San judges visit Kalahari

2004-07-05 13:39

Maun, Botswana - Judges from Botswana's high court travelled to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve on Monday as part of a landmark case brought by the San challenging their eviction from an area they consider their homeland.

The court inspected the Metsimonong settlement where some of the San lived before the Botswana government began evicting them from the reserve in 1997, presidential spokesperson Jeff Ramsay said.

A group of 243 San, southern Africa's earliest inhabitants, are asking the court to rule that the government's decision in 2002 to cut off water, food and health services to the settlements in the reserve was illegal.

Ramsay said that the judges inspected the new settlement of Kaudwane, outside the reserve, on Sunday and were to go to another former San village inside the sanctuary, Old Xade, on Tuesday.

The inspection tour ends in New Xade, where many of the San have been relocated, and formal hearings are to begin there on Thursday, he said.

The San took the government to court in April 2002, seeking an order declaring it illegal to cut off services to the reserve, which was established in 1961 to protect the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the San.

The government claims that there are now only 17 San living in the reserve but rights groups say 200 have gone back in defiance of Gaborone's campaign to resettle them outside the reserve, one of the world's largest sanctuaries and an area the San have been calling home for the past 20 000 years.

- AFP