Tens of thousands of Tanzania's ethnic Maasai people are homeless after the government burned their houses to keep the savannah open for tourism benefiting two foreign safari companies, a US-based policy think tank has charged.
Villagers in northern Tanzania's Loliondo area, near the Ngorongoro Crater tourism hotspot, have been evicted in the past year and denied access to vital grazing and watering holes, said the new report published yesterday by the Oakland Institute, a California think tank that researches environmental and social issues.
"As tourism becomes one of the fastest-growing sectors within the Tanzanian economy, safari and game park schemes are wreaking havoc on the lives and livelihoods of the Maasai," said Oakland Institute's Anuradha Mittal. "But this is not just about a specific company - it is a reality that is all too familiar to indigenous communities around the world."
Concern for the Maasai has been raised at home and abroad by rights groups such as Minority Rights Group International and Survival International, which has warned that the alleged land grabs "could spell the end of the Maasai."
"The government has been reviewing boundaries and subsequently evicting communities in the name of conservation," she told The Associated Press. "In my understanding the conservation should have been made to benefit people, and if people are affected then it calls for worries. The Maasai community (is) indeed suffering."
"But what made Tanzania so alluring was not just the wildlife, but the people," he said. "When people return from a safari with us, they say how magnificent the wildlife was, but that what was so extraordinary were the people they met."
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