The Botswana High Court’s ruling in favour of the Bushmen who were forcibly removed from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), means that more than 1Â 000 displaced people can return immediately to their ancestral land.
“It is their constitutional right to go back as soon as they like,” said lawyer Gordon Bennett, who represented 239 applicants in the matter. “They’ll just have to work out some kind of arrangement with the government so that they can go back in an orderly fashion.”
The Bushmen were forcibly removed in three campaigns in 1997, 2002 and 2005 and were resettled in desolate camps several kilometres outside the reserve. The government of Botswana first planned to remove the Bushmen in 1986, shortly after the discovery of kimberlite deposits in the reserve in 1984, but could not find a suitable settlement for them.
In the run-up to the removals the Bushmen were stripped of their rights to practise their hunter-gatherer lifestyle with the removal of hunting licences, the banning of crop cultivation and the holding of domestic livestock.
In the judgement the court ruled that the government was not obliged to provide essential services for the Bushmen returning to the reserve. According to indigenous people’s rights group Survival International this is meant to discourage their return.
“The government provides essential services to other communities living in remote areas and the CKGR is a remote area,” said Fiona Watson, the organisation’s campaigns coordinator. “Previously they did provide mobile health services, pension and a school, but in the period leading up to the removals, the government used pressure and intimidation tactics, stopped hunting licenses and removed the water supply.”
Roy Sesana, the leader of the Bushmen rights group First People of the Kalahari, said the Bushmen were happy with their land, as long as they had access to food and water. “We don’t necessarily need their services because in the first instance, those services are the ones that made us lose our land,” he said, alluding to the government’s claim that they were being relocated to aid their development as a people.
Bennett said the case had nothing to do with diamond mining, which was set to happen in Gope, an area inside the reserve. “All we were saying is you can’t move people from their land without consent and the court agreed that there was no consent. I can’t say that it is connected to the diamond mining, but the move to remove them followed quickly after the discovery of the kimberlite in the area.”
The Botswanan government refused to comment on the judgement, saying an official statement would be released later. A Botswana government official, who did not want to be named, said he doubted whether the Bushmen would want to return to the CKGR as no services were going to be provided by the government. He said regulations requiring proof that hunting was for sustenance still had to be obtained and might act as a further deterrent. Furthermore, he said, the status quo with regard to ownership of diamond-rich land would not change any time soon.
The Botswana government opposed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which was recently adopted by the Human Rights Council of the United Nations General Assembly.
In a statement to the General Assembly last month, Botswana’s ambassador to the United Nations Samuel Outlule, said the absence of a definition of “indigenous peoples” within the declaration “left it wide open for any group or community to identify itself as indigenous”. He said the UN should not appear to be promoting initiatives whose unintended consequences might be “the unraveling and disintegration of the state”.