It might have been a scene from one of Africa's guerrilla wars: four men wearing green fatigues and packing FN assault rifles fanned out across a wooded ridge. The bush crackled under a punishing afternoon sun as the government patrol scoured the hillside for enemy tracks. Then they heard it: the low murmur of voices drawing closer. Below them, a file of four men -- three carrying AK-47 rifles -- slowly advanced through a yellow sea of elephant grass. Without warning, the government patrol opened fire, gunning down all four in 40 seconds. When the bodies were searched, they recovered 278 rounds of ammunition, two ivory tusks and the horns of a black rhinoceros.
This recent skirmish in Zimbabwe's Zambezi Valley was no military operation. The government patrol consisted of game rangers from the country's Department of National Parks and Wild Life Management. The enemy was a gang of poachers that had crossed the border from neighboring Zambia to plunder one of Zimbabwe's most treasured resources -- the last great population of black rhinos living in the wild.
The rhinoceros is one of earth's oldest creatures, dating from the Eocene epoch, when horses were the size of dogs, some 55 million years ago. There are five surviving rhino species -- black, white, Sumatran, Indian and Javan -- all of them endangered because of poachers who kill them for their horns. Africa's black, or hooked-lipped, rhino (Diceros bicornis) is the latest to land on the endangered list. In 1970 there were 65,000 of the beasts roaming the rough bush country of east, central and southern Africa. Today there are fewer than 4,000, half of them in Zimbabwe. The Zambezi Valley, with more than 500 animals, now holds the world's last viable breeding herd. To defend them, the country has launched a controversial shoot-on-sight war against poachers, who are killing the rhinos at a rate of one a day. "We have an obligation to the rest of the world to save our rhinos," declares Willie K. Nduku, Zimbabwe's director of national parks. "We won't spare our ammunition."
Operation Stronghold, as the policy is known, was approved by Prime Minister Robert Mugabe in mid-1985, when less violent attempts to arrest poachers proved ineffective. Most of the rhino hunters cross the border from Zambia. Rangers try to stop them without bloodshed, insists Blondie Leathem, 29, who coordinates the Zambezi Valley patrols, but "trying to arrest a man with an AK-47 is like trying to grab a lion with your bare hands. We must often shoot first to protect our lives."
Supplied in part by American donations, the gunslinging rangers have so far captured 21 poachers and killed 29. But the gangs keep coming, and parks officials admit that they are in a losing battle. Their only hope is to slow down illegal hunting in order to buy time for two other efforts to save the rhinos. One is capturing and moving as many of the animals as possible away from the Zambezi Valley to safer sanctuaries. The other involves an international campaign of diplomacy and media pressure to shut down the trade in rhino horn.