SOS Bushmen

Botswana police and wildlife guards are torturing bushmen arrested for hunting, Survival International claimed on Wednesday.

They made three bushmen  run through the desert in blistering heat for hours, while chasing them in vehicles, Survival said in a statement.

Sono emersi nuovi particolari scioccanti sulle torture e le violenze inferte a un gruppo di Boscimani nel campo di reinsediamento di Kaudwane, in Botswana. Quindici uomini sono stati arrestati lo scorso settembre per aver cacciato e almeno dieci di loro sono stati torturati.

It is easy!  

Please write to the President of Botswana saying he should let the Bushmen go home:

Fax: +267 395 0858

Les San parcourent les savanes et les déserts d'Afrique australe depuis des milliers d'années, mais la façon de vivre traditionnelle de ces nomades chasseurs-cueilleurs est en voie d'extinction.

Exploités au XXe siècle par les colons allemands, les San ou bushmen (hommes de la brousse) sont menacés par le chômage, la pauvreté, le Sida et l'alcoolisme.

La détresse des San du Botswana a fait les grands titres lorsque le gouvernement les a expulsés de la réserve du Kalahari. Mais ceux de Namibie et d'Afrique du Sud n'ont guère mieux réussi à se préserver.

The Bushmen certainly stole Khoi cattle, because the concept of private ownership of animals was foreign to them.

But the Khoi started the process by stealing the Bushmen’s land when they colonised the southern and western Cape and proceeded to wipe out or reduce to serfdom every Bushman they could lay hands on.

They roamed the savannahs and open plains for thousands of years, but the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of southern Africa's San tribes is slowly being squeezed towards extinction.

After clashing at the start of the last century with German settlers in modern-day Namibia and then being exploited by South Africa's apartheid regime in the 1980s, the San, also known as Bushmen, are now threatened by the 21st century curses of unemployment, poverty, alcohol abuse and HIV-AIDS.

A new report on indigenous people around the world says forced relocation and loss of land can lead to disease, suicide and addiction. VOA's Joe De Capua reports.

Survival International director Stephen Corey says the new report is called "Progress Can Kill." He says it catalogues the mental and physical breakdown of tribal peoples due to what's commonly called progress or development.

Six Bushmen have been arrested for hunting in New Xade resettlement camp, according to First People of the Kalahari, a Bushman human rights organisation.

The latest arrests bring the total number of Bushmen arrested for hunting since last year's landmark court ruling to at least forty-eight, with most being arrested since June this year.

The Botswana High Court held last December that the Gana and Gwi Bushmen had been evicted illegally from their land in the central Kalahari in 2002. The court also held that the government had broken the law in refusing to issue them with hunting permits.

Besides refusing to issue hunting permits, the government has also refused to provide transport for the Bushmen to return. It has banned them from using their water borehole, and will not let them take their small numbers of livestock back with them.

Survival's director Stephen Corry said today, 'The ongoing campaign of harassment against Bushman hunters has suddenly escalated in the past few months. This is a blatant attempt on the part of the government to stop Bushmen returning home. It seems that it is determined that the High Court judgement should not be implemented.'

 Une organisation bushman de défense des droits de l'homme a dénoncé hier l'arrestation d’au moins 10 hommes du camp de relocalisation de Kaudwane et les violences qu'ils ont subies de la part des gardes forestiers pour avoir chassé.

A Bushman human rights organisation  reported that at least ten men in Kaudwane resettlement camp have been arrested and beaten by wildlife officials for hunting.

At least one man, Motsoko Ramahoko, was tortured as officials attempted to force him to admit that he had been hunting without a permit.

On September 13th, 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a landmark declaration outlining the rights of the world's estimated 370 million indigenous peoples and outlawing discrimination against them - a move that followed 22 years of contentious negotiations.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples( http://www.ohchr.org/english/issues/indigenous/docs/draftdeclaration.pdf ) has been approved after 143 Member States voted in favour, 11 abstained and four voted against the text.

A non-binding text, the Declaration sets out the individual and collective rights of indigenous peoples, as well as their rights to culture, identity, language, employment, health, education and other issues.

The Declaration emphasises the rights of indigenous peoples to maintain and strengthen their own institutions, cultures and traditions and to pursue their development in keeping with their own needs and aspirations.

 Eine Menschenrechtsorganisation der Buschleute berichtete gestern, dass mindestens zehn Männer wegen Jagens im Kaudwane Umsiedlungslager von Wildschutzbeamten verhaftet und geschlagen wurden.

Un’organizzazione boscimane che difende i diritti umani ha denunciato che almeno dieci uomini del campo di reinsediamento di Kaudwane sono stati picchiati e arrestati dalle guardie forestali con l’accusa di aver cacciato.

A Mashco-Piro camp on the Piedras river in the Peruvian Amazon. Estimates of the number of such isolated tribes are rising, largely due to industry incursions Photograph: Heinz Plenge Pardo/SZF

"First just one came out, then two, then three, four, five, six, seven, but there were more than that in total. We had a dozen machetes, a dozen knives and some axes and pots with us. We gave these to them. Not by hand, but by leaving them on the beach. We said to them, 'Come closer' but they didn't want to. They said to us, 'Go further back, further back,' so we did."

The encounter between Jose, a Peruvian from the Las Piedras river area near the border with Brazil, and members of the large isolated Mashco-Piro tribe living in the deep Amazonian rainforest, took place this year and was described to the anthropologist Richard Hill, of Survival, the international campaign for tribal peoples.

50 years after her father famously chronicled the lives of the Kalahari Bushmen, LUCIA VAN DER POST visits their tribal homeland in Botswana -and finds a demoralised people trapped in a limbo between their ancient heritage and the modern world

Almost all my life the Bushmen of the Kalahari have been part of my psychological landscape. It is 50 years since my father, Sir Laurens van der Post, "gave a face and a story to a discarded people before anyone else thought to do so", as the writer Christopher Hope put it. So how could I not have thrilled to the news that the Bushmen had won the right to return to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), the lands that were historically theirs?