. That is where the energy comes from.
Ofir Drori
Every day, not every week, every day we have things that are failing, things that are succeeding, things that didn’t succeed at – a trafficker here that was not arrested, another one that got out, but you have another one or two managed to put in jail, you have another one, another impact that you managed to do politically on something. At the end of the day, you don’t look back and say, hey, are things solved? Because they’re not. It’s a drop in the ocean. I can still say extinction is real. There are countries that, during the time that I’m doing this work, were saying goodbye to their rhinos and their elephant populations, one after the other. We are not winning. But an activist doesn’t ask this question. It’s a luxury that we don’t have. We are fighters and we fight. It is an enemy. It is a real enemy.
Ofir Drori
We get our energy from the fact we manage to do something. We manage to do something positive. We manage to affect a change. Even a small change. We never asked ourselves if this change is a big thing, there are things I was doing which I was thinking will make a huge impact. And they didn’t. And there were small things I was doing that were later on having a larger impact. We’re a community. It’s about how we can make a change, how we can make a difference, how we can affect the change. And that means that maybe one person from the people who are listening to us now, just one, okay, we’ll change his life course a little bit because of one word that we are saying and it will grow and that spark will light something bigger. It happened to me, a lot of people who are doing great things and they were saying, hey, I listened to something that you said once.
Ofir Drori
And I was like, what? It was a total waste of time. I didn’t arrest anybody, I didn’t do anything. I was like, I was just talking. And yet something happened. Because being an activist is being a part of a community and understanding that affecting a change, it means that you will get more and more people doing that. Today, we are not winning. I can sleep because we manage to get somebody behind bars. I can touch what we do. I know that we have an interaction with a world that is trying to change it, trying and maybe it wouldn’t, we’re still losing and maybe it would not work and maybe we are going to lose all the apes. It is definitely still a possibility, a real possibility. But I know that I was fighting for it and I know that others will join and with time there will be enough people to make a real difference.
Gerry Ellis
So it really is to be that change you want to see.
Ofir Drori
Yes, for anybody out there.
Gerry Ellis
Ofir, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us on Talking Apes. This is incredible. I would love to have you back again, I know there’s hundreds of other stories you could tell, but you really are an incredible breath of fresh air in this. I mean, I’ve been around the NGO community and traveled in many of the same countries that you have for years and years, and it can get incredibly depressing when you see what you’re up against, and to know that there’s somebody like you out there up to your eyeballs in this fight every day, and yet you still smile. I mean, what people won’t see is as we’re recording this podcast, we’re looking at one another. You’re halfway around the world and you have that huge smile on your face and it makes me wanna get up and go to work in the morning as well. So thank you so much for taking the time.
Ofir Drori
Thank you, Gerry. Thank you. Thanks a lot.
Gerry Ellis
Many, many thanks Ofrir Drori For taking time out of his crazy schedule and sharing his firsthand perspectives on the crisis of illegal aid trafficking. One all of us need to understand so we realize what we may be losing in these next few decades. You’ve been listening to Talking Apes, where each episode we explore the world of apes with experts from research to outreach with passionate primate people and conservationists from around the world. Our guests are at the very forefront of news about our wild primate cousins. You can find previous episodes of Talking Apes on our website at www.GLOBIO.org/talkingapes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any questions for us here at Talking Apes or ideas about future podcasts, you can always email us at @media.GLOBIO.org. I’d like to thank talking Apes producer Meg Stark for all of her work, pulling together another great episode of this podcast. And finally, I’d like to thank you. Talking Apes podcasts are made possible by listeners like you, so please consider supporting Talking Apes with your tax deductible donation GLOBIO.org. Once again, thanks very much for listening. I’m Gerry Ellis. This has been Talking Apes.
