Botswana’s police commissioner said on Tuesday that officers had fired rubber bullets to disperse a group of about 35 Bushmen protesting their eviction from ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
The Basarwa tribesmen had been trying to break through blockades and enter the reserve on Saturday, police commissioner Edwin Batshu said. Some demonstrators, including mothers with infants and young children, were briefly detained, but were not charged, he said.
The Kalahari Bushmen said their leader, Roy Sesana, was arrested and beaten by police. One protester was shot in the jaw and hospitalised, according to a tribal spokesperson who did not want to be named for fear of police retaliation.
The Batswara accused the government of evicting them to relocation camps in an effort to clear the land for De Beers mining giant to explore for diamonds and minerals.
An estimated 2 000 people have been relocated to camps. However, several families were still living in the reserve, cut off from food and water, the Bushmen said.
The government said it needed to close parts of the game reserve to protect wildlife from a disease spread by domestic goats smuggled in by the Bushmen.
Presidential spokesperson Jeff Ramsay blamed the demonstrators, saying police had acted with restraint.
”When the police would not let them enter the reserve, the demonstrators broke into a riot and attacked the police with an assortment of weapons,” Ramsay said.
”To maintain law and order, the police were forced to fire three rubber bullets, one of which hit and slightly injured one of the demonstrators,” he said.
Since diamonds were discovered in the country in 1967, Botswana has prospered with the trade accounting for half of government revenues and three-fourths of export earnings.
But the row over the Bushmen has tarnished the image of Botswana, a nation of 1,5-million people that has been a model democracy for other African nations.
In 1991, Sesana set up the First People of the Kalahari organisation to campaign for the Bushmen’s human rights.
On Thursday, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Awards, known as the ”alternative Nobels,” for ”resolute resistance against eviction from their ancestral lands, and for upholding the right to their traditional way of life”. – Sapa-AP