COLUMN ONE : A Wildlife Smuggler’s Paradise : Illicit trading in endangered species flourishes in Thailand. Legal loopholes and corruption make it hard to stop.

When security guards passed the suitcase on Thai International’s Sunday night flight to Paris through a routine X-ray check, they were astounded to see the images of three tiny bodies moving inside.

When the suitcase was opened, customs officials found three rare apes known as gibbons, renowned for their eerie resemblance to small humans. The gibbons had been wedged into a cardboard box so that they could barely move, then wrapped in a towel and stuffed into the suitcase for the 13-hour flight to France.

The smuggling incident at Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport on Oct. 7 provided fresh evidence that Thailand remains a wildlife supermarket, the world center for an illicit trade in endangered species of animals ranging from the orangutans of Indonesia to the crocodile-like caimans of South America.

In addition to serving as an international transit center to “launder” illegally obtained wildlife, Bangkok is home to dealers who now control a growing trade in wildlife poached in the countries of Indochina--Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.

One enterprising Bangkok dealer has even created a fictitious zoo using a post office box in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, giving the impression of legality to help market everything from parrots to camels.

“Principally because of its poor enforcement (of international regulations), Thailand has now taken over from Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore as the favored destination in Asia of much illegal wildlife trade,” said a recent report by the World Wide Fund for Nature. “It is regularly used as a laundering point for wildlife to enter Europe and other countries in Asia.”

There is a huge demand in America for rare parrots and dangerous snakes. Collectors in Japan and elsewhere in Asia seek rare monkeys, such as Vietnam’s douc langur, as exotic pets.

Foreign and Thai conservationists blame the problem largely on a lack of Thai laws to protect animals that are not native to Thailand.

Although the Thai government ratified the 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which sharply restricts imports and exports of animals at risk of extinction, it has never adopted laws to provide enforcement. Five attempts by the Wildlife Department to get legislation passed by Parliament have failed.

Illegally imported animals are “laundered,” or made to appear legal, in several ways. The simplest is to obtain forged documents certifying that the animals can be legally exported, such as for research purposes. Another method used by dealers is to take animals to the Laotian capital of Vientiane, just across the Thai border, obtain legal documents from the Laotian government, which has not signed the endangered species pact, and then import them back into Thailand legally. The same is true of Cambodia.

One other popular method of laundering, according to wildlife experts, is to describe animals being shipped out as something different than what they are. Dealers will obtain clearance for a shipment of parakeets, for example, and then ship rare parrots. One dealer shipped rare birds to the United States marked “Danger: Spitting Cobras,” but the package was nonetheless opened by an intrepid U.S. Customs agent.

Even with native species, the Thai government has a spotty record of enforcement. According to Boonlerd Angsirijinda, chief wildlife enforcement officer in the Forestry Department, customs officials at the airport took no action against the passenger who was attempting to smuggle out the three gibbons, which are now suffering from double pneumonia.

“If you confess, there is no penalty,” Boonlerd said of tourists caught at the airport. “You have to give up the animals, but you can leave the country.”

Similarly, traders caught in Thailand by the police routinely receive suspended jail sentences.

Because of the influx of foreign tourists in recent years, traders have begun using airports at Chiang Mai in the north and Phuket in the south to smuggle animals out of Thailand because customs officials there are unfamiliar with the complicated conservation laws.

The Wildlife Department also has no facilities to care for seized animals, so they are often at risk of dying even if they are rescued. Two British women living in Thailand, Leonie Vejjajiva and Margaret Himathongkom, have started private menageries to care for recovered animals, including the three gibbons.

Bangkok’s tourist shops are filled with items carved from ivory. Shop owners assert that the ivory is from Africa, where exporting ivory is prohibited. But Thailand does not observe the ban and, under Thai law, African ivory is legal.

Still, there are no checks to determine whether the ivory has actually come from Africa or from Thai elephants, which are protected by law. Last month, Sueb Nakhasathien, head of one of Thailand’s largest wildlife sanctuaries, committed suicide to draw attention to the widespread poaching of protected animals.

Similarly, tourist areas are filled with shops offering reptile-skin boots at bargain prices. The boots almost certainly are made in Brazil from skins of the endangered caimans rather than of the far more expensive crocodiles raised in Thailand. But once the skins have been turned into pointed cowboy boots, few stop to ask questions.

Tom Milliken, a Covina, Calif., man who works for an organization called Traffic Japan, which is attempting to restrict illegal wildlife trade in Japan, said there is an enormous market in that country.

Milliken traced several shipments in 1988 in which tens of thousands of caiman skins were sent from South America through Thailand and on to Japan using forged documents obtained in Bangkok to obscure their origins. At one point, the Japanese government sent a query by telex to the Thai Wildlife Department; the reply by telex came instead from a wildlife dealer, indicating that government employees were working on both sides of the fence.

