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| Mursi, Southwestern Ethiopia.
©Edward Mendell/Survival |
The Mursi,
a nomadic, cattle-herding people living in the Omo National Park in
southwest Ethiopia, fear eviction from their ancestral lands in the
name of conservation. If evicted, they will lose precious agricultural
and grazing lands which are central to their livelihood and identity.
In September 2005, the African Parks Foundation (APF), a private
non-profit organization based in the Netherlands, signed an agreement
with the Ethiopian government to manage the Omo National Park which is
home to the Mursi people. However, it has consistently refused to
recognise and guarantee the land rights of the Mursi, claiming that it
could not interfere' in the policies of a sovereign government'.
According to the anthropologist David Turton, who has worked with the
Mursi for over 30 years, the Mursi and their neighbours in the Omo Valley have suffered for years from the
creation of state farms, national parks and the allocation of hunting
concessions to safari companies on and around their land. Their
children have become steadily more vulnerable to malnutrition, death
and disease as vital resources are taken over by outsiders.
In December 2005, the APF said that it would not be possible to
guarantee the Mursi's land rights because the government would not
agree to this, and in any case it would not be necessary because the
rights of pastoralists' to their land are already guaranteed by the
Ethiopian constitution (Article 40, 5). In practice, however, these
constitutional rights are rarely if ever upheld. APF then stated in a
letter that we are not going to make written agreements with the local
people'. According to Dr Turton, APF may protest as much as it likes,
therefore, that it has no intention of displacing people from their
land, but unless it is prepared to enter into legally binding
agreements to back up its claims, it cannot expect them to be taken
seriously.'
APF has also failed to make available to the Mursi the contracts it has
signed with the federal and regional governments, thereby denying them
the right to seek and obtain independent legal advice about a contract
that will have enormous consequences for their own and their children's
futures, and which was agreed and signed without their knowledge or
consent.
When the park's boundaries were mapped out, the Mursi were not given
copies of documents the government asked them to sign, using their
thumb prints, in which they agreed' to the current park boundaries.
This process of demarcating the park boundaries made a mockery of
prior informed consent', contravened international agreements on
the rights of indigenous people, and revealed a colonialist attitude on
the part of the Ethiopian government towards its own citizens to which
APF has turned a blind eye.
APF's standard response is that all these matters so crucial to the
Mursi will be negotiated and agreed upon in the course of discussions
and consultations with local people over the coming months, leading up
to the writing of a management plan' for the park. But as Dr Turton
has said, 'What kind of negotiation' is it in which one side has all
the financial and political power and the other has no legally
enforceable rights at all? To speak of negotiation' in these
circumstances is utterly meaningless. The, Trust us: everything will
be sorted out in the management plan', approach looks, in practice,
like a way of ensuring that all decision-making power remains firmly in
the hands of APF. It is unlikely that local people would be happy with
this approach in any case.'
Mursi supporters are lobbying APF to:
sign legally binding agreements with each of the
groups living in the park and/or making use of agricultural or grazing
land within it, guaranteeing their right to a secure livelihood in
their existing territories;
specify, in writing, the social and economic
benefits that are expected to accrue to local communities, including an
agreed percentage of tourist and hunting revenues;
make freely available to local people the full text
of any agreements it has signed with the federal and regional
governments; and
provide local people with copies of the documents
they were asked to sign during the boundary demarcation process, and by
which their prior informed consent' was obtained to the legalisation
of the park boundaries.
By taking these steps APF would be helping to empower the groups living
in and around the Omo National Park, so that they could genuinely
negotiate, and take part in shared decision making, about park
management. By empowering local people, APF would inevitably be
ceding some of its own power – a difficult thing to do. But if it
really believes that the strong support of the Mursi and other local
people is fundamental to effective management of the area', there can
be no other way.
