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Indigenous groups fight eviction by nature parks

"It's about the communities' legitimate right to their own land."

David Grossman, ecologist

The era of evicting indigenous people from ancestral lands to make way for protected nature areas and parks will have to end, conservationists were told on Monday.

Pygmies, Bedouins and Bushmen, among others, said they would no longer accept being brushed aside by governments and environmentalists in the name of protecting world heritage sites.

Communities which feel betrayed by the conservation movement have mobilized to turn the 10-day world parks congress which opened in Durban yesterday into a platform for their grievances. The conference, Benefits Beyond Boundaries, is intended to focus on endangered species and the rise in trans-frontier parks, but 120 disgruntled indigenous groups are expected to seize much of the attention.

Since the last conference in Venezuela in 1992 protected areas have doubled in size and now cover about 12% of the earth's continental surface, a trend conservationists hail as a belated recognition of the fragility of the earth's heritage. But some of the groups who lived in those areas say they have been dispossessed and that they were the more accomplished conservation experts.

"For me that's the crux of the conference, and it should ensure that communities living around protected areas get their rights back," David Grossman, an ecologist who advised the Makuleke community on retrieving land in South Africa's Kruger national park.

"It's not about being nice to neighbors or asking for handouts from parks. It's about the communities' legitimate right to their own land, and communities have shown a commitment to conserve these protected areas."

A spokesman for central African Pygmies said his people shared the plight of other indigenous groups pushed from their land without consultation, with no provision for education and healthcare or respect for traditional rights. Other delegates complained of being forced to become poachers.

Sabbah Eid Zlabiah, representing a Bedouin village in Jordan, said that proclaiming the desert mountain area of Wadi Rum a protected area in 1998 could have ended a way of life had the government not backed down.

The indigenous groups have adopted the Cape Vidal memorandum, calling for landowners to help draft management plans. Among signatories were the Khomani San, also known as the Bushmen, the indigenous people of South Africa.

About 2,500 environmental experts and scientists are expected in Durban for this the fourth congress organized by the Swiss-based IUCN-World Conservation Union, and the first to be held in Africa.

Delegates are to compile a list of all the protected areas in the world and agree on a conservation plan for the next 10 years.

"Turning `paper parks' into real parks is one of the big challenges facing the conservation community," the union's president, Yolanda Kakabadse Navarro, said, reflecting the fear that too many "protected areas," like in the Indonesian province of Papua and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are anything but.
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