Several thousand people who had settled illegally in Kenya’s most important forest have left their homes at the beginning of an eviction plan designed to end rampant environmental degradation in the Rift Valley.
Security officers this week entered the Mau forest, the country’s largest water catchment basin, in the first stage of a government operation that will see up to 30,000 families leave.
More than a quarter of the 400,000 hectare forest has been lost because of human activity over the past 20 years, threatening Kenya’s crucial tourism, tea and energy sectors and the livelihoods of millions of people reliant on the Mau ecosystem.
“We have no time to waste here,” said Christian Lambrechts, a UN environmental program expert seconded to the government’s Mau Secretariat. “The ecological services must be restored.”
The dozen or so rivers that originate in the montane forest complex feed the Masai Mara Reserve and Lake Victoria, as well as the lush tea fields of Kericho. But in recent years the river flows have decreased or stopped during the dry season.
At Lake Nakuru, Kenya’s most visited national park, wildlife officials had to pump in water for the animals this summer when all the feeder rivers dried up.
A serious drought that has led to water and power shortages across the country was a contributing factor. But human destruction of the once-thick Mau forest, causing aquifer levels to plummet and soil erosion to increase, played a major part.
At its root, as so often happens in Kenya, is politics and corruption. Before the 1990s, the forest was a protected area. But senior officials in then-president Daniel arap Moi’s government grabbed large plots of the highly fertile land for themselves — Moi still owns a large tea farm in the Mau — profiting from the timber they cleared.
They also removed protection from other parts of the forest where thousands of their supporters were allowed to settle and begin farming. Many of the plots were subdivided resold.
Amid warnings that the entire ecosystem in the Rift valley and western Kenya is in danger, Kenya’s government has made saving the Mau its top environmental priority.
A task force formed by Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga recommended that all settlers in the forest be removed and that cleared areas be rehabilitated through mass tree planting.
Genuine titleholders — many of the titles in circulation are fictitious — are to be considered for compensation.
It is likely that some forest dwellers, including a few thousand members of the Ogiek ethnic group who have lived in the Mau for generations, will be allowed to remain.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS