KENYA, IN GESTURE, BURNS IVORY TUSKS

By JANE PERLEZ, Special to The New York Times

Published: July 19, 1989

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Email
• Share
• Print
• Reprints
• 
  

NAIROBI, Kenya, July 18— President Daniel arap Moi ignited 12 tons of elephant tusks today in a gesture to persuade the world to halt the ivory trade.

Soon after Mr. Moi lit the 20-foot pile, artfully arranged by a pyrotechnist who specializes in creating fires for movie sets, flames roared upward, blackening the tusks. Experts said the blaze, fed by hundreds of gallons of gasoline, would reduce the tusks to charcoal.

Cabinet ministers, diplomats, white farmers from the highlands and conservationists came out to the Nairobi National Park to see the show. The fire was intended as a statement of the Government's political will to stop the poaching that has reduced Kenya's elephant herds to 17,000 from 65,000 in 1979.

''To stop the poacher, the trader must be also be stopped and to stop the trader, the final buyer must be convinced not to buy ivory,'' President Moi said. ''I appeal to people all over the world to stop buying ivory.'' Fear for Tourism

Underlying the call for a ban is the worry that tourism, which is the country's biggest foreign-exchange earner, will fall off if the elephant disappears.

President Moi said Kenya had decided to burn the stored ivory because it could not urge people not to buy ivory jewelery or carved ornaments and at the same time allow ivory's sale.

The tusks, each marked for weight and size, represented more than 2,000 elephants shot during the last four years. On the open market, the tusks could have brought about $3 million. Most were recovered by the Wildlife Conservation Department from elephants that poachers had shot but left behind, said Iain Douglas Hamilton, a leading authority on elephants. ''But this is a tiny fraction of what was killed,'' Mr. Douglas Hamilton said.

The cache of ivory, which had been in a Government storehouse in Nairobi after collection by game wardens, told a lot about Kenya's elephants, he said. ''There is a dearth of big tusks and a heavy preponderence of female,'' he said. ''The males were largely wiped out years ago'' because of larger tusks. Strategy for a Ban

The burning, apparently the idea of the new director of the Kenyan Wildlife Conservation Department, Dr. Richard E. Leakey, was also organized to emphasize Kenya's determination to win a formal ban on ivory trade at a meeting in Switzerland in October.

There, both ivory producing and consuming countries, who are members of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, will decide whether to declare the elephant an endangered species. Such a declaration would ban trade in elephant products: ivory, skin, meat and hair. South Africa has already said it will not abide by such a ban because its own conservation measures are adequate.

Wildlife officials in Zimbabwe and South Africa, where elephant herds are better protected and the proceeds from sales go back into conservation, described the bonfire as a publicity stunt.

Dr. Leakey did not deny that the bonfire was arranged to seek publicity -the Washington firm of Black, Manafort & Stone, Kenya's new lobbying representative in Washington, sent a representative to help organize the event - but he said he was convinced the burning of ivory would generate funds abroad far outweighing the $3 million worth of tusks.