THE airport at Arba Minch, down in the rift valley of southern Ethiopia, is brand new and fully staffed. A bit overstaffed, you might say, since there are only two scheduled flights a week. But they are expecting more flights now there are new managers at the nearby Nechisar National Park. Tourists will soon be flocking here to see elephants and giant Nile crocodiles.
Nechisar is close to the border with Kenya. Ethiopia wants a Kenyan-style network of wildlife parks to service a Kenyan-style tourist industry. And, again following the model of Kenya, the country鈥檚 leaders have been throwing the locals out of the park to achieve the ultimate safari experience for western visitors: wildlife without people. It stinks.
Last year, some 5000 people from the Kore tribe were escorted from their thatched huts in Nechisar and dumped onto distant land owned by other rural communities. No compensation, no nothing. The Guji-Oromo tribe and their 20,000 cattle are also being targeted: in January there were reports of huts being burnt. To make matters worse, the park will be surrounded by an electric fence that will prevent many of the displaced from walking through the park to the nearest town, already a day鈥檚 walk away. Local political groups and the US-based human-rights organisation Refugees International have been complaining vehemently at this environmental fascism.
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鈥淭ourists should not be offered safaris from which all local people have been surgically removed鈥�
If this were at the behest of the Ethiopian government alone, it would be bad enough. But the expulsions reached a peak in the weeks before the handover of the park in February to the African Parks Foundation. This is a Dutch-owned private foundation funded by the US and the EU that claims the backing of Nelson Mandela as well as numerous environmental groups around the world for its mission to bring a new professionalism to parks management in Africa.
The foundation was set up and is chaired by a leading Dutch industrialist, Paul van Vlissingen. It offers to take over moribund parks from African governments, find international funding to spruce them up, and then get the tourists rolling in. It is building up a portfolio of parks across Africa. Everyone鈥檚 a winner, it seems 鈥� except the people who have to make way for the tourists.
The foundation stresses its openness and commitment to working with local communities. In the case of Nechisar, it says the relocation was a government action 鈥渦ndertaken with the consent of the people involved鈥�. But board member and African conservation veteran Anthony Hall-Martin says that clearing the park of people was a prerequisite for the foundation鈥檚 involvement in managing the park.
This kind of thing really ought to be history. Tourists should not be offered safaris from which all local people have been surgically removed. It is far from unique, of course, and many national parks around the world, and particularly in Africa, have been created at the expense of the locals. But more far-sighted environment groups, such as WWF, have undergone a cultural revolution in the past decade or so, and now argue that conservation can be successful only if carried out with the consent and involvement of the traditional inhabitants of the land. Now it seems the privatisation of Africa鈥檚 parks is heralding a return to the bad old days.
Van Vlissingen owns a 32,000-hectare deer estate in the Scottish Highlands, where he has proposed the return of wolves and lynx as a way of attracting tourists. Ironically, estates such as his were created as a result of the Highland clearances 200 years ago, when thousands of highlanders were expelled to make way for sheep. In Africa, western tourists are the new sheep.
Ironically, too, Kenya 鈥� Ethiopia鈥檚 model 鈥� is trying to backtrack from this kind of heavy-handed environmentalism. A fifth of the country is given over to big game parks and tourism. Even so, the animals spend most of their time outside the parks, and the landowners 鈥� big and small, white and black 鈥� say they are constantly being attacked by lions and having their crops trampled by elephants. They see themselves as victims of a rapacious tourist industry underpinned by environmental rhetoric. The Kenyan parliament recently passed a law giving rural communities a bigger say in wildlife management. That could lead to the resumption of hunting, which is currently banned.
Inevitably this led to an outcry from animal rights activists and some conservationists, who claim the reforms would usher in 鈥渢he return of the great white hunter鈥�. So far the president has refused to ratify the new law. The row has become a classic tug of war between a tourist industry run by urban entrepreneurs and backed by conservationists, and the rural people.
The lessons from recent history are clear. Conservation will never win if it insists on setting the inhabitants of rural Africa against the continent鈥檚 wildlife; if it sacrifices basic rights to pursue a narrow green agenda; or if it sides with the moneyed against the poor. Conservationists should take a long hard look at themselves.