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LOBATSE - More than 1000 Kalahari Bushmen have won the right to return to their ancestral hunting grounds after a court ruled yesterday they were evicted to make way for diamond mining.
Campaigners said the landmark decision will advance the rights of indigenous people all over the world.
Supporters of the Bushmen - traditional hunter-gatherers whose proper name is the San - accused the Botswanan Government of evicting them to exploit the potential diamond and mineral wealth on their reserve.
A High Court panel of three judges in Lobatse ruled 2-1 that the San were illegally moved from their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve four years ago.
Judge Mpaphi Phumaphi, who delivered the swing vote, said the Government had forced them out of the reserve by depriving them of their livelihood.
"In my view, the simultaneous stoppage of the supply of food rations and the stoppage of hunting licences is tantamount to condemning the remaining residents to death by starvation," he said.
Miriam Ross, of the London-based pressure group Survival International, said the ruling was historic because it added to a "growing body of case law and a mounting international consensus that recognises the rights of indigenous peoples".
She said a similar case in South Africa three years ago had granted the San rights to mineral revenues from their ancestral land.
But the Botswana case marked the first time a modern African court had recognised the ancestral land access rights of indigenous people, she said.
The Botswana Government would not comment on the ruling but said it was considering appealing.
There are estimated to be 100,000 Bushmen in southern Africa, and about half are in Botswana. None live the 20,000-year-old traditional hunter-gatherer life centred on tracking and killing game on foot using poison arrows. Because of their change in lifestyle, it is unlikely that many San will return to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which is the size of Belgium.
The ruling gives them the right to do so, but does not compel the Government to provide services such as water, clinics and schools in the park.
The San have suffered decades of discrimination at the hands of the local Setswana population whose name for them, Basarwa, means "people without cattle".
White settlers once hunted them for sport. Renowned for their ability to track game by reading delicate signs in the sand, the San in South Africa were used by its armed forces as frontline "trackers" in the apartheid era.
Yesterday's ruling reverses 20 years of a Botswana Government policy to "encourage" the San to leave the reserve. From 1997, the authorities began to cut services to them, such as mobile clinics. Payments were offered to those who volunteered to move to a resettlement camp 50km away.
For that reason, the Government has always argued that it did not evict anyone. However, human rights campaigners in Botswana say the authorities took advantage of the San's low levels of education by spreading rumours that boreholes in the park would be sealed and those who remained would be killed by the Botswana Defence Force.
San advocacy groups say they have been watched by police. Most anthropologists have been denied research permits to study them in the park.
But it is unlikely that many San will return to the park. Even before the evictions began 20 years ago, most had given up their nomadic life in the park and had settled around boreholes in it.
Still, life in the park - close to the ancestors who are crucial to the wellbeing of the San - was better than at the New Xade resettlement camp, where there are no jobs, resettlement grants are spent on alcohol, and Aids is rife.
Battle to return to ancestral home
Eviction illegal
Botswana's High Court has ruled that the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, the oldest people in subsaharan Africa, were illegally evicted from ancestral hunting grounds to make way for diamond mining.
Bushmen resettled
The Government of Botswana, the world's top producer of diamonds by value, resettled about 2000 Bushmen mostly in 1997 and 2002. It claimed all but about 25 had voluntarily left the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, one of the world's biggest nature reserves.
Gem of a reason
Botswana said relocation would ease delivery of Government services to the Bushmen. The Bushmen said they were moved to open the area for diamond mining.
National transformation
Botswana's diamond reserves have helped transform one of the world's poorest nations into one of Africa's most sophisticated economies. Botswana also has one of the continent's highest per capita incomes and model health and education services.
Long history
About half of southern Africa's 100,000 surviving Bushmen, one of the world's last groups of hunter-gatherers, live in Botswana. Their ancestors, famed for their rock paintings, have hunted in the Kalahari Desert for 20,000 years.
- INDEPENDENT
