The Illicit Ivory Trade and Joseph Kony

Invited Special Guests:
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce and Ranking Member Eliot Engel

Panelists:
Kathryn Bigelow, Sasha Lezhnev, Jackson Miller, Ledio Cakaj

Various rebel groups and criminal organizations are involved in wildlife trafficking globally. Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a U.S.-designated terrorist group that has abducted over 66,000 youth for use as child soldiers, servants, and sex slaves, has been actively engaged in elephant poaching and ivory trafficking in order to sustain its operations.

Kony’s fighters are part of an onslaught of elephant poaching by an array of armed groups and poachers, including from Sudan and South Sudan, which has left rangers in national parks besieged, under resourced, and often out-matched. The elephant population in Congo’s Garamba National Park has already been decimated from 20,000 in the 1980s to approximately 1,000 today, and it could be wiped out entirely.

This panel will present findings from recent field research in central Africa on the LRA’s ivory trafficking, its internal power dynamics, and the need for additional U.S. policy tools to combat the illicit trade.

In May 2015, Representatives Ed Royce and Eliot Engel introduced H.R. 2494, the Global Anti-Poaching Act. Please join us for a collaborative discussion on the connection between wildlife trafficking and human rights, and the positive impact that consumers and the U.S. Government, particularly Congress, can have.

Speaker Bios:

Kathryn Bigelow, Film Director
Kathryn Bigelow is the award-winning director and producer of THE HURT LOCKER and ZERO DARK THIRTY. ZERO DARK THIRTY was nominated for five Academy Awards in 2013 including Best Picture and Best Actress. The film was also nominated for four Golden Globes including a win for Jessica Chastain as Best Actress.  In 2009, Bigelow's direction and producing of THE HURT LOCKER earned her two Oscars, including one for Best Picture. THE HURT LOCKER also garnered Golden Globe nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, a Best Picture win from the Producer's Guild of America, and a Best Director win for Bigelow from the DGA. The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won 6, including Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Screenplay.  Kathryn also recently created the Public Service Announcement LAST DAYS in conjunction with WildAid and Annapurna Pictures, and was awarded The Humane Society of the United States Genesis Award in 2014 for Outstanding Short Film.  The award cited the "impactful story-telling to call critical attention to the link between terrorism and the ivory trade and its dire consequences for elephants.” 

Jackson Miller, Analyst, C4ADS
Jackson Miller is an Analyst with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS).  He received his undergraduate degree in international politics and Chinese studies from New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.  He has worked and researched throughout China, including Xinjiang, as well as in Kenya, and speaks Mandarin and French. The coauthor of the 2014 C4ADS report Out of Africa, Jackson leads the C4ADS Environmental Crimes Fusion Cell. In addition to transnational wildlife crime, his work highlights East Asian security issues.

Sasha Lezhnev, Associate Policy Director, Enough Project
Sasha Lezhnev is Associate Director of Policy at the Enough Project, where he focuses on peace, conflict, and corporate accountability issues in central Africa. He is a Governance Committee member of the Public-Private Alliance on Responsible Minerals Trade (PPA). Sasha is also Founding Director of the Grassroots Reconciliation Group, an organization that runs projects with former child soldiers in northern Uganda. He previously worked at Global Witness, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of Peace on U.S. policy issues on conflict resources, extractive industries transparency, and peace processes in Africa. He was based in Uganda for 2 1/2 years as Senior Program Officer with the Northern Uganda Peace Initiative and advisor to the chief mediator of the peace process with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

He is author of the book Crafting Peace: Strategies to Deal with Warlords in Collapsing States. He holds a Master's in International Relations from Cambridge University and a B.S. in Foreign Service magna cum laude from Georgetown University.

Ledio Cakaj, Independent Consultant
Ledio Cakaj, author of the upcoming Enough Project report on the LRA and ivory, is an independent researcher with a focus on armed groups, demobilization and reintegration of former combatants, and security sector reform. He has worked for over ten years in central and east Africa, having conducted extensive field research in Burundi, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Ledio has written a series of reports for various organizations including the Enough Project, the Resolve and the World Bank. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Jane’s Intelligence Review, the Africa Report and the Journal of East African Studies. He is also the author of the book When the Walking Defeats You; A young man’s journey inside the Lord’s Resistance Army, to be published in 2017 by Zed Books.