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Our point of focus is mainly enforcement, enforcing the laws.
Basically for us, the lack of application of the law – often be-
cause of corruption in governments – is the main problem that is
causing the extinction of gorillas and other species. Therefore for
us, what we would like to see is a big push on enforcement. It’s
looking at the hard issues, not the soft issues, like education, and
like many other long term solutions, what we want to see is ac-
tion. The traders, who are trading gorillas, big, high officials, are
through corruption leading gorillas to extinction – and that’s
not an easy issue. That is an issue that needs a lot of political
power, political push, but this is the situation as we see it.
What we have here is a crisis. The situation for gorillas didn’t
get better. We have tried a lot of different methods over the years.
I think that trying to sensitise communities, education, trying
to do many conferences with government, training, didn’t get
us very far. We have many striking examples of this huge gap
between the conferences hall and field realities. I think that we
need to wake up if we are to save the Great Apes.
Indeed the situation is deteriorating, in Cameroon at least. We
have lost our rhino, we are probably going to lose our lions in
a year or two and Great Apes will come next. This is the situ-
ation for Cameroon and I think that in other countries it may
be even worse for Great Apes.
If we are to save the Great Apes, we need to do something
totally different. I would say, cut the conferences off, cut the
speeches, cut all the huge, long political processes, and let’s
get down to work – action. Let’s get down and see what hap-
pens next month. Do we have those big-time dealers? Not
small poachers in the villages, because our problem is not
in the villages, our problem is with government officials, our
problem is with military officials, our problem is with huge,
big, wealthy businessmen who are trading in apes. We want
those people behind bars and that’s where we will start get-
ting a message that things need to change. Conference halls
don’t get us very far.
Ofir Drori
Founder/Director of the Last Great Ape
Organisation, Cameroon
INTERVIEW
“
What we want to see
is action
”