SOS Bushmen

The Botswana government has dismissed reports in the British Daily Telegraph that it would change the Constitution if it lost the case in which Bushmen are claiming efforts to persuade them to relocate from lands they claim as ancestral were unconstitutional; and said it was pleased with the way the hearing was going.

The Telegraph quoted an unnamed highly placed government source.

"That report was complete rubbish," President Festus Mogae's Press secretary Jeff Ramsay said Thursday.

The report has been widely circulated by Survival International, which represents the interests of the Bushmen.

On Wednesday and Thursday, government counsel Sidney Pilane cross-examined George Silberbauer, a retired Botswana magistrate and district commissioner, who compiled a report on the Bushmen in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve for the British Government in the 1960s -- six years before Botswana's independence.

Pilane suggested that the CKGR had been established to placate (white) farmers, not for the Bushmen, as an area in which they could live and hunt.

"Pilane was clearly trying to destroy that the reserve was for the Bushmen," observers at the trial said.

"Was the reserve not established to deal with the problem of the Bushmen squatting on the white-owned farms?" he asked.

Silberbauer admitted after questioning that was an ancillary reason, as were other factors, but stressed the main reason was for the welfare of the Bushmen.

The court will adjourn of Friday and reconvene on July 26 until July 30.