It is often said that if something is repeated often enough, it becomes accepted as true. This has certainly been the case for the link between terrorism and the poaching of elephants for the ivory trade.
A wide range of public figures have repeated the claim that ivory plays a major role in bankrolling terrorist organisations in Africa. These include former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, UK foreign secretary William Hague and Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta.
The most recent voice to be added to the choir was that of cinema director Kathryn Bigelow. The Oscar-winning director teamed up with charity WildAid to create a short video asserting that trade in ivory is funding the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab, responsible for the 2013 Westgate Mall attack in Kenya in which 67 people died.
As with any illegal activity, it is very difficult to obtain reliable data on the size of the ivory trade. Although there is evidence that it has been used to finance armed groups in Africa such as the Lord’s Resistance Army or the Janjaweed in Darfur, the allegations linking ivory to terrorist groups are much weaker.
They essentially rest on a single report published by the Elephant Action League in 2012. The report asserts, based on a single unnamed “source within the militant group”, that al-Shabaab makes between US$200,000 and US$600,000 from ivory, up to 40% of its income. This over-reliance on a single source and the fact that only a short “journalistic summary” of the report was ever released, has led to scepticism.
