A torched Sengwer home in western Kenya’s Embobut forest. The indigenous Sengwer tribe are being forcibly removed from the area as part of the government’s attempt to preserve one of the country’s water towers. Courtesy: Justin Kenrick/Forest Peoples Programme

By Matthew Newsome
NAIROBI, Jan 24 2014 (IPS)

Kenyan government security forces are forcefully evicting thousands of people, including the indigenous Sengwer tribe, from the Embobut forest in western Kenya by burning homes and possessions in an effort to promote forest conservation, safeguard urban water access and “remove squatters”.

“The Kenya Forest Guard is burning homes and belongings in the Embobut forest area. They are threatening [people] with AK-47 guns. Gunfire has caused chaos as families run to hide in the mountain forest,” Yator Kiptum, a member of the Sengwer community, told IPS.

The Sengwer people, a traditional hunter-gatherer society estimated to have a population of only 15,000, have inhabited the forest area for hundreds of years and regard the Embobut forest area as their ancestral home."It is through such actions that whole cultures, languages and histories die." -- Tom Lomax, Forest Peoples Programme

International human rights organisations are condemning the Kenyan government for undermining the tribe’s constitutional entitlement to free, prior and informed consent to the evictions and for illegally breaking international agreements on conservation and human rights.

“Crucially, the constitution states that ancestral land and the land occupied by traditionally hunter-gatherer groups such as the Sengwer is ‘community land’ owned by that community. None of these legal provisions are being respected by the government of Kenya in the recent evictions of the Sengwer from Embobut forest,” Tom Lomax, a legal expert with the Forest Peoples Programme, an international NGO that promotes forest peoples’ rights, told IPS.

Despite the government declaring conservation as its reason for the community’s eviction, its actions break official commitments to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which require the state to protect and preserve traditional communities and their adaptive practices that have helped maintain the forest area.

Lomax maintains that the conservation of biodiversity or ecosystems in compliance with CBD commitments cannot justify evictions of indigenous communities by armed troops and the burning of houses.

“These evictions are unlawful under Kenya’s constitution and under its international legal commitments. The strong connection of the Sengwer to the Cherangany Hills forests [where the Embobut forest lies] means that their very physical and cultural survival as a people is at stake in these evictions,” Lomax said.

“It is through such actions that whole cultures, languages and histories die. Sengwer ancestors are buried in Embobut forest, and their sacred places and livelihoods are there. They have nowhere else to go,” he added.

However, despite protests from the Sengwer community about their forced removal, the principal secretary in the ministry of environment, water and natural resources, Richard Lesiyampe, said in a public statement on Jan. 7 that “people were moving out of the forest willingly.”

“The reason of telling people to move out of the forest was meant to conserve one of the Kenya’s water towers and no one is being forced out but are moving willingly,” he said in the statement.

Over the last 20 years regional landslides and election violence have created a large number of Internally Displaced Persons who have inundated the Embobut forest in the Cherangani Hills.

The Sengwer community have found themselves conflated with the settlers and labelled as “squatters” by the government despite an injunction secured at the High Court in Eldoret forbidding evictions until the issue of community rights to their land is settled.

The Kenyan government has pledged 400,000 shillings (about 4,600 dollars) as compensation to each evicted family. However, the Sengwer community have refused to take money in exchange for their land and burnt possessions.

The World Bank (WB) is being investigated by its own inspection panel after the Sengwer community complained in January 2013 that the WB-funded Natural Resource Management Project was responsible for redrawing the borders of the Cherangani forest reserves.

This redrawing of the borders led to the Kenyan government evicting, without consultation, community members found on the inside of the forest reserve. The government has invoked the WB redrawn boundaries to legitimise forced evictions from 2007 to 2011 and in 2013.

“While the main culprit here is the Kenyan government, the World Bank must also be held accountable. It financed a project that redrew the boundaries of the forest reserve without consulting the Sengwer,” Freddie Weyman, Africa campaigner at Survival International, told IPS.

