SWAZI COPS LET MAN BE EXECUTED

On 8 August 2008 a young Swazi man, Musa Gamedze, was hunted down and executed in broad daylight at his home, in full view of his children. According to eyewitness reports the man who fired the fatal shot was the General Manager of a local private game reserve, Mkhaya, accompanied by three police officers.

Friends of the Earth (FoE) reports that Big Game Parks (BGP) owns and manages Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary and Mkhaya Nature Reserve. It also manages Hlane National Park, the country’s largest protected area, held in trust for the Nation by the King.

Musa Gamedze was part of a community that was forcibly evicted, without compensation, by BGP from land they had lived on for more than four decades. The community is still resettling and struggling to rebuild their livelihoods. Their new home is over 10km away from Mkhaya Game Reserve and the time of the shooting Musa had just returned to visit his three young children.

Musa is not the only one to suffer at the hands of BGP. Many others have been killed or left crippled in suspicious circumstances. The police and the parks rangers, when not denying responsibility, cite poaching as the reason for the attacks.

Whilst there have been reports of game poaching by the residents of the neighbouring communities, these are understood to be mainly subsistence in nature with some resulting from farmers defending their crops against marauding game from the nature reserves.

In 2005 Friends of the Earth Swaziland published a research report into the conflicts arising from the management of protected areas. It exposed numerous cases of human rights abuses which were alleged to have been committed in the name of conservation by game rangers and put forward various recommendations. These include the urgent repeal of section 23 of the Game Act, used by perpetrators of these human rights abuses to avoid prosecution.

Three years after this report the situation is critical.

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See also

DEFEND SWAZILAND’S RURAL PEOPLE