At Surabaya Zoo, Animals Bear Brunt of Management Fiasco
The Jakarta Globe, February 7 2014
Surabaya/Jakarta. It’s a weekday afternoon, and Surabaya Zoo is as quiet as it’s going to get before the weekend rush of visitors.
It looks run-down; the bars and chicken wire that fence off the animal enclosures are rusty, and several of the enclosures look as though they haven’t been cleaned in a while. The walls need a fresh coat of paint.
For Indonesia’s biggest zoo, it comes off as parochial. But the tensions bubbling beneath its rustic surface are fed by the kind of intrigue found in paperback thrillers — allegations of illicit animal smuggling, protection rackets, poisoning, and a network of zoos run in quasi-Mafia fashion.
Musical chairs
Surabaya Zoo is officially back under the management of the city, which took it over in July last year from a caretaker team that had been appointed by the Forestry Ministry in August 2010 to stem a tide of up to 500 animal deaths a year under previous managements dating back to 2006.
The deaths have not ceased; 106 animals were reported to have died since the city took charge in July, four of them this year, including a lion that was strangled to death last month after getting caught in a steel cable that was part of its enclosure.
A big part of the problem, says Tony Sumampau, the director of Taman Safari Indonesia and the head of the now-dissolved caretaker team, is that animal welfare has always been low on the list of priorities of the city-appointed zoo officials.
High on the list, he says, is the money that the officials make from the various vendors and stall owners who have set up shop inside the zoo.
The restaurants, Tony says, generate up to a Rp 50 million ($4,100) a month in kickbacks to the officials, while the smaller eateries pay a combined Rp 25 million.
The fees are illegal — as is the presence of many of the food stalls and vendors of other knickknacks. That makes the protection racket a valuable one for those running it, Tony says.
“So if their interests are disturbed, they resort to sabotage,” he says.
“For instance, they can kill an animal.”
Tony claims this has happened during his watch, when his team tried to clear away some of the illegal vendors. An animal (he declines to give details) was found dead one day, and an autopsy found it had been poisoned with cyanide.
“There’s no way a visitor would have done that. It was certainly someone on the inside,” he says.
Wayan Titib Sulaksana, the former legal and administrative affairs officer in the short-lived management of Basuki Rekso Wibowo, one of many appointed to try and improve conditions at the zoo since 2001, also alleges that making money from the protection racket has always been more important for some zoo officials than taking care of the animals.
He says one of the first things he noticed when Basuki, a law professor at Surabaya’s Airlangga University, took charge in August 2009 was the sheer number of vendors operating in the zoo, often right up against the animal enclosures.
“Why on earth would there be people selling sandals and T-shirts at a zoo?” Wayan says. “What did any of that have to do with conservation?”
Wayan and Basuki tried to evict the vendors, both inside and outside the zoo, many of whom were also illegally siphoning electricity from the zoo.
But they encountered resistance from the longtime workers at the zoo, many of whom either ran the illegal concession stands or had allowed their family or friends to sell inside the zoo.
Wayan later found that the zoo’s worker recruitment system was plagued by the same problem: older employees were deliberately blocking the hiring of fresh staff and steering the jobs to their children, relatives or friends, who in most cases were unqualified for the positions.
“So it’s no wonder that the problems at the zoo have become so deeply entrenched over the years,” he says.
Wayan’s attempts to clean up the zoo management went unfinished when just six months after taking over, Basuki’s team was replaced, at the city’s behest, by the previous management led by Stany Soebakir. (Stany’s team was itself just months later replaced once again, this time by Tony’s, upon the intervention of the Forestry Ministry.)
“They hired thugs to kick us out of Surabaya Zoo,” Wayan says of Stany’s team.
Stany also precipitated the ouster of Tony’s team last year, when he threatened to file suit against the administration of Surabaya Mayor Tri Rismaharini if it did not take immediate measures to restore his management.
Facing mounting pressure, Rismaharini ordered the zoo back under city management — but left Stany out of the picture. (That hasn’t stopped his supporters from claiming ownership of the zoo, as they did last month after the Forestry Ministry said it would issue a conservation permit formally approving the Surabaya administration as the zoo’s new management; they insist Stany owns the land on which the zoo, and most of the animals too).
The zoo boss
While Stany’s name has come up at nearly every mention of the zoo, one that has remained largely unspoken is that of Rahmat Shah, a member of the Regional Representatives Council (DPD) and chairman of the Indonesian Zoo and Aquarium Association (PKBSI).
Rahmat is one of several officials reportedly named by Rismaharini in a recent filing to the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) about the alleged illegal trade of up to 483 animals from the zoo, including highly endangered species such as the Sumatran tiger and Bali starling.
He also came to the attention of the Jakarta Globe when US filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer sent an e-mail noting that Rahmat was featured in his Academy Award-nominated documentary “The Act of Killing,” in which he can be seen showing someone around his “dead animal museum, joking about possibly shooting the very last black rhino,” Oppenheimer says.
A source familiar with the problems at the zoo alleges that Rahmat and Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan duped Tony, whose primary concern was to ease overcrowding by moving some of the animals out of Surabaya to other zoos that could take better care of them, into arranging for the animals to be traded to their own network of zoos, all for free.
“By using his power and position as chairman of the PKBSI, and the pretext of wanting to save the zoo, Rahmat conspired to have Tony’s team take over Surabaya Zoo,” the source said.
Animals were moved to Pematang Siantar Zoo, in North Sumatra, owned by Rahmat, and to the newly built zoo in Banyuwangi, East Java, reportedly owned by Zulkifli.
Local media reported that other animals were sent to Lembah Hijau Park in Lampung, owned by Rahmat’s family.
Calls by the Globe to the PKBSI for comment were not immediately answered.
For his part, Zulkifli insists that the animal transfers will continue under the city’s management. He says up to 1,000 animals should ideally be moved to better-equipped facilities, but to date fewer than 200 have been moved.
He points out that some enclosures, built for a maximum of four animals to move around comfortably, now hold up to 50 animals. Overcrowding in the mountain goat enclosure was blamed for the death last month of a kid goat, which was attacked by a ram.
Zulkifli says it is also important to move animals out to prevent in-breeding among species. He adds that the management of the zoo is now fully in the hands of the Surabaya administration.
For Rosek Nursahid, chairman of the wildlife conservation group ProFauna Indonesia, saving the zoo will require more than just another management change. It will need a complete purge of all workers, most of them aligned with Stany’s team, and the introduction of an entirely new team of workers, keepers, veterinarians and animal carers, he says.
Wayan and Tony both agree. Wayan has called for existing employees to be subjected to the standard round of recruitment tests, and if they fail, as he predicts many will, then new recruits must be hired with the proper qualifications.
But Tony says all workers must be replaced. He argues that an all-new workforce will be less likely to fall under the sway of parties trying to retain control of the zoo and its operations for their own interests. The existing 186 workers, he says, should be given jobs with the city administration.
The city has announced big plans for the zoo, including installing surveillance cameras throughout the site, improving the quality of the food given to the animals, upgrading its veterinary facilities, and cleaning up and making the enclosures safer and more comfortable for the animals.
Tellingly, it has announced no plans to overhaul the staff or to address the problem of animal overcrowding.
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vr 7 feb 2014 - 4:19