“Some families therefore suddenly found themselves living inside the reserve and subject to eviction. This is now the seventh time authorities have torched houses in Embobut in the seven years since the project began. Can the World Bank guarantee that its loan did not facilitate these evictions?” Weyman asked.

International conservationists reject the Kenyan government’s stance that a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle is incompatible with the goals of conservation and forest protection.

Instead, they say, environmental conservation is best achieved by supporting indigenous communities who have experience of preserving their habitat and resources.

Liz Alden Wily, research fellow at the Rights and Resources Institute, told IPS that this is a “battle between conservation and particularly the colonial inherited mode of fortress conservation where everybody has to be removed for the forest to become pristine, to modern approaches which utilise occupying communities as the conservators.

“Around Africa and the world, the latter strategy is beginning to get a grip,” she said.

“These areas are the residue left of their ancient territories. [The] Ogiek, Aakuu, or Sengwer, are people who live essentially by forest hunting, honey gathering [some have 80 hives], and some small numbers of livestock and small farms. They have a different commitment to the forest. Consider, for example an Ogiek honey gatherer, dependent on his hives. Would he burn the forest or clear the forest and lose his livelihood?” Wily said.

Since the 1970s Kenyan authorities have made repeated efforts to forcibly evict the Sengwer from the forest for resettlement in other areas.

The “Fortress Conservation” approach that involves evicting indigenous communities rather than consulting and supporting them is increasingly discredited as counterproductive.

Instead, the ‘New Conservation Paradigm’ promotes an approach to conservation that supports ancestral communities to continue protecting their forests and biodiversity.

“Rather than returning the area to ‘pristine’ forest, it actually does just the opposite as profit-making plantations and agriculture replace the biodiversity of the indigenous forest. Far from protecting ‘pristine’ forest, this approach uses ‘conservation’ as its excuse to first evict the indigenous inhabitants before destroying the indigenous forest,” Justin Kenrick from Forest Peoples Programme told IPS.

Recently reconstructed Maracaná stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Governo do Rio de Janeiro CC BY 3.0

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 17 2013 (IPS)

As Brazil prepares to host several sporting mega-events, human rights abuses and authoritarian interventions by the authorities are going on behind the scenes, favouring major urbanisation projects and stadium remodelling, a study says.

The state has forced almost 30,000 families across the country to leave their homes, according to the Comité Popular da Copa e das Olimpíadas (World Cup and Olympics People’s Committee), made up of around 50 social movements, researchers, NGOs and trade unions.

The Committee’s report, “Megaeventos e Violações dos Direitos Humanos no Rio de Janeiro” (Mega-events and Human Rights Abuses in Rio de Janeiro), says that in this city alone, which will host the 2016 Olympic Games, 3,000 families have already been displaced from their homes and another 7,800 are facing eviction.

The forced displacement of thousands of people and the privatisation of public areas constitute the dark side of Brazil’s sports projects, claims the study which was presented in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday May 15.

Brazil will host the FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) World Cup, which is to be held in 12 cities, in 2014. A dress rehearsal for this will be the ninth FIFA Confederations Cup, a tournament between the top national teams from each continent, from Jun. 15-30 this year.

“Our fears are being confirmed. The benefits and social legacy that are so widely trumpeted really hide a dark legacy: an elitist, segregated and unequal society. It is a sad thing to see,” said Orlando Alves dos Santos Jr., a sociologist and urban planner and one of the study coordinators.

In the view of dos Santos Jr., a researcher at the Observatório das Metrópoles and the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning and Research at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the multi-million dollar investments carried out under the cloak of preparations for the World Cup and the Olympic Games go beyond the scope of sports facilities and are part of a grand project of urban reform.

Interventions in cities, like evictions, are having an immense impact in terms of social exclusion, the report says.

“We show that poor people are being relocated outside the areas of investment, which are concentrated in the centre, south and north of Rio de Janeiro. These are areas where real estate has vastly increased in value,” dos Santos Jr. said.

He said the rise in housing prices has been largely based on the displacement of the poor towards the outskirts of the city.

