The Botswana government is pushing on with their ethnocidal policies toward San communities in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Maintaining that the expenses for providing services to communities residing in the reserve are too high, the government stopped delivering water and other essential services to the San last month. This month authorities are intensifying the pressure on Gwi and Gana communities to resettle by dismantling their local boreholes and water pumps, and emptying their reserves onto the desert ground. Last week several San members attempting to deliver food and water to their families were restricted from entering the reserve without special permits. Most recently, government officials have confiscated radio transceivers used by San communities to communicate with one another. Now, cut off from each other as well as from adequate food and water supplies, the 700 or so San remaining in the reserve are threatened with imminent thirst and starvation.
Government officials claim that San relocation is done on a strictly voluntary basis and that there are “less than 30” indigenous persons left voluntarily residing in the reserve. However, over the past five years, San dwellings have been burned down and residents have been trucked out of the reserve by the dozens; subsistence rights have been revoked and hunters have been imprisoned and fined for maintaining their traditional livelihoods, even in cases where they possessed special hunting permits to do so. A trial against 13 San hunters accused of hunting without governmental permits in August 2000 began in Lethlakane, Botswana last week. The 13 hunters testify that they were assaulted and tortured by wildlife officers during six days of interrogation in the desert. Several were tied to trees which were then set on fire, and others were left handcuffed to the front of an official’s vehicle for three days after being severely beaten. A prominent elder of the targeted community subsequently died of heart attack after this incident. And yet it is the San hunters who are on trial and face a sentence of five years each in prison.
The government justifies its “encouragement” of San relocation on the grounds that services are difficult and expensive to deliver from urban centers, and that permanent structures should not be developed in a wildlife reserve for the provision of such services. However, the San have lived for thousands of years on their ancestral lands without the use of permanent structures. Furthermore, the EU recently offered to cover the expenses of inhabitants residing in Botswana ’s national parks, (which amounts to $3 per person daily), but the government has not accepted. Instead, thousands of dollars have been funneled into the creation of resettlement camps outside the reserve, which residents refer to as “the place of death.” The camps are overcrowded and do not allow sufficient land for traditional subsistence activities, leading San residents to become almost wholly dependent on governmental rations. Rampant despair and boredom has led to increased rated of alcoholism and violence within the camps.
Today Survival International, a London-based non-governmental organization, is leading a campaign to stop the Botswana government from exterminating the rights and livelihoods of the Gana and Gwi communities who wish to remain in their ancestral homelands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. For more details see their website at http://www.survivalinternational.org.
