Amnesty calls for justice for indigenous Ugandans evicted 13 years ago

By Andrew Wasike and Godfrey Olukya

NAIROBI, Kenya/KAMPALA, Uganda (AA) - Uganda’s Indigenous Benet people were evicted from their ancestral lands by the government 13 years ago, Amnesty International said in a report released Monday, calling for justice for the community.

The international rights group said the Benet people continue to languish in deplorable conditions in ramshackle resettlement camps with little access to water and sanitation after being forcefully removed from their ancestral forest lands on the slopes of Mount Elgon.

“Not only were the Benet violently evicted from the forest and robbed of their ancestral home, but today, 13 years later, they are still living in temporary settlements made of flimsy huts of mud and stick, deprived of essential services such as clean drinking water and electricity and cut off from health care and education. The treatment of the Benet is a flagrant violation of Uganda’s constitution and its own international human rights obligations,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East and Southern Africa.

Muchena called on the Ugandan government to “recognize the Benet as the Indigenous inhabitants of the forest and restore them to their ancient home.”

According to the report, titled “13 Years in Limbo: Forced Evictions of the Benet in the Name of Conservation,” Amnesty says that it interviewed 61 evictees on the numerous impacts of forced evictions against the community of about 18,000 people.

Authorities in Uganda have said that the allegations by Amnesty International about the Benet people are false and inaccurate.

''We did not take the Benet's land. We simply evicted them from a place gazetted by the government for wildlife. A gazetted place for wildlife. Whenever we chase people from a gazetted place, we are doing our job. We cannot allow encroachers on gazetted land,” said the spokesman for the Uganda Wildlife Authority, Bashir Hangi.

He castigated those who wrote the report for telling lies, noting that “those people are not living in camps. They are living in a containment area. We gave them a piece of land to live on.”

The Benet is a hunter-gatherer and pastoralist community widely referred to by the pejorative word “Ndorobo,” meaning the “primitive people of the mountain.”