“Houses are still being burned down, and people are being displaced violently. Tauli-Corpuz will tell the congress that nature conservation is not working for people or for wildlife. She has already sounded the alarm at the UN over the impact that conservation is having on tribal peoples in Kenya, Uganda, Bangladesh, Namibia, Botswana, Ethiopia, South Africa, Argentina, Chile and Ecuador. “The world’s most vulnerable people are paying the price for today’s conservation,” says Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples. This week, the issue will be raised in Hawaii at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s congress. In order to make room for wildlife, tourism and industry, governments are using conservation as a pretext to drive the world’s most endangered peoples away from the lands and animals they have lived with for generations. They claim that indigenous peoples are being appallingly treated and abused, all in the name of a conservation philosophy that carries a heavy human cost. What has happened in Botswana is happening all over the world, according to an increasingly vocal group of campaigners, academics and environmentalists. Is this conservation, or something more akin to bullying of the weak and exploitation of the land in the interests of the powerful? Meanwhile, one of the largest diamond mines in the world has been allowed to open in the park, and wealthy big game hunters from abroad are welcomed to newly constructed state-of-the-art game lodges. San men preparing for hunting in Grashoek, Namibia Photograph: Alamy Now these people live, dispossessed, on the edge of the huge game park, forbidden to hunt in or enter the land they have lived on sustainably for centuries. In a series of heavy-handed evictions, houses have been burned, schools and health centres closed, and water supplies cut off. Sending a helicopter gunship and armed guards to arraign the hunters looks rather like an escalation of the low-grade war that Botswana has waged for years on one of the most vulnerable indigenous groups in the world.įor the past 20 years, the San have been systematically stripped of their homes, land and culture. But there are no rare or endangered species such as elephants or rhinos in the areas where the bushmen hunt. Khama claims the policy, which is supported by conservation groups, will deter poaching and the illegal wildlife trade, which is widely seen by Europe and the US as disastrous for biodiversity. The brutal incident took place last week, just days after Botswana’s wildlife minister Tshekedi Khama, the brother of President Ian Khama, announced a shoot-on-sight policy on poachers. Welcome to 21st-century life in the vast Central Kalahari game park, an ancient hunting ground for the San, but now off-limits to the people who forged their history there.
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