It’s almost as if accountable killings being backed and cheered on by powerful governments and business interest attracts the wrong crowd. If Jeff Dahmer was stronger and smarter im sure he would’ve applied to similar organizations .
Operation Lock was apparently the first major privately funded African antipoaching project, and may have been the most sinister, not least because poachers may have been among the major beneficiaries of it.
“To implement Operation Lock,” Ellis wrote, “Dr. Hanks commissioned KAS Enterprises Ltd., whose chair was the late Sir David Stirling, the founder of the Special Air Services. Many of the KAS staff were former members of the SAS. The initial aim was to gather intelligence, but it developed into a more ambitious project to employ former SAS men for paramilitary anti-poaching work throughout Southern Africa, and bought equipment from the South African Defense Force. At least £75,000 of Prince Bernhard’s donation was used to buy rhino horn.” As Ellis added, even then it was no secret that “Many of the ivory and horn traffickers in southern Africa” were “also known to deal in drugs, weapons and ammunition, sometimes with the conivance of senior officers of the South African Defence Force.”
Craig Van Note, executive vice president of the WWF subsidiary TRAFFIC, outlined what WWF already knew in a mid-1988 article for Earth Island Journal. “The South African military,” Van Note charged, “has cynically aided the virtual annihilation of the once great elephant herds of Angola. Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA rebel forces in Angola, largely supplied by South Africa, have killed perhaps 100,000 elephants to help finance the 12-year-old conflict. Most of the tusks have been carried out on South African air transports or trucks, although some move through Zaire and Burundi.”