By Maidhc Ó Cathail. Published in Beo! September 2008.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is the world’s largest conservation organisation, with an income of $200 million a year. The WWF is familiar to most people with its easily recognisable symbol – the panda. Less well-known, however, is the secret history of this powerful organisation.
The WWF was founded on September 11, 1961 following a series of articles in The Observer written by Sir Julian Huxley, in which he claimed that Africa’s wildlife was in great peril. Huxley primarily blamed human development in Africa. According to Huxley and the other British aristocrats who founded the WWF, the newly independent African states would be unable to preserve African wildlife without the guidance of the white man. As the British empire was declining, a new kind of empire made its appearance – the conservation empire.
Nearly fifty years on, more than 10 percent of the earth’s land surface has been preserved for nature. An area twice the size of Australia cannot be cultivated, although we are told that there are food shortages in many countries. Worse still, the poorer the country, the more land it has to put aside for nature, if it wishes to get loans or aid from the World Bank of the International Monetary Fund. In Tanzania, for example, over 40 percent of the country is conserved.
Of course, in order to achieve this, lots of natives had to be evicted, not only in Tanzania but throughout Africa. Referring to sub-Saharan Africa, journalist Kevin Dowling claimed that between 30 and 50 million people have been displaced by the conservation industry.
Two controversial members of European royalty played a key role in the development of this new empire. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands became the first president of the WWF in 1961. Before he married the future Queen Juliana of the Netherlands in 1936, the German prince was an officer in the SS, and controversy followed him throughout his life. He was forced to resign the WWF presidency in 1976 when it emerged during a hearing of the U.S. Senate that the prince had solicited $1 million from Lockheed in exchange for a contract to sell fighter planes to Holland.
Prince Philip of Britain then assumed the presidency. Like his friend Bernhard and many of the WWF leadership, the Duke of Edinburgh likes to hunt big game – tigers, elephants, etc. – the kind of animals that they are supposed to be conserving.
Rich man’s club
In the early 1970s, the WWF managed to raise a substantial sum of money through a plan known as “The 1001: A Nature Trust.” For $10,000, one thousand rich individuals received life membership of the 1001 Club – Prince Bernhard was the “one.” The man who sold the costly membership was Charles de Haes, an employee of Rothmans International, who had been appointed as personal assistant to the prince at the WWF. Strangely, the tobacco company owned by South African Anton Rupert supplied both money and personnel to run the WWF. Stranger still, de Haes sold membership to some people that you wouldn’t expect would have anything to do with wildlife conservation.
Although the 1001 membership list is secret, some of the names have been revealed from time to time, and it’s no wonder that it’s secret. Mobuto Sese Seko, the egregiously corrupt dictator of Zaire from 1965 to 1993, was a member. There were plenty of people with major legal problems, like Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of the BCCI bank, used by the CIA to launder drug money. Even worse, there were lots of people with disastrous environmental records, like Daniel Ludwig, whose companies destroyed large stretches of the Amazon rainforest.
It’s unlikely that the likes of Mobuto, Abedi, or Ludwig were overly concerned about wildlife conservation. Why then did they, and the other billionaires, give $10,000 to the WWF?
If the members of the 1001 Club are not too perturbed about African wildlife, they certainly have an interest in the continent’s other valuable resources. Of course, many of them are owners or managers of oil and mining corporations. The WWF is often criticised for being overly sympathetic to these same corporations. And how convenient for the likes of Shell, BP, Barrick Gold, De Beers and Rio Tinto Zinc that so much valuable land has been cleared of natives by the conservation industry.
Covert operation
It appears that the WWF hasn’t been very successful in preserving wildlife either. In 1996, South Africa’s post-Apartheid government set up a judicial commission of inquiry which confirmed that the Apartheid government had used profits from poached ivory and other stolen resources to finance the destabilisation of neighbouring countries, wars in which 1.5 million people were killed. There was scarcely a word about the Kumleben report in the press, however.
Not only did the WWF do nothing to stop the South African army from committing what one journalist called “the wildlife crime of the century,” but the wildlife organisation was even involved with some of that pariah government’s covert activities.
At the end of the eighties, the WWF took part in a covert operation called Operation Lock, in which the conservation organisation hired mercenaries from KAS Enterprises. Owned by the founder of the SAS, Sir David Stirling, KAS was widely believed to be a front for MI6. At any rate, KAS was supposed to be training an anti-poaching unit in the countries surrounding South Africa. The true object of the operation came under suspicion, however, when it appeared that many of the poachers killed were ANC members.
It wasn’t surprising, perhaps, considering that many members of the 1001 Club were also members of the Broederbond, a powerful Afrikaner society with the aim of maintaining white rule in South Africa.
Censorship
But if things are so bad, why doesn’t everyone know the truth about the WWF? Why hasn’t this scandalous story been covered by the media? Well, two credible journalists have written about the WWF’s secret history, but look what happened to them.
Raymond Bonner, a New York Times correspondent, wrote At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa’s Wildlife in which he exposed many of the WWF’s embarrassing secrets. The book was withdrawn shortly after its publication in Britain in 1993. Whatever happened to Bonner himself, he prefers not to talk about the whole affair now.
Kevin Dowling was a print journalist and television producer in Britain. Dowling’s “The Secret History of the Wildlife Conservation Movement” is the best account of the WWF, but he was unable to get it published in any mainstream media. And it now seems that Dowling has given up on the story. As he recently wrote to me: “I am extremely reluctant to take the matter further, in view of the damage this organisation did, not only to me, but to other journalists.”
So then, the WWF clearly has the power to prevent the ugly truth behind the cuddly image of the panda from ever reaching an unsuspecting public.
This article was originally published in the Irish-language magazine Beo! That article can be read here.
