SOS Bushmen

'Ethnic cleansing' is forcing Bushmen from the world's richest gem fields

ACCORDING to the postmortem examination Xoroxo Duxee died of "shock and dry starvation" after crawling from her settlement in the desert to search for food and water.

Yet her people - the famed Bushmen of the Kalahari - have lived in the area for at least 20,000 years and their resourcefulness and skill at surviving in such a hostile environment is legendary.

So why are Xoroxo and others like her now starving to death on the very land that once supported them?

According to the tribal peoples' rights charity Survival International, it is because they are being driven from their land by the government of Botswana to make way for the exploitation of the world's richest diamond fields which lie below the dry scrub.

The diamond discoveries have given the land that was granted to the Bushmen by the British colonial authorities as a permanent haven five years before independence in 1966 a wholly new value.

The largest deposit of gems in the Kalahari has been found at a former Bushman community called Gope.

It is estimated it would be able to produce a million carats of diamonds every year.

The government has been accused of embarking on a drive to expel around 2,000 Bushmen from their ancient lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR).

Their school and health clinic have been closed, their huts and water boreholes destroyed.

Hunting has been forbidden and some of those caught doing so tortured. The Bushmen have been loaded on to trucks and resettled in "modern" camps.

The authorities have declared their herds of goats to be diseased and sealed off the game reserve.

Food now comes in the form of government "rations for the destitute".

But the world has now begun to watch and the level of international protest against President of Botswana Festus Mogae has been growing.

BBC reporter John Simpson has accused the regime of ethnic cleansing.

Last year he wrote: "Diamonds, the curse of modern Africa, were discovered under their hunting grounds and to President Mogae they are worth a great deal more than the human treasures of a culture lasting 10 millennia or more."

He said he started off refusing to believe that diamonds were the reason for evicting the Bushmen from their land but changed his mind because "somehow, it is too much of a coincidence that so much wealth lies under the land of so few Bushmen".

Tribal peoples' ownership of their territories was enshrined in international law as long ago as 1957, and in many parts of the world their situation has improved dramatically as a result.

Not so in Botswana where diamonds are the mainstay of the economy. The government claims the Bushmen are being removed to retain the pristine nature of the CKGR and improve the country's tourism industry.

But along with the expulsions has come a huge expansion of mining exploration. Almost all the is now being explored for diamonds and precious metals.

De Beers, the secretive South African company which dominates diamond production throughout the world, is one of the companies with exploration rights in the Kalahari.

Mining in Botswana is controlled by a company called Debswana (De Beers/Botswana), a company jointly-owned by the government and the diamond giant. Many of the directors of Debswana are senior political figures in the country.

British company Kalahari Diamonds and its subsidiary Godi also have concessions here.

A group of 240 Bushmen are now fighting the Botswana government through the courts, demanding the right to return to their ancestral lands. The case has now been in progress for 15 months and last year reached the country's High Court.

However, their battle - due to resume next month - is being severely hampered by lack of funds.

In London actress Julie Christie recently staged a protest during a diamond exhibition at the Natural History Museum sponsored by De Beers. British model Lily Cole and the Somali-born supermodel Iman, have both stopped working for the giant diamond firm.

And the vicious conflict involved in the scramble for man's most prized gems will be thrust further into the limelight this year with the making of Leonardo DiCaprio's latest film - The Blood Diamond - which starts shooting next month.

Set in Sierra Leone in 1999, it sees DiCaprio play a smuggler who specialises in the sale of "blood diamonds" - also known as "conflict diamonds" - which are still used to finance wars and terrorism.

Activists claim nearly a quarter of all diamonds adorning the fashionable and rich are still being extracted in areas of conflict.

A spokesman for human rights group Amnesty International said:

"Anything that shines a light on the atrocities carried out for such diamonds is to be welcomed."