It seems that here the Government is doing the opposite to Zimbabwe at this point in time ?

Peter
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Sello Motseta | Gaborone, Botswana
05 October 2005 08:51

Botswana's police commissioner said on Tuesday that officers had fired rubber bullets to disperse a group of about 35 Bushmen protesting their eviction from ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

The Basarwa tribesmen had been trying to break through blockades and enter the reserve on Saturday, police commissioner Edwin Batshu said. Some demonstrators, including mothers with infants and young children, were briefly detained, but were not charged, he said.

The Kalahari Bushmen said their leader, Roy Sesana, was arrested and beaten by police. One protester was shot in the jaw and hospitalised, according to a tribal spokesperson who did not want to be named for fear of police retaliation.

The Batswara accused the government of evicting them to relocation camps in an effort to clear the land for De Beers mining giant to explore for diamonds and minerals.

An estimated 2 000 people have been relocated to camps. However, several families were still living in the reserve, cut off from food and water, the Bushmen said.

The government said it needed to close parts of the game reserve to protect wildlife from a disease spread by domestic goats smuggled in by the Bushmen.

Presidential spokesperson Jeff Ramsay blamed the demonstrators, saying police had acted with restraint.

"When the police would not let them enter the reserve, the demonstrators broke into a riot and attacked the police with an assortment of weapons," Ramsay said.

"To maintain law and order, the police were forced to fire three rubber bullets, one of which hit and slightly injured one of the demonstrators," he said.

Since diamonds were discovered in the country in 1967, Botswana has prospered with the trade accounting for half of government revenues and three-fourths of export earnings.

But the row over the Bushmen has tarnished the image of Botswana, a nation of 1,5-million people that has been a model democracy for other African nations.

In 1991, Sesana set up the First People of the Kalahari organisation to campaign for the Bushmen's human rights.

On Thursday, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Awards, known as the "alternative Nobels," for "resolute resistance against eviction from their ancestral lands, and for upholding the right to their traditional way of life". - Sapa-AP

Let me see if I read this right.It is Ok in Southern Africa to remove whites from their land to re-establish blacks in their ancestral lands.That is , unless they are bushman.Then they can be removed from their ancestral grounds and re-located to other ares to make way for diamond mining.

Is it just OK for blacks to kick other less human blacks off their ancestral grounds?Or is it simply a matter of the current black leadership can remove whomever it sees fit whether they are white or black?

Someone help me out here.

I think the point of the post is Bot. is different from the other land grabing countries surounding them. As to the treatment of black on black just look around the next time you are in Africa. They can teach the rest of the world how to pick on those they coinsider less worthy. Do you think all blacks in Zim. have been treated equally by killer Bob. What kind of name is Roy for a bushman anyhow?

Diamonds are forever, but apparently Bushmen and their goats are not.

Well shooting rubber bullets at them is an improvement- they tried a spot of genocide a few years back, turned off the water arround the edge of the park and got all the busmen gathered arround a few water points in the middle of the desert and then turned those off... Fortunately for some thousands of bushmen and their families some do-gooders smelled a rat and took water bousers in. Ian Kamer was very embarrased when that came out and a few heads rolled- but was it for trying to perminantly "solve" the problem or just for being exposed? I would like to think it was genuine outrage but...

Bushmen aren't black, they are a different ethnic group-so they are fine to kill/remove