“All this has been accompanied by a complete lack of information for the evicted families, as well as coercion, the use of violence and human rights abuses. What is happening in the city is extremely serious,” he said.

Christopher Gaffney, a U.S. geographer who studies public policies on sports and security for big events, told IPS that evictions and the privatisation of public spaces represented a great failure of democracy in this country of over 195 million people.

“The policy is a big step backwards. It represents a reversal of values that eliminates the role of government as the guarantor of essential citizen services, like housing and culture. Forced evictions are a clear violation of the right to housing. Real estate speculation is rife in Rio,” he said.

Gaffney, who is also a member of the People’s Committee and a researcher with the Observatório das Metrópoles, said that there is no “coherent practical criterion” being applied in the eviction of thousands of families, and that those affected by the policy complain of a lack of dialogue, transparency and information.

“The uncertainty associated with being made homeless creates constant panic, and terror methods are being used to expel these people from their communities at any price,” he said.

“There have been cases where families have been told they must vacate their homes, without any time for them to collect their belongings; and others where their eviction has been negotiated right alongside the bulldozers that were ready to demolish the houses. This is enormous psychological pressure,” he said.

Only a few families received a decent house after their eviction, Gaffney said. The authorities provide indemnities for expropriation that are not enough to buy a new house, or they put families into housing plans that have requirements that many of them cannot meet, such as that the head of household must have a formal sector job and a bank account.

The report argues that the real Olympic legacy in Rio de Janeiro will be that of “an even more unequal city, which will exclude thousands of families and destroy entire communities…a project that will appropriate the majority of benefits for a select few economic and social agents.”

One of the main criticisms is the privatisation of public spaces worth millions of dollars. In Rio de Janeiro, sporting facilities like the legendary Maracaná stadium are being renovated, as well as infrastructure and transport facilities, and urban remodelling projects have mushroomed.

The initial budget for investment in the city for the upcoming events has risen by 95 percent, from 1.1 billion dollars to 2.1 billion.

Construction and renovation of stadiums represent nearly 25 percent of this total. Maracaná stadium, where the finals of the 2014 World Cup will be played and where the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games will be held two years later, is the focus of controversy because it has been granted in concession to a private consortium for 35 years.

The cost of the works undertaken was 600 million dollars, compared with the 370 million dollars initially envisaged. The concession of the stadium into private hands for the first time led the public prosecutor’s office to launch an investigation into the state’s investments for the sporting mega-events.

In Gaffney’s view, the sporting facilities will be transformed from cultural spaces into consumption centres.

“Stadiums are the platforms where local culture is expressed in football. It would be virtually cultural assassination to substitute faithful, traditional fans with ‘clients’ or higher class consumers,” he said.

Moreover, the private initiative will also lead to the demolition of a major aquatic park, a public school, an athletics track and a prison, in order to build two multi-storey car parks for 2,000 vehicles, a heliport, a shopping mall and a football museum.

“This shows the vulnerability of Brazilian democracy, even as Brazil is trying to build stronger institutions. The FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games are accelerating anti-democratic processes,” Gaffney said.

Dos Santos Jr. said that society has taken the multi-million dollar renovation passively, and that construction of the Maracaná complex “will bring about the destruction of multi-purpose facilities that were used to practise other sports.

“It will only be a space for show and a commercial centre. Athletes in other disciplines will not have a place to train. And the entrance tickets will be too expensive,” he said.

The People’s Committee intends to present its study to public authorities, FIFA, the International Olympic Committee and international organisations such as the United Nations through its Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing.

Protesters in Málaga demonstrating against foreclosures. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain , Oct 25 2012 (IPS)

Shouting slogans against bank foreclosures, dozens of protesters in this southern Spanish city gathered Wednesday to prevent the eviction of a Moroccan family who couldn’t afford to meet their mortgage payments.

“I lost my construction job and I have two small children,” the head of this immigrant family, who gave his name as Mohammed, told IPS outside the house he began making payments on in 2007 in the Málaga neighbourhood of La Palma.

