Farmland - Japan, please don't go grabbing Ethiopians' land

Japan, please don't go grabbing Ethiopians' land

Reflections on feelings and farmland born of an exciting time
spent serving Haile Selassie

3 April, 2010 | By C.W. NICOL

On March 15 just

gone, this newspaper

carried an excellent

but disturbing article

by John Vidal,

environment editor of

the London-based

Guardian newspaper.

He wrote about food

shortages and land-

grabbing in Africa,

and I was particularly troubled to read about deals going on to sell
Ethiopian land to foreign investors. In the article, an Ethiopian
government spokesperson was quoted as saying that "Ethiopia has 74
million hectares of fertile land, of which only 15 percent is currently in
use — mainly by subsistence farmers . . . "

From September 1967 until October 1969 I was the first Game Warden
of what was soon to become the Simien Mountain National Park in the
northern mountains of Begemdir province in Ethiopia — a 220-sq.-km
expanse that was enshrined in law with a proclamation by His Imperial
Majesty Haile Selassie printed in the Negarit Gazeta newspaper on Oct.
31, 1969. That proclamation defined the park's boundaries as those
mapped out by myself and Senior Game Warden John Blower, the
Addis Ababa-based Brit who was the boss of all the country's game
wardens.

At the time, of course, that was encouraging news, soon after I left
Ethiopia I started hearing about more wild land being plowed up, more
forests cut down and — almost daily — rifle shots heard around the
great Simien escarpment, home to the endangered walia ibex.

I had departed Ethiopia with a heavy heart, knowing it was heading for
more chaos and internal strife, large-scale land erosion, loss of forests
and wildlife — and inevitably, mass starvation.

Together with my very able assistant, Mesfin Abebe, a graduate of the
Tanzanian College of Wildlife Management, and our 20 rangers, we had
fought and struggled for two years to establish the park. We had done
our best to deal with poachers, hill bandits, illegal loggers and illegal
farming on vulnerable watershed slopes, all made worse by rampant
corruption — from local governors and police to senior officials in our
own central wildlife department.

Towards the end of my sojourn in Ethiopia, I drove the 800 km or so to
the capital, Addis Ababa, for meetings about the new park boundaries.
The city was in chaos. The university and nine secondary schools were
closed. Truckloads of soldiers and police were everywhere and I saw
jeeps mounted with 50-calibre machine guns. The students were not
allowed to gather, even in small groups, and hundreds had been
arrested. Wild rumors were heard and repeated — there was going to
be a coup d'etat . . . some students had been thrown into a cesspit and
drowned by the Imperial guard . . . the army was poised outside the
city, ready to come in and take over . . . five young people had been
jailed for five years for distributing pamphlets . . . all foreigners would
be killed.

On that particular visit, I myself — with a machete in one hand and a
Walther PPK in the other — faced down a vengeful mob as I was
driving along a lonely, muddy track on the outskirts of the city. Two
Ethiopian students of English tried to reason with the mob, saying that I
was helping the country, but the mob wanted blood. I was pretty angry,
and a bit of a wild man at that age, so after firing a couple of shots in
the air, I tossed the machete onto the seat beside me, stuck the pistol in
my belt, then quickly collared two rabble-rousers (as a Game Warden I
had the rights to search, seize and arrest) and hurled them into the back
of the vehicle. The people in front had to either scatter or get run down,
but about 50 screaming men and boys chased after my vehicle,
throwing stones and waving knives, machetes and sticks.

Why the fuss? I couldn't think of anything I'd done or said to get them
so enraged, but I was a foreigner and all foreigners were suspect during
that nervous time. I drove the captives to a hospital, had them checked
out so they couldn't later claim I had run them down or something.
Getting money out of scared foreigners that way was a minor industry
back then in Addis Ababa.

If that wasn't enough, a friend from the Israeli embassy later told me
that I was marked for assassination. An attempt had already been made
on my life in Gondar, the old castled city and provincial capital of
Begemdir, where I sent off reports to the capital and picked up supplies
and wages for park staff and workers.

One night, walking back to my hotel from a bar along an unlit, deserted
lane, two men came at me from behind wielding iron-tipped clubs.
Thanks to my karate skills I was able to fight it out without drawing my
pistol. After the skirmish I returned to my hotel to bandage up the
wounds on my hand and forearm. The next morning, as I was having
breakfast and getting ready to return to the park, a student I was
friendly with came to the hotel and told me that, just after the fight, a
police Land Rover drove up the lane with its lights out and officers
dragged the two attackers I had left lying on the ground to the vehicle,
tossed them into the back, and drove off. Later, other witnesses told me
the police had driven the men beyond the city limits and dumped them
in a field outside the local slaughterhouse, a place that attracted hungry
hyenas.

On my next visit to Gondar, when I made inquiries to the police about
the incident they claimed to have known nothing. This was not
surprising, as the Chief of Police was involved in the illegal wild-animal
fur trade, which we had been disrupting. That unsavory gentleman had
already warned me to stay away from fur traders. I told him that as I
was a Game Warden, it was my job not only to protect the park but
also to find and arrest such criminals.

When I got back to Gondar from Addis Ababa after the park boundary
meetings there were riots there too. A police Land Rover had been
burned. Police with guns faced the students. At night, they dragged
students out of their houses and beat them with clubs while their
parents watched and pleaded for them. A couple of bright young men
whom I knew vanished.

Then there were the anti-Arab riots.

The Eritrean Liberation Front had been blowing up planes and generally
making a nuisance of themselves, and there had been reports in the
press about links with Syria. A huge "spontaneous" anti-Arab parade
was held in Addis Ababa, with Amhara warriors wearing their lion-mane
headdresses, carrying round shields and curved scimitars. In cities and
villages all over Ethiopia, Arabs were beaten up and their shops were
stoned or even looted.

At that time, several cultured Ethiopians came to me, asking if I could
get guns and ammunition for them. (Of course I could, but would not.)

I cannot imagine now, in 2010, that Ethiopians have changed so much
that they will stay subdued and silent while being displaced from their
land by foreign investors. I especially fear that the Amhara, who are
Coptic Christians, will be incensed if Arab Muslims are involved in any
moves to take away their land rights. The Amhara are an especially
proud and ancient people. It was ordinary Ethiopians, many of them
barefooted and lightly armed, who finally drove out the Italian invaders
in 1941, despite their machine guns, howitzers, planes and tanks.

Nothing I can do or say will change any of this, but even so I, with
deep respect for Ethiopians — and as a citizen of this country — urge
Japan not to join in this greedy scrabble. We have far too much arable
land going to waste here in Japan. Land and food is not only a question
of money. People who live off their land feel deeply about it, no matter
how poor and defenceless they may seem.

Japan should shun this new kind of colonization like a plague, no matter
what well-paid city-based officials may say. As other people who have
lived and worked in the country have noted, I can myself affirm a
strong belief that there is no land in Ethiopia that has no owners or
users.

Back in the late 1960s, we had enough problems establishing a national
park, one in which farmers were allowed to keep on using their land.
We tried to stop poachers and illegal loggers, and that was not easy. I
doubt if we would have survived if we had tried to take the locals' land
from them — even if it was for reasons of wildlife protection or water
conservation.

Japan, please, by all means help poor African farmers — but do not
have anything to do with displacing them!

Courtesy