Botswana government thwarting court judgement
This is a story I followed here a while back. It seemed to be resolved in favour of the Bushmen, but, as this press release makes clear, the Botswana government is doing all it can to thwart the court's judgment in the matter.
To enter into the world of this remarkable people - written by the remarkable Laurens van der Post - I recommend:
Survival International has been supporting the Bushmen cause for some years. Here is their May 22nd press release:
Bushman leader Roy Sesana will meet with British MPs at Westminster
this Wednesday 23 May to seek support for his people's ten-year
struggle to return to their land in the Kalahari desert, Botswana.
Despite the Bushmen's dramatic court victory in December, the
Botswana government is trying to prevent them returning to their land.
The country's President has urged them not to go home, and the
Attorney General has said that only Bushmen named in the court case
can return. Some have gone home, but many hundreds more are desperate
to do so.
Despite the court ruling that the evictions were illegal, the
government has refused to help the Bushmen make the long journey home.
It has also banned the Bushmen from taking their small herds of goats
back to their land. Since the court ruling, Bushman hunters have been
arrested, beaten and held for days without food.
Alternative Nobel Prize winner Sesana will meet members of the newly
formed All Party Parliamentary Group on Tribal Peoples.
Sesana said today, 'We Bushmen won our court case, and this made us
feel strong again. But now the President is ignoring Botswana's own
court. I am asking people in Britain to please help us, because people
are dying in the places where we have been forced to live.' Sesana will also go to Downing Street to deliver a letter from the
Bushmen to Tony Blair expressing their dismay at the British
government's support for the evictions.
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