About a hundred neighbours and members of the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) gathered for hours in front of Mohammed’s family home, in spite of Wednesday’s heavy rain, to keep out the justice system authorities in charge of the foreclosure.

Thousands of immigrant and Spanish families are in the same situation as a result of the severe economic crisis, which has driven up unemployment to the highest level in Europe, depressed wages, and prompted a raft of austerity measures introduced by the government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of the rightwing People’s Party.

A total of 29,275 evictions were carried out between April and June – a record for this country, according to a report on the impact of the crisis on the judicial branch, published Sept. 2 by the General Council of the Judiciary.

The official figures indicate that the Spanish justice system foreclosed on 271,570 homes because of default on mortgage payments between 2007, when the crisis began, and 2010.

“This is a very harsh war,” Antonio Alarcón, an activist with the Málaga PAH, told IPS. He said Spain “is in a state of housing emergency, with many families living in dreadful conditions in garages, garrets and shacks,” while others face imminent eviction.

But at the same time, there are over five million vacant dwellings, equivalent to 20 percent of the country’s housing stock, according to housing experts. The National Institute of Statistics recorded 3.1 million uninhabited housing units in 2001, but will only update its figures in early 2013.

According to the newspaper El País, the General Council of the Judiciary this month studied a report by six magistrates which accused banks of “malpractice” for granting mortgages “without evaluating the borrower’s real ability to pay,” demanded a moratorium on mortgage payments, and called for government bank bailout funds to be extended to the financial institutions’ indebted clients.

The growth of unemployment, which has reached 24.6 percent, has caused growing numbers of mortgage-holders to default on their payments and to be evicted. And in spite of being on the street, they are still liable to the banks for the outstanding debt.

“Where will they go with their children? We need a solution, a job so that we can pay,” a female relative of Mohammed’s wife told IPS on the brink of tears, while her husband, Abdesselan, complained that they were deceived because they took out a mortgage for 117,000 euros (151,758 dollars) when the title deed states the value of the apartment is only 70,000 euros (116,754 dollars).

“Let’s form a human chain of passive, peaceful resistance. We’re here to protect a home and a family. We are human beings,” Sara Vázquez, a Málaga PAH spokeswoman, exhorted the neighbours shortly before the time set for the eviction, which in the end was suspended without a new date set, IPS was told.

“It is the neighbours who are stopping the evictions,” said Alarcón, who complained about the lack of effectiveness of the foreclosure mediation programme launched by the government in recent months, whose offices have not been able to solve cases like that of Mohammed’s family.

PAH lawyer José Cosín told IPS that foreclosures can be stopped or delayed by means of “frontal and physical” opposition by civil society, organised in groups like the May 15 Movement (15M), which arose from spontaneous mass demonstrations in the central squares of Spain’s large cities on that date in 2011.

PAH, formed in Barcelona in 1994 as an association of people affected by mortgage debt, has joined with other social organisations and with trade unions to promote a so-called Popular Legislative Initiative, which would make it possible for mortgage-holders to give up a house in full payment for the debt, request a moratorium on mortgages and convert them to affordable rents.

The Rajoy administration will face its second general strike in protest against the cuts in less than a year of government on Nov. 14. In February it announced a “code of good practice” on giving up houses in full payment – known as “dación en pago” – that was merely a declaration of intent and not binding on the banks.

The proposal, according to Cosín, “was not worth the paper it was written on,” as it left it up to the banks to accept or not the return of the houses, or to negotiate affordable rent payments.

“Our weapons (against evictions) are our voices and our hands,” one of Mohammed’s neighbours shouted through a loudspeaker, surrounded by signs reading “Indignation” and “Can’t Pay, Not Won’t Pay.”

In late 2010 there were 687,523 new housing units in Spain that lacked buyers, according to a July 2011 report by the Ministry of Public Works. Meanwhile, evictions are growing exponentially.

Cosín believes solutions exist, and he gave the example of Miguel, an unemployed bricklayer who was squatting in a decrepit house in Málaga, but signed an agreement on Oct. 12 with José, the owner, which allows him to live in the house temporarily in return for renovating it so it can be sold.

