Group Says Botswana Bushmen Evicted over Diamonds
An international boycott of Botswana diamonds aims to draw greater attention to the government's mistreatment of native Kalahari Bushmen.
The rights group Survival International launched the boycott in San Francisco and London Tuesday with a protest outside the diamond retailer De Beers, which is partly owned by the Botswana government.
With the support of several celebrity endorsements, the group is also urging a boycott of tourism to Botswana 'until the Bushmen are allowed to live on their ancestral land in peace'.
'No government is immune to bad publicity, and the Botswana government is no exception,' says Miriam Ross, Survival International's Campaigner. 'The more people know about the government's treatment of the Bushmen, the less customers Botswana will have for its diamonds and its tourism.'
The Kalahari Bushmen, who have lived in Southern Africa for more than 20,000 years, are now being starved off their land to make way for lucrative diamond extraction, says Survival International.
In past years, the Bushmen have relied on water from a borehole in one of the Kalahari communities. The government provided a tanker that distributed water around the region once a month.
Survival claims that since the discovery of diamond deposits, worth up to $3.3 billion in one community, the government has halted the operation, removing the storage tanks and the pump that made water extraction possible. The Bushmen are banned from re-opening the borehole.
The group claims the decision to restrict access to the borehole is the government's latest effort to drive the Bushmen off the land.
'Botswana's diamond industry is the 'Siamese twin' of the government,' says Stephen Corry, director of Survival International. 'People should know that far from being an expensive token of eternal love, Botswana diamonds are a symbol of the nasty oppression of southern Africa's first people.'
The government refutes the claims of the London-based tribal rights group.
'Survival is on a fund-raising campaign at the expense of a whole people,' environment minister Kitso Mokaila told the BBC.
'Every mineral wealth that we have has taken all of us to school, has brought in development to every level, to every community. Therefore I'd encourage tourists to come and see for themselves and compare with the propaganda that Survival is spewing out there,' he said.
The government is currently negotiating the $3.3 billion deal with the global diamond producer Gem Diamonds.
In May 2007, Gem Diamonds bought the Gope mining site from De Beers for $34 million. At that time, Gem Diamonds' chief executive called the deposit 'a problematic asset for De Beers'.
The Kalahari Bushmen live in the middle of the richest diamond-producing area in the world. Many cite the country's mineral industry as the main driver behind Botswana's dramatic ascent from one of the poorest African nations to one of the wealthiest.
Kalahari Bushmen have faced escalating pressure from outside forces since diamonds were first discovered in the area in the early 1980s. Thousands were evicted from Gope in 2002, while the government denied any knowledge of diamond reserves.
Though the government claims that the operation was voluntary and natives were duly compensated, the Bushmen took the evictions to court that same year.
The case was the longest and most costly in Botswana history. In 2006, the judges determined the evictions to be 'unlawful and unconstitutional', and the Bushmen were once again granted access to their land.
Survival International says the latest actions by the government are illegal, and clearly prejudiced against the Bushmen, who have been a traditionally marginalised and impoverished class in Southern Africa.
In response to allegations regarding the court hearing, Mokaila said,
'That's a process that's painfully slow but I can assure you there is great progress being made and we're hopeful that we'll arrive at some conclusion.'
Survival also notes that while denying water to the Bushmen in Kalahari, the government drilled new water wells, with funding from Tiffany and Co. Foundation, for the sole use of wildlife.
© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service