The Sunday Times December 19, 2021 25
Charles Saint-Rémy, is the brother-in-law
of Moïse’s predecessor, Michel Martelly,
who served as president from 2011 to- Moïse and Martelly, a musician-
turned-politician based in Miami, were
once close allies. The assumption in
some circles was that as Martelly was con-
stitutionally barred from running for two
consecutive terms, Moïse would “keep
the bench warm” before Martelly
Wales study released in
March that collated 5,000
DNA samples of wild canines
across the country; it found
that 99 per cent were pure
dingoes or hybrids with more
than 50 per cent dingo genes.
“We should be just calling
them dingoes because that’s
what they are,” says Dr KylieCairns, a conservation
biologist from the university
and lead author of the
study.“‘Wild dog’ isn’t a
scientific term — it’s a
euphemism,” she said. Just as
the reintroductions of wolves
to Yellowstone National Park
in 1995 provided more cold,
shaded water for fishbecause the wolves forced elk
to move, leading to more
beaver dams, studies are
showing that the presence of
dingoes protects small native
animals and preserves
landscapes.
Outside the dingo fence
where the predators are
absent, feral cats and
introduced foxes have
flourished, wiping out small
native herbivores such as
hopping mice; their
vegetation diet has increased,
altering the trajectory of
winds which has created
unnaturally taller, harder
sand dunes.
Covering well over a
quarter of a million acres of
Outback Western Australia,
Wooleen station is one of
several vast cattle
properties that are
pioneering a new
attitude toward
dingoes. TheWho’s a good boy now? Australia may be learning to love the dingo
When Elena Swegen moved
to Australia to study dingoes
she was unprepared for the
loathing felt towards the
country’s native dogs — and
what that meant for those
seeking to protect them.
Her new neighbour, a
farmer, shot hundreds of
dingoes and hung the
carcasses from a tree near
Swegen’s farm in rural New
South Wales. The practice,
common in the remote
interior of Australia, is
intended as a warning to the
dingoes but also as a message
to their sympathisers.
To underline his point the
farmer later fired six soft-
nosed bullets into the huge
central Asian shepherd dog
that Swegen, 52, had brought
with her from Russia.
It survived — but Swegen
fled and now lives in forested
hinterland north of Sydney
where her family’s organic
farm produces mozzarella,
yoghurt and feta from the
milk of their buffalo herd.
From there she is helping
to spread a pioneering
movement to challenge the
view of the dingo.
Two skittish dingoes live
with the family and their
small farm is surrounded by
wild dingoes that live, under
rare protection, in the
national park adjoining her
property. Other packs, living
unprotected, are pursued by
hunters with guns and
poisoned by exterminators.
Swegen had to tell her
former university colleagues
in Russia that she could not
aid their research into
dingoes. “I said, ‘Look, they
hate them here. They just kill
them. No one wants to
protect them. I don’t think
they value them’ ,” she told
The Sunday Times at her
farm near Myall Lakes, 170
miles north of Sydney.
Dingoes originated in Asia
14,000 years ago, descended
from wolves. They have
roamed Australia for 4,000
years — having probably
arrived with seafarers. How
to live alongside the animals
has vexed Australians since
white settlers brought 29 fat-
tailed sheep from England
aboard the First Fleet in 1788.
Even today ecologists are
split over the value of
dingoes. While able to run
down their kangaroo prey —
thus helping suppress the
estimated 12 million that
devour pastureland — dingoes
are the enemy of sheep.
“I’ve seen dogs run round
and round in circles outside a
mob of 600 sheep,” said Chris
Patmore, who runs a sheep
farm 200 miles north of
Perth. “Every now and then
they would launch in, grab
one, tear it up, let it go and
then run around again and
have another go, just for the
hell of it,” he told Farm
Weekly.
It is a divide that cleaves
the nation. The world’s
longest fence, running 3,600
miles east-west through
Outback South Australia and
Queensland has since the
1880s tried to keep dingoes
deep within arid country.
