Conservationists have urged the Binh Dinh provincial People’s Committee to announce soon about how it will deal with the 102 sea turtles. However, to date, no proper solution has been found, while the case is still considered “sensitive”.
The 102 sea turtles were seized by the Binh Dinh provincial market control sub-department from a smuggling case. The turtle individuals were carried from the south to the north and were captured by the relevant taskforces in Tuy Phuoc Town in Binh Dinh province. They are big in size with the shells’ length of between 0.38 and 0.85 meters. They are all dead and have been preserved frozen since then.
Though the preservation of the turtles has gobbled up big money, it’s now still unclear about what to do with them. A lot of individuals and preservation institutions in Vietnam have said they meet difficulties when trying to access local authorities to ask for the information about the fate of the turtles.
Tran Viet Hung, Communication Director of the Education for Nature – Vietnam (ENV), said that ENV has been trying to contact local authorities to ask for information and discuss about how to deal with the turtles. “However, relevant agencies have refused to discuss the issue, reasoning that this is a sensitive issue,” Hung said.
Le Huu Tuan Anh, a senior official of the Department of Exploitation and Protection of Aquatic Resources under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, has said that he is interested in the case, but he has not found any further information.
Meanwhile, Dr Pham Binh Quyen from the Vietnam Association for Conservation of Nature and Environment, said he is so surprised when hearing someone saying that this is “sensitive information”.
“The delicacy here is that the 102 seized sea turtles raises a worry that the biodiversity of the sea areas in Vietnam is now in danger,” Quyen said.
Hoang Van Ha, the coordinator of the Turtle Conservation Program in Vietnam, said the sea turtle is one of the typical biological indicators of marine biodiversity in Vietnam, where five of the seven sea turtles species of the world can be found. "The turtle is an indicator for the freshness of water," Ha said.
"All sea turtles in Vietnam are threatened with extinction," he added.
Selling to get money, or…
The biggest worry for conservationists now is that the local authorities may put the turtles into auctions to get money instead of being ruined or transferred to museums, or to scientists for pure research works.
No one knows which species the seized turtles belong to, except officials. According to Nguyen Van Hoa, Head of the Binh Dinh provincial market control sub-department, all the turtles are tortoise-shells. Meanwhile, tortoise-shell is one of the five species of sea turtles that face the high risks of going extinct in Vietnam, according to Nguyen Van Anh from the Biodiversity Conservation Department under the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment.
Tortoise-shells in particular and sea turtles in general, are all valuable, which can bring big profits to hunters and traders. Therefore, even executive bodies believe that it would be better to put the valuable turtles into auctions to get money which will be spent on strengthening of the taskforce on fighting against smugglers.
Is it illegal to sell the seized turtles? According to Hoang Van Ha, there is no legal document which says that the wild endangered animals must not be auctions in Vietnam.
"So, the fight against the auction of more than 100 sea turtles is the fight for morality rather than a legal war," said Dr Pham Binh Quyen. "The problem is that the management agencies have the right to treat the turtles in accordance with the current laws.”
Meanwhile, Le Huu Tuan Anh said that it would be better to ruin the turtles. “I personally wish to see the turtles to be ruined or treated in non-commercial way, because this can show the determination of the authorities in dealing with the violations of the laws,” he said.
Source: Tien phong
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