The World Wildlife Fund now wishes to congratulate Cameroon’s government for its decision to send as many as 600 elite soldiers to protect the country against poachers.
These soldiers now find themselves at a distance of roughly fifty kilometers from Chad's border, and fairly close to North Cameroon’s Bouba N’Djida National Park.
Apparently, the decision to secure the country's borders against poachers with the help of soldiers comes as a result of nearly 300 elephants having been slaughtered in said national park earlier this year.
“WWF would like to congratulate the President of Cameroon for the decision to deploy Special Forces to protect vulnerable areas, people and elephants from heavily armed foreign poaching gangs,” stated the Director General for WWF International, Jim Leape.
As this organization argued time and time again, keeping poachers at bay and putting an end to the illegal trade in animal parts is not just a matter of safeguarding biodiversity.
Quite the contrary: it also has a lot to do with international security and protecting vulnerable human communities against what these poachers are capable of.
General Martin Tumenta, one of the military leaders presently accompanying these 600 soldiers on their mission to defend Cameroon’s border's against poachers, made a case of how, “They are highly armed, they have machine guns, automated rifles... they wear uniforms, they are organized and they are after our elephants.”
“What we are dealing with is an army, platoon, battalion, that does not hesitate to cross our borders to rob it of its natural heritage,” GeneraL Martin Tumenta went on to add.
According to several estimates released by the WWF, roughly 700,000 elephants were killed in Africa within an incredibly short time frame: between 1970 and 1989. Most of these killings were carried out to provide for the illegal ivory market.
WWF hopes that other nations will follow in Cameroon’s footsteps, and that Africa's elephants will eventually be rescued from becoming extinct.
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