Perceptions of the animal
are bitterly contested. State
governments avoid using the
term dingo — preferring
instead to call them wild
dogs, lumping them in with
feral dogs of other breeds.
Laws allowing the mass
slaughter of wild dogs mean
that pure dingoes are
exterminated as pests. This
continues despite a
University of New Southstation once employed ten
full-time dingo shooters.
Today Wooleen’s owner,
David Pollock, allows the
dingoes to roam. “The
dingoes have been marching
back in from the desert over
the last four years,” he said.
“We simply can’t manage
these big, arid properties
without the dingo.”
The return of the dingoes
has slashed the thousands of
kangaroos and wild goats that
depleted the land — allowing
it to be restocked with cattle.
Nevertheless, Pollock said,
attitudes remain entrenched
— a legacy, he believes, of the
sheep farmers who were once
dominant. “We have a culture
of hatred about the dingo
which persists today even
though everybody’s moved
into cattle. It’s just taken as
the norm that you have to kill
all the dingoes,” he said.
The dingo’s infamy is
partly connected to its status
as a very occasional child-
killer. Nine-week-old Azaria
Chamberlain was snatched
from her parents’ tent in
central Australia in 1980 in an
incident that led to her
mother Lindy being
convicted of murder before
new evidence led to her being
cleared.
The case was depicted in
the 1988 film A Cry in the
Dark, starring Meryl Streep
and Sam Neill.
But for the academic
expert Cairns and others, the
time has arrived for
Australians to reimagine the
dingo as a priceless part of
their natural heritage.
“We can now see the value
that dingoes have in the
environment,” Cairns said.
“We need to be thinking
about what changes occur
over a long period when
predators are removed.”Bernard Lagan
Myall Lakes, Australia
MIKE OCONNOR/GETTY IMAGESElena Swegen
keeps two
dingoes at her
farm. A 3,600-
mile fence aims
to confine
dingoes to the
arid interior but
ecologists say
they can be good
for the
environmentNew South
WalesNorthern
Territor ySouth AustraliaMelbourne
500 milesDINGO BARRIER
FENCEQueenslandSydneyEven by the grim standards of Haiti, it was
a brazen, brutal crime. Last July, a group
of mercenaries stormed a hilltop villa
overlooking Port-au-Prince: the private
residence of the president. With little
resistance from the guards outside, they
made their way inside the mansion seek-
ing their target, the 53-year-old Jovenel
Moïse. The softly spoken head of state
was standing defenceless in his bedroom.
His wife was lying on the floor. He was
murdered with 12 shots to his abdomen.
Five months later, no one has been
charged. But last week, a possible motive
for the killing emerged, following an
investigation by The New York Times.
The raid, it concluded, was not simply a
murder mission. The hired hands, mostly
former Colombian soldiers and several
Haitian police officers, had been
instructed to find a dossier, handwritten
by Moïse, which detailed links between
Haiti’s ruling elite and organised crime.
In the preceding months, Moïse had
set about compiling the report, which he
told his inner circle would “name
names”. Convinced his power was being
deliberately stifled by his enemies and
that his life was in danger, he planned to
hand it over to the US Drug Enforcement
Administration, the newspaper claimed.
The theory fits in with previously
unexplained details from the night of his
murder. Officials who went into the villa
Stephen Gibbs Caracas would be killed to obtain a list of drug
dealers. “Surely everyone already knows
who they are?” he said.
“Hand-in-hand with the political and
economic elite, Haiti is run by a criminal
monarchy and it has been for many
years,” he said. “They control an infernal
system whereby if you are not willing to
be corrupt that system will, at best, reject
you. At worst, it will destroy you.”
The months since the murder have
seen Haiti’s descent into total lawless-
ness. Local security experts say around
20 people are being kidnapped each day.