“This is a solution in a society where there are millions of empty houses that are depreciating and thousands of people without a home,” said Cosín, who proposed the formula that suited both parties when he received José’s lawsuit against Miguel.

José will receive a pre-arranged sum of money when the house is sold, and the difference between this amount and the final value will be used to buy another dilapidated house for restoration, said Cosín, who is also a 15M activist.

A bill on Urban Rents before the Spanish parliament includes a contract on “restoration in lieu of rent,” regulating the opportunity for the tenant to restore the property instead of paying rent.

Governments should promote alternatives to housing policy based on credit and property, among other things by means of developing a private rental sector, Raquel Rolnik, United Nations Special Rapporteur for the right to adequate housing, said in a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly.

Demolition of Shiliuzhuang village in southern Beijing, Jul. 4, 2012. Bulldozers and hired security officers descended on the village without warning at dawn, razing it within hours. Credit: Amnesty International/Boxun

By Malgorzata Stawecka
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 12 2012 (IPS)

Wang Jiazheng’s family was sleeping at home when the bulldozers, along with security officers, entered their village at dawn.

While the demolition team was approaching their house, Wang climbed onto the roof, poured gasoline on his body and set himself on fire. He died in the hospital several days later.

According to the new report “Standing Their Ground” released by Amnesty International Thursday, the forced eviction of people in both rural and urban areas has become the order of the day in China and constitutes a violation of country’s international human rights commitments on a vast scale.

As affirmed in different international human rights conventions, forced eviction is the “removal against their will of individuals, families and/or communities from the homes and/or land they occupy without the provision of, and access to, appropriate forms of legal or other protection”.

Forced evictions are officially forbidden under international human rights law and can be undertaken only as a last resort after having examined all reasonable alternatives.

“Despite international scrutiny and censure of such abuses amid preparations for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the pace of forced evictions has only accelerated over the past three years, with millions of people across the country forced from their residences without appropriate legal protection and safeguards,” the 85-page report states.

According to Amnesty International, expropriation and home demolitions in China have risen dramatically, as local governments have been trying to cope with structural budget deficit since the reform of the tax system in the 1990s and pay off enormous debts by selling off land rights, often secretly, to real estate developers.

Moreover, China’s ruling Communist Party leaders defend those who contribute to economic growth, even at the expense of the poorest, as a necessary step of country’s modernisation process.

“The effects of eviction touch all aspects of Chinese society,” Frank Jannuzi, head of Amnesty International’s Washington office and an East Asia expert, told IPS.

“The effects of forced evictions ripple out into the citizens’ ability to start a new life after having lost their homes and possessions and poses a significant obstacle to stability in China,” he added.

Amnesty International is calling upon the Chinese authorities to put a definite end to this practice at the first opportunity and ensure “adequate safeguards are put in place in line with international law”, with proper alternative housing and possibility of seeking redress for all affected citizens.

China’s central government appears to recognise the gravity of the situation, but it does not effectively approach it.

A long-awaited Law on Property Rights, adopted in March 2007, distinguishes the state from collective and individual property rights and provides a uniform domestic legal framework for all residents. However, critics say it doesn’t adequately safeguard civil rights, since it states that forced evictions may take place ‘for the purpose of public interest’, without giving further definition of this notion.

According to the report, the “public interest” often constitutes an excuse for local officials and property developers to increase their revenue and profit. Projects aiming at China’s high-speed expansion of cities and infrastructure often lead to the eviction of hundreds of families who usually are not offered alternative accommodation or adequate compensation.

Moreover, the rights to basic services, such as water supply, electricity or road access, are often violated in total impunity, it says.

However, as of January 2011, some progress has been made with the adoption of several regulations prohibiting the use of violence in urban evictions and guaranteeing adequate compensation based on true market value and not on the agricultural value of the land. But these regulations take into account only home owners and not renters, and are not extended to rural communities, housing rights activists and lawyers warn.

Eviction therefore largely contributes to general impoverