By: Syamsidar

Sad news comes from Tesso Nilo again; in the middle of February seven elephant skeletons were found at once inside the concession of RAPP (APRIL’s group) which is directly adjacent to Tesso Nilo National Park.
These seven elephants which comprises of one adult male, six male calves, and one adult female were guessed to have died more than a month. Based on field check, we assumed that these elephants died of being poisoned.

The team found detergent plastic wrap near the skeletons which presumably was used by angry encroachers as a medium for the poison for the elephants. Marks of use of sharp tools to remove the ivory were seen in one of the skeletons. Number of elephant deaths in Tesso Nilo forest is escalating within these three years which is significantly related to massive encroachment in the park and the surrounding concessions. None of the cases went to court. 

Lack of commitment from the authority to enforce law against elephant death cases is a factor of repeated elephant deaths as there is no deterrent effect of punishment against elephant killing. Less skill of the government’s investigators in conducting investigation and law enforcement process have caused them to respond slowly to elephant death cases. Standard operating procedure to respond to elephant death report is not available yet. This situation may cause the authority do not perform their action as required though WWF has facilitated them in collecting field data but very often that the process stopped at necropsy phase. 

We have pushed the national park authority to investigate this seven elephant skeleton case. Their civil investigators have collected evidences from the scene. To avoid unexpected things to happen such as missing of evidences, the authority had brought all skeletons from the scene to their office however the investigation is going slow and seems to have no progress.Amid the slow progress, three other elephant skeletons were found on end of March in different date. We assumed that these three lately finding skeletons are part of elephant group of the seven skeletons that were found a month before. 

Information of three other skeletons were received from RAPP lately and based on our field check we assumed that these skeletons were from two male elephants and one is unknown. Some of the skeleton parts were missing therefore we found it hard to identify the gender. Media covered a lot of stories of repeated elephant deaths in Riau, especially the finding of seven skeletons to gain public attention on this. However the government still worked slowly to investigate this case further for the law enforcement. If there is no other pressure, we may find this case end similarly with other elephant cases which has no law enforcement.