In October, 17 members of a missionary
group — including a baby and four chil-
dren — were taken hostage after visiting
an orphanage. Their abductors had
demanded a $1 million ransom for each of
them. All were eventually released, the
final 12 were set free on Thursday. The
assumption is that a ransom was paid.
Since the assassination, President Joe
Biden has released an extra $50 million of
support for police training. Washington
is in talks with France and Canada over
the possibility of helping Haiti set up an
elite force to tackle the gangs. The inter-
national community has given about $13
billion of aid to Haiti in the past decade.
Deibert is pessimistic the criminality
can be tackled if the murder of the head
of state remains unsolved. “No Haitian in
any position of power seems interested in
finding out who killed the president,” he
said. “That, in itself, is telling.”
returned to office.
However, soon after Moïse was
installed, relations between the two men
began to strain. “Jovenel felt he was being
suffocated by Martelly,” was how one Hai-
tian businessman with government con-
nections described the friction last week.
One senior official Moïse inherited
from his predecessor was the head of the
presidential security, Dimitri Hérard.
Moïse distrusted him. In February the
unpopular president became convinced
a coup was being plotted against him.
It was then that the president report-
edly began compiling a dossier to expose
the murkiest side of Haitian crime and
politics. A handful of aides were asked to
start listing every detail of the country’s
smuggling networks. The information
was collated by Moïse, a stickler for keep-
ing handwritten notes. In the weeks
before he died, he ordered his security
forces to close an illegal airstrip that was
used for drug shipments. It was perhaps
the decision that sealed his fate.
On the night of his murder, Moïse’s
assassins were let in by his guards, who
were under the command of Hérard.
Moïse made several frantic phone calls to
aides, including Hérard, seeking help.
None arrived.
“He believed he would likely be killed
before the end of his term,” said the
American author Michael Deibert, who
interviewed the president several times.
Deibert doubts a Haitian presidentan estimated 100,000
Russian troops near his
neighbour’s borders.
This came in a week in
which Germany expelled two
Russian diplomats after a
Berlin court ruled that the
killing in 2019 by a Russian
of a Chechen former rebel
commander of Georgian
origin in the city’s Kleiner
Tiergarten park was an act of
“state terrorism”.
Under Merkel Germany
acted as a bridge with the
Kremlin and disconcerted its
allies by pressing ahead with
Nord Stream 2, a pipeline
carrying Russian gas directly
to Germany, bypassing
Ukraine.
By contrast, Scholz’s
foreign minister, Annalenafrom which it became
increasingly indistinguishable
during the long years the two
parties served together under
Merkel. The former
chancellor had announced
long before the election her
intention to retire.
Such a move could help
Merz to win back some of
those who have defected in
recent years to the far-right
Alternative for Germany. Yet
it must do so without losing
centrist voters to the present
government coalition.
The challenges,
meanwhile, are beginning to
pile up for Scholz — among
them how to deal with
President Putin, who has
fuelled fears he is going to
invade Ukraine by deployingnext ten years and not the
past ten years.
“Trust me to do that.”
There is no doubting his
energy or determination.
During the election
campaign, Merz, a towering
6ft 6in, charmed crowds with
his passionate rhetoric and
crushed hecklers — in
contrast to the man he
replaces, Armin Laschet, the
mild-mannered former head
of North Rhine-Westphalia,
who stepped down after
leading the party to the worst
defeat in its history.
The two men are also very
different politically. Merz has
repeatedly urged the CDU to
return to its conservative
roots to differentiate itself
from the Social Democrats,critics, however, he is a
throwback to the macho
world of 1990s politics and a
product of the CDU’s
obsession with having “a
strong man” at the helm.
Merz, 66, who will be
formally confirmed in the
post at a party conference
next month, dismissed such
jibes. In a series of post-
victory television interviews
he promised renewal and
vowed to appoint women and
young people to key
positions.
