Justice does not stop the forced displacements of communities in northeastern Tanzania. Relocations involving at least 70,000 people living between the Serengeti park and Ngorongoro, in an area destined to become a hunting reserve for wealthy tourists.
On 30 September, the East African Court of Justice (Eacj), based in Arusha, Tanzania, ruled against the appeal lodged by the Maasai who oppose the Tanzanian government's decision to evict them from their villages that have been inserted in a protected game reserve, part of a tourist development plan in the area, which is located between the Serengeti park and the Ngorongoro crater. The government decision affects at least 70 thousand people.
The judgment was expected from 2018, when the court ordered the eviction to be suspended until the final sentence.
The judges should have ruled last June, but the trial was postponed for a few months due to the facts of Loliondo which took place at the beginning of the same month. On that occasion, as on other occasions before, the police used force to persuade the Masaai population to leave their homes and lands. Videos and testimonies of the violence had gone around the world. There was also a casualty among the police in the clashes.
Since June, according to organizations for the defense of human rights and indigenous peoples, the abuses, if not violence, have continued, according to a consolidated strategy which consists in depriving the affected communities of basic services such as education and health, to the point of preventing their access to water sources.
According to the East African Court of Justice, the Maasai, who are defended by lawyers from the Pan African Lawyers Union (Palu), have presented no evidence that they have been forcibly expelled from villages that are outside the territory of the national park, but only from those within its boundaries.
That is to say that, according to those judges, the right to land is not valid in the event that it is in a protected area, effectively taking the parts of the government that justifies its expulsion measure with the duty to protect the environment, risk from the increase of the indigenous population, moreover in an area with high tourist potential.
The maasai and the lawyers who defended the case said they were completely dissatisfied with the sentence and announced that they will appeal.
Associations that defend the rights of native populations are also worried. Fiore Longo, of Survival International, said:
The court has given a strong signal to the international community: forced displacements and violations of the human rights of indigenous peoples must be tolerated if they are done to protect nature.
https://twitter.com/Survival/status/1576856908329205760
- Survival
It is obviously a negative signal that risks being an example, at least in the region, in numerous other cases of land rights denied to native populations and communities residing in attractive territories for tourism purposes.
The sentence, however, is not yet final and could be overturned on appeal. It would certainly help an international mobilization that could challenge the paradigm of environmental protection now in force and consider native communities not as a danger but as part of the system to be protected and conserved.
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