“The Thai law contains a major loophole,” Milliken said. “If the situation doesn’t improve qualitatively, I think you’ll see sanctions being imposed against Thailand.”

Even Pairot Suwannakorn, director general of the Forestry Department, who has been praised by foreign experts for his efforts to reform his agency, said the existing laws “are simply ridiculous. We don’t have the power to arrest.”

He added that corruption among government officials who profit from the trade “is a big problem.”

As just about every tourist who has visited Bangkok knows, the city’s weekend Chatuchak market is a center for the wildlife trade. During a visit in early October, a trader produced a gibbon from a hiding place and offered it for sale for 3,000 baht, about $120.

Another loophole in Thai laws that benefits small dealers allows individuals to own two protected animals as pets. Thus, even if caught with two gibbons at the market, a dealer can avoid prosecution by saying they are merely pets. Dealers frequently employ children as salesmen, thus avoiding prosecution altogether.

According to Boonlerd of the Forestry Department, 57 people have been arrested for wildlife trade this year and the government has confiscated 1,559 birds, 481 reptiles and 123 mammals, mostly monkeys. It also has taken possession of 10,159 illegal skins.

Ironically, the wildlife trade is so open that a worldwide conference on conservation was held recently at a Bangkok hotel that advertises that it has hundreds of rare birds in cages on its grounds. The export to Thailand of many such birds is barred under the endangered-species convention.

Besides the weekend market and individual vendors serving tourists, there are four major wildlife traders in Bangkok who act as conduits for shipping abroad, wildlife groups say. Many use impoverished zoos in Eastern Europe to further help “launder” the animals, obscuring their true origins, according to Thai wildlife officials.

In exchange for a specimen or two of an endangered animal, the zoos provide the dealers with certificates falsely showing that other specimens of the animal were born in captivity. Under the international convention, the sale of endangered species born in captivity is legal.

One of the four traders, Preecha Varavichit, who operates a company called Pimjai Birds, told the newspaper Bangkok Post recently that he paid $5,000 to the Laotian government to operate out of Vientiane, where wildlife trading is conducted at a former army camp and is apparently legal.

“Laos has a lot of wildlife,” he said.

Preecha told the newspaper that senior Thai officials “have never questioned me, and they don’t dare.” He was quoted as saying that “if government officials did not give their cooperation, I would not be able to do business. Don’t blame me alone. They work as a team. If they take legal action against me, I will reveal everything.”

Shirley McGreal, head of the International Primate Protective League in Summerville, S.C., said in a telephone interview that the flourishing trade is doubly worrying because of the destructive way in which the wildlife is collected.

A baby gibbon, for example, can be taken only if the mother is killed, usually by high-powered rifle. But the subsequent fall from a tree often injures the baby as well, meaning that 20 gibbons may die for each one sold on the market.

“It’s very, very destructive of the species,” McGreal said. “There is such terrible waste.”

According to McGreal and others, the animals are also shipped in horrific conditions. A gorilla sent from Africa to Bangkok via Moscow arrived frozen solid. One Japanese tourist had 11 rare monkeys jammed into a carry-on bag. When discovered by Tokyo customs, five of the monkeys had suffocated.

Pisit na Patalung, head of the Wildlife Fund of Thailand, said he objects to the sheer cruelty of the animal dealers. Monkeys’ teeth are pulled out with pliers or cut with clippers to make their bites harmless. Smugglers have gotten some small leopards out of Thailand by dyeing their fur black and claiming them as house cats. Rare birds are drugged and stuffed into suitcases.

Perhaps the most famous case involves what has become known as the “Bangkok Six,” six orangutans shipped from Singapore to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, via Bangkok last February. Singapore does not X-ray personal baggage as a security precaution, and so it is another favorite conduit for wildlife smugglers.

In this case, the shipment was discovered in Bangkok because of a clerical oversight; the Soviet airline Aeroflot would not carry animals without a waybill. When the crate was opened, the six orangutans were found stuffed in straw to keep them from moving, three of them upside down. A West German national, Kurt Schafer, who works for a wildlife trader in Bangkok, was later fined about $1,000 by a Singapore court for attempting to smuggle the animals to the Belgrade Zoo in Yugoslavia.

According to McGreal, the six orangutans were apparently headed for a wildlife dealer in Miami. The apes have been popular in the United States since Clint Eastwood made a series of films with them.

The case of the Bangkok Six caused a furor in Thailand. Photographs appeared around the world showing the injured apes. Although shipped back to their native Indonesia, four of them have since died.

Despite the outcry, a wild animal dealer in Jakarta has four orangutans awaiting shipment, according to Leonie Vejjajiva.

“It’s just too horrible to contemplate,” she said.