Three women, De Beers Botswana CEO Sheila Khama, Botswana Attorney-General Athalia Molokomme and Bank of Botswana Governor Linah K Mohohlo, were at Chatham House for a public meeting hosted by the Botswana diamond industry. Molokomme and Mohohlo are on the board of Debswana, De Beers's joint venture with the Botswana government.

Botswana's High Court declared the evictions "unlawful" in 2006. But the government is preventing the Bushmen from returning to their land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve by banning them from using their own water borehole there.

Bushman woman Qoroxloo died of dehydration and starvation in the reserve in 2005. Her relatives were arrested trying to take food and water to her. Gakemeitswe (not her real name) died of AIDS in a relocation camp in 2006 after being evicted from the reserve, and Dibe died "of a broken heart" soon after being evicted against her will.

Jeweller Pippa Small, who attended the vigil, said, "Jewelry is becoming more ethically aware and consumers are becoming more aware of the background of the stones. I just don't want to work in a material that has caused damage or death or misery to anybody."

"I'm appalled that the Botswana government is preventing the Bushmen from taking the tiny amount of water they need from beneath the Kalahari," she declared. "The diamond mine planned on their land will use billions of times more water than the Bushmen would ever use. This is giving Botswana's diamonds a bad name."

Now Botswana is set to have one of the world's largest and most sophisticated diamond sorting and valuing operations, reports Global Information Network, www.globalinfo.com.

This month, the world's largest and lowest cost producer of diamonds, with annual production worth over $2.5 billion, will be taking over diamond sorting and valuation operations of the Botswana Diamond Valuing Co. Board seats of the new valuing company will be shared equally between the government of Botswana and the De Beers gem company.

The U.K.-based Firestone Diamonds is the largest holder of mineral rights in Botswana's "kimberlite" fields, controlling over 21,000 square kilometers of rich mineral mines.
Land grabbed from people who've lived there for millennia

There are 100,000 Bushmen in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Angola. They are the indigenous people of southern Africa and have lived there for 100,000 years.

In the middle of Botswana lies the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, a reserve created to protect the traditional territory of the 5,000 Gana, Gwi and Tsila Bushmen and their neighbors, the Bakgalagadi, and the game they depend on.

In the early 1980s, diamonds were discovered in the reserve. Soon after, government ministers went into the reserve to tell the Bushmen living there that they would have to leave because of the diamond finds.
In three big clearances, in 1997, 2002 and 2005, virtually all the Bushmen were forced out. Their homes were dismantled, their school and health post were closed, their water supply was destroyed and the people were threatened and trucked away.

They now live in resettlement camps outside the reserve. Rarely able to hunt, and arrested and beaten when they do, they are dependent on government handouts. They are now gripped by alcoholism, boredom, depression and illnesses such as TB and HIV/AIDS.

Unless they can return to their ancestral lands, their unique societies and way of life will be destroyed, and many of them will die.

Although the Bushmen won the right in court to go back to their lands in 2006, the government has done everything it can to make their return impossible. It has:

- Banned them from using their water borehole,

- Refused to issue a single permit to hunt on their land, despite Botswana's High Court ruling in December that its refusal to issue permits was unlawful,

- Arrested more than 50 Bushmen for hunting to feed their families,

- Banned them from taking their small herds of goats back to the reserve.

Its policy is clearly to intimidate and frighten the Bushmen into staying in the resettlement camps, and making the lives of those who have gone back to their ancestral land impossible.

Recently, police and wildlife guards took three of the men, Vitanon Mogwe, Mphato Mothoiwa and Nabedao Mamou, into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and made them run through the desert for several hours in high temperatures, following them in vehicles. They beat the three with sticks, kicked them, jumped on them and tightened car inner tubes around the necks of Vitanon and Mphato.

One of the wildlife guards told Mphato Mothoiwa, "If you don't tell us the truth that you killed an eland, we will do to you what we did to Selelo." Bushman Selelo Tshiamo died in 2005 a few weeks after he was beaten and tortured by wildlife scouts.

Botswana's "policy couldn't be clearer," observed Stephen Corry, director of Survival: "to terrorize the Bushmen so that they're too afraid to go home. It's a policy that is both brutal and doomed to failure."

To learn more, including how you can help, email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and visit www.survival-international.org/tribes/bushmen and the Bushmen's own website, www.iwant2gohome.org. Bay View staff contributed to this report, which comes mostly from Survival.

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