Thursday, June 13, 2013

Exposed: Rajapaksa’s Blood Ivory Robbery: Justice Rohini Lies Internationally

June 14, 2013

Despite Sri Lanka’s obligations under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, there has been a surreptitious move by the President Mahinda Rajapaksa to misappropriate an entire stock of blood ivory seized by the Sri Lanka Customs, the Colombo Telegraph can exclusively reveal with the documentary evidence today.

On 19th December 2012, on the orders of the President Rajapaksa, the Director General of Customs was directed by the Presidential Secretariat to hand over the entire stock of blood ivory to the Presidential Secretariat to be utilize them for a ‘magnanimous trust work’ launched by the Presidential Secretariat and the DGC Jagath Wijeweera directed the Additional Director General (Enforceemnt) to ‘attend soon’ to the President’s directive.

Any ivory seized shall be destroyed

Despite an international ban adopted in 1989, the global ivory trade seems flourishing. And according to the statistics published by the National Geographic Magazine, last year alone over 25,000 elephants have been killed mainly in Africa to satisfy the human greed for blood ivory, resulting Africa’s elephant population and range dramatically shrinking. And in 2011 poaching hit the highest levels with the greatest impact in the central Africa region.