Читать книгу Blaming No One - Dan Inc. Whitman - Страница 7

It started seven years ago with one man’s empathy for chimps – those little guys with DNA 98 percent like our own. (When I broke my thumb once, the doctor said, “Now you are one percent closer to being a chimp,” but that was another story.)

Ofir Drori, Israeli eccentric and transplant, fell in love with Cameroon and all things African, and took a do-gooder approach of saving chimps, even as the humans needed a ton of saving as well. The result was LAGA—the Last Great Ape Organization—based in Yaoundé.

Drawing fully on the only interdiction tool he had—chutzpah—Ofir engaged brain and proceeded. He improvised his own plea bargains, confronting big contraband gangsters with partial details of their misdeeds, and getting them to rat on one another. How he got past the doors of the padrinos, or why he has been left unmolested to this day, kneecaps intact, is a secret best known by him. In countries with the best justice money can buy—Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon—Ofir got an 83 percent incarceration rate from those he went after. Clang-clang, case closed. It’s a miracle.

Wait, though – just picking at the scabs of ape abuse, and by the way, illegal ivory harvesting, LAGA found huge additional sores underneath: the same networks that shipped tons of contraband ivory to unscrupulous buyers in Taiwan often slipped arms, narcotics, and cash into the containers for delivery. NGO private wildlife law enforcement began doing for governments what governments were not positioned to do themselves. It turns out that needlessly torturing apes is unsettlingly akin to other forms of personal gain which can do in the humans as well. Who would have thought? The UN, World Wildlife Fund, and U.S. Fisheries and Wildlife Service all took notice. A lone individual cracked a code, and by the way, got awards from the Secretary General of the UN Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

With Ofir’s brainy methodology even child trafficking gets on the agenda, with Catholic Relief Services now picking up on his model. Transparency International also followed his approach, and set up an anti-corruption hotline to flush out corrupt judges and officials who are more part of the problem than the solution.

In seven years, LAGA has appeared in 366 media pieces and gotten 59,000 views on YouTube. With no government authority (but with cooperation from the latter), LAGA has conducted 244 investigations, and in one case nabbed 21 major dealers in five days. Prosecution? LAGA gives full documentation in 85 percent of the cases, and gets 83 percent in jail.

Abducting an African grey parrot, or a sea turtle, leads in a more or less direct line to contraband and the corruption that robs African people of 25-50 percent of their wealth per year. You don’t have to love chimps, but it helps. Corrupt regimes even turn state’s evidence, caught up in the exhilaration of the process. Most people don’t really prefer to be enemies of humanity, as long as it’s rewarding and fun to join the Other Side.

LAGA puts out a press release every day – that would make over 2,000 to date. They have maintained a stable rate of one arrest per week for the past six years, and have put over 350 dealers behind bars. LAGA has documented that in over 80 percent of its cases, bribing attempts would have averted justice if LAGA had not intervened.

Ofir is still basically a one-man operation, and yes, he needs money in order to keep going. Have a look at his website www.laga-enforcement.org.