In spite of the success at court - Expelled bush people are prevented from returning to the Kalahari

A group of forcibly expelled bush people stood before closed gates when they wanted to return to the Kalahari Wildlife Reserve at the beginning of January 2007. Park rangers turned them away. The Supreme Court of Botswana had declared the expulsion of the bush people as illegal on 13th December 2006. This was reported by the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) on Monday. "We were all surprised, annoyed and sad when our people were turned away at the gate of the Reserve”, said Jumanda Gajelegone, the spokesperson of her self-help organisation "First People of the Kalahari”.

"This week the San are trying with a fairly large group of about one hundred people to return to the Kalahari”, said the GfbV Africa correspondent, Ulrich Delius. "But conflicts are bound to happen because there is a new dispute between the San and the government concerning the people who are to be allowed to return home”, said Delius.

It is true that the office of the attorney general of Botswana does not wish to challenge the judgment, but it views it in a very restrictive way and is only granting an individual right to return to the 189 plaintiffs. "First People of the Kalahari” is very worried about these new attempts of the government to prevent a large group of the San to return to their traditional land. The self-help organisation puts it to the attorney general that everyone who has been resettled in recent years has "the same interest” as the plaintiffs and is therefore justified in returning to the land on which his forebears had lived for thousands of years. The 189 San had conducted the appeal on behalf of them all.

For 22 years the government of Botswana has been operating the resettlement programme of the native inhabitants from the Kalahari Wild Life Reserve. Most of the remaining 50,000 San were already established in 63 villages outside the Wild Life Reserve. A few are still living in the Reserve and are being put under pressure to leave as well. So they have not been supplied with water since February 2002 and the electricity has been cut off. Rangers prevent those expelled from returning to their old homeland. In a case before the Supreme Court, which lasted for many years, ending on 13th December 2006 with a partial victory for the San, the resettlement was on 13th December declared illegal and the native inhabitants were given the right to return to the Kalahari.