WWF International director general James Leape says mistakes have been made in the past. Targeted worldwide by the many tribes evicted from protected areas, big conservation NGOs have now made it clear that they do not support the creation of protected areas that displace indigenous people. Questions of poverty are not our responsibility." UWA's John Makombo defended their approach: "Their conditions of living are not our responsibility. However, the quality of life of the Batwa does not seem to be taken into account by conservation programmes.
He added: "The question is also: what is the quality of life you would like the Batwa to live? And what rights are you going to guarantee for the animals?"īatwa people have little option but to squat on other people's land Minister of State for Tourism Serapio Rukundo told the BBC that it is for "their future that the government told them to leave the forest". The government seems to have handed over its responsibility to the few organisations and church groups looking at the plight of the Batwa people. UOBDU co-ordinator Penninah Zaninka says that the government "should really think of resettling the Batwa and give them better shelters so that they could benefit from development projects that the government is doing for other citizens of Uganda". They live in unsanitary housing conditions, typically mud huts where the rain comes through.Īccording to the United Organisation for Batwa Development in Uganda (UOBDU), most are unable to invest in permanent structures as they fear being removed by the owner of the land on which they are squatting. It seems that the Batwa have suffered more than other people from the creation of the parks because they were the people whose livelihoods were most closely related to the forest.Įven now, they tend to be the poorest and most marginalised people who have fewer opportunities to benefit from tourism and other development programmes that have come along with the parks. I think it was better to manage them when they are outside the forest." "So, it was not wise to leave inside the forest.
"Originally, when the Batwa were living in the forest they were hunting down all the fauna and that was eradicating almost all the animals: the gorillas were in danger, the chimps were in danger," Mr Makombo said. John Makombo from the Uganda Wildlife Authority says that they aimed to achieve "sustainable conservation". As a result of the eviction, everybody is now scattered."Ĭonservationists, back then, saw local communities as a major threat to wildlife. They either died or went somewhere we didn't know. We were very scared so we started to run not knowing where to go and some of us disappeared. Up on a hill, between the Echuya forest and the Bwindi Park, community leader Sembagare Francis recalls: "One day, we were in the forest when we saw people coming with machine guns and they told us to get out of the forest. Anthropologist Chris Sandbrook explains that in the early days of conservation "local people were excluded from protected areas and kept out with some kind of law enforcement, which has been called fortress conservation". However, when the Ugandan government decided to reinforce the protection of the mountain gorilla habitat, the Batwa were moved from their lands to make way for national parks. When the area was divided into three forest reserves - Mgahinga, Echuya and Bwindi - in the early 1930s, the Batwa stayed where they had been living for generations. "It is a question of trying to balance the protection of the forest with the needs of the local communities," says Alastair McNeilage, from the Wildlife Conservation Society, who works at Bwindi. In these two places, where a small area of forest is surrounded by large numbers of poor rural farmers trying to scrape by and live off the land, conservation is a tricky issue. Nearly two decades ago, the Batwa lived in the mountain forest of Mgahinga as well as in the deep forest of Bwindi, called the Impenetrable Forest. Right next to the Mgahinga National Park's boundaries, the slopes of these mountains are intensively cultivated and settled by dominant Bufumbira and Hutu people. The Muhabura volcano is one of the three inactive volcanoes that make the south-west Ugandan border with Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Families are squatting on other people's land or live in shabby camps with no sanitation. Just after dawn, as the fog slowly leaves the slopes of the Muhabura volcano, some Batwa people make their way to the neighbouring farms hoping to get a job for the day.
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