But the CDU also needed to
know again what it stood for,
he said. “This is not going
back to the 1980s or 90s. We
live in the 21st century, in the
third decade. And of course
we will have to talk about thehead of a three-party
coalition with the Greens and
the Liberals.
Now Christian Democrats
have signalled a desire for a
clean break with the past.
Given a chance to choose
their leader for the first time,
the rank and file voted
overwhelmingly last week for
Friedrich Merz, a corporate
lawyer who pilots his own
plane and has frequently said
that the party has lost its
identity by drifting to the left.
“The real end of the Merkel
era,” declared a headline in
Bild, the popular tabloid and
a fan of the new leader. One
of its commentators called
Merz’s win, after two failed
attempts to get the top job, a
“liberation for the CDU”. ForIn a jolt to the cosy,
consensual world of German
politics the Christian
Democrats have chosen as
their new leader a fiery
multimillionaire and long-
term rival of Angela Merkel,
who appears determined to
steer to the right the party the
former chancellor dominated
for almost two decades.
The CDU, which formed
the government for more
than 50 of the past 75 years, is
struggling to come to terms
with its defeat in September’s
general election by Olaf
Scholz, 63, a Social
Democrat, who became
chancellor this month at the
Peter Conradi
Europe Editor
Baerbock, 41, joint leader of
the Greens, has promised a
“values-based” foreign policy
and a tougher line with
Russia as well as with China.
But she may struggle to
prevail, given a foreign
policy and security
establishment dominated
by Social Democrats.
“This is going to be the
real battlefield for this
administration,” said Thomas
Kleine-Brockhoff, the Berlin-
based vice-president of the
German Marshall Fund of the
United States. “Ms Baerbock
has demonstrated she is not
going to be a pushover. But
the whole building is full of
Social Democrats. You could
say she is walled in.”
@Peter_ConradiMerkel’s flamboyant arch-rival pilots their party to the right
Haitian president ‘murdered for
his dossier of drug gang secrets’
Jovenel Moïse’s killing by mercenaries may have been prompted by fears that he was about to name corrupt politicians
immediately after the killing, where they
discovered Moïse’s corpse, also said his
office and bedroom had been ransacked,
with documents strewn across the floor.
The president’s wife, Martine Moïse,
who said she survived by “playing dead”
after being shot in the elbow by the gun-
men, has described how she heard the
killers searching for something specific
on the shelves where her husband kept
his files. “That’s not it, that’s not it. Ah,
that’s it,” were the words she recalled the
men saying, in Spanish, as they rifled
through Moïse’s papers. One man was
apparently on the phone to someone
who appeared to be directing the search.
Once they had found what they were
looking for, they fled.
The Haitian police have since arrested
more than 40 suspects. Those being held
include 18 former Colombian soldiers
and several Haitian police officers.
But the investigation into who ordered
and financed Moïse’s killing has stalled.
Suspicions have been cast everywhere,
including in the direction of the acting
prime minister, Ariel Henry. Phone
records indicate that he spoke to one
suspect on the night of the killing.
Henry, 72, has dismissed all sugges-
tions of his involvement.
Prior to entering politics, Moïse
himself reportedly had dubious
business connections with at least
two men who have been directly
linked with drug trafficking. One,ing held
soldiers
s.
ordered
stalled.
ywhere,
e acting
Phone
to one
lling.
ges-oïse
ous
ast
ctly
ne,Martine Moïse at
a memorial for
her husband,
left, who was
murdered in
July. Nobody
has been
chargedFEDERICO RIOS/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUXofBaer
theG
“val
and
Rus
Bu
pr
po
es
byreal
adm
Klei
base
Germ
Unit
has
goin
thew
Soci
says
@Pes a Haitian president said. That, iniFriedrich Merz,
with his wife,
CharlotteBanca do Antfer
Telegram: https://t.me/bancadoantfer
Issuhub: https://issuhub.com/user/book/1712
Issuhub: https://issuhub.com/user/book/41484