“This is our land, and we won’t leave”: the Maasai under attack in the name of conservation
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| Image credit: Survival International |
By Simon Counsell, Survival International
Thousands of Maasai people have fled their homes following a brutal Tanzanian police crackdown on protests against government attempts to evict them to make way for trophy hunters and conservation. The Tanzanian government’s action has drawn widespread condemnation from international organisations.
On June 8th, an estimated 700 officers arrived in Loliondo, Northern Tanzania, to demarcate a 1,500 square kilometre area of Maasai land as a Game Reserve. On June 10, they fired on the Maasai community protesting against the eviction. At least 18 men and 13 women were shot and wounded. One person was confirmed dead.
Over the last week, police have been going house-to-house in villages, beating and arresting those they believe distributed images of the violence or took part in the protests. A 90-year-old man was beaten by police because his son was accused of filming the shooting. Close to 3,000 tribespeople are camping out in the bush while some of Maasai leaders have been imprisoned. Many require urgent subsistence needs and medical supplies. More than a hundred Maasai fled to Kenya. Some members of the Maasai in Kenya, who were protesting to the Tanzanian embassy in solidarity with the Maasai in Tanzania, were tear-gassed by police last Friday. A Maasai man said: “I love this place because it’s my home… They want our land because we have water sources, and we have them because we protect them. We have been living with wildlife for generations. They don’t want the Maasai because people coming here don’t want to see the Maasai.”
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| Elderly Maasai man wounded in the military attack on protesters |
On 13 June 2022, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights strongly condemned the violence. Nine UN Special Rapporteurs called on the Tanzanian Government to immediately halt plans for relocation of the people living in Loliondo and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
The violence seen in Tanzania is the reality of conservation in Africa and Asia: daily violations of the Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities’ rights. These abuses are systemic and are built into the dominant model of conservation based on racism and colonialism. They are likely to accelerate if protected areas are nearly doubled, to 30% of the planet, as is proposed in GBF Target 3. We can no longer turn a blind eye to human rights abuses committed in the name of ‘conservation.’ Target 3 should be fundamentally reformulated, the 30% target dropped. Instead, the protection of biodiversity through supporting Indigenous Peoples and their lands should become its main purpose.
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