Eviction of Bushmen Is Ruled Illegal

Botswana Game Reserve Was Ancestral Home for Thousands

JOHANNESBURG, Dec. 13 -- A court in Botswana ruled Wednesday that the government was wrong to evict thousands of Bushmen from their homes in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and should allow one of Africa's most ancient peoples to return to land their families had occupied for centuries.

Bushmen celebrated the 2 to 1 decision by the High Court in Lobatse, a border city near South Africa, though the government can still appeal.

"We feel very happy because the land has come back to us," said Solomon Phetolo, a spokesman for the First People of the Kalahari, an advocacy group, speaking in Lobatse. "Most of the people are going to return."

The court case resulted from forced removals in 1997 and 2002 during which an estimated 2,000 Bushmen were relocated to settlements outside the game reserve, in the heart of Botswana.

The Bushmen once roamed across much of southern Africa, hunting game and gathering wild vegetables to survive in harsh, dry conditions.

They have been in retreat for centuries, and of those who survive, only a small percentage still live as their grandparents did, subsisting in the Kalahari's brutal dry season mainly on water-bearing roots.

Survival, a tribal rights advocacy group, helped pay for the lawsuit filed by the Bushmen.

The government has long contended that the game reserve was intended for animals, not people, and that only by being moved to more accessible settlements could the Bushmen receive education, medical care and other government services.

Many Bushmen described themselves as miserable in the new settlements and accused the government of moving them to ease access to diamond deposits in the game reserve. They also accused the government of making it impossible to survive in the reserve by sharply restricting hunting and ending water deliveries to several communities there.

The judges ruled that there was not conclusive evidence that the government was motivated by a desire to control diamond rights, but said the relocation was against the law and criticized the government's tactics.

"In my view the simultaneous stoppage of the supply of food rations and the stoppage of hunting licenses is tantamount to condemning the remaining residents of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to death by starvation," said Judge Mpaphi Phumaphi, according to the Reuters news service.