Source : Bangkok Post, Thailand, 05 Sep '06
By : DPA
  

Chawal Thanyikorn, deputy director general of the National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation Department, said the 48 apes will be flown on military aircraft to Borneo, Indonesia, in the third week of this month, where they will be kept under quarantine for three months.

"Once they are there we don't want them back," said Chawal, of the orangutans, who have been a source of international embarrassment for the Thai government.

Six orangutans will need to remain in Thailand for further DNA testing to determine their place of origin, Chawal said.

In early 2005, Thai forestry authorities, responding to complaints from animal protection groups, raided the Safari World zoo on the outskirts of Bangkok and confiscated more than 100 orangutans to determine whether they had been purchased illegally by the zoo's owner, Pin Kiewkacha.

DNA tests showed that 54 of the seized primates had been acquired illegally, and a two-year investigation was launched into the origin of the primates that is only now leading to the apes' repatriation.

The orangutan repatriation operation has been a test case for regional cooperation under the ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network, set up in Bangkok on December 1, 2005.

Thai, Indonesian and Malaysian authorities met in Bangkok in April, this year, to determine where the 54 primates originated. Orangutans are indigenous to Indonesia, Brunei and Malaysia, but not to Thailand.

Thailand's failure to quickly repatriate the 54 orangutans was heavily criticized at the last meeting of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) members that was hosted by Bangkok in November and December of 2005.

One of the concrete measures to emerge from that CITES meeting was the launch of a new ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network to facilitate cooperation in cracking down on the flourishing illegal trade in wildlife in the region.

ASEAN stands for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations which groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.