Chad fights back to protect elephants from poachers

0 Comments | AFP, June, 2007

THE HAGUE (AFP) — Chad's President Idriss Deby Itno has detached 400 regular army soldiers to defend the remnants of a once-thriving elephant population decimated by poachers, the country's top conservation official said.

"The soldiers are taking positions in and around Zakouma National Park as we speak," Abakar Mahamat Zougoulou, who is in The Hague to attend a meeting of the international body that regulates the trade of endangered species, told AFP on Monday.

"Twenty years ago we had 40,000 elephants," said Zougoulou, whose main mission at the 171-nation Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is to lobby and vote for a 20-year, worldwide ban on the trade in ivory.

"Today we have less than 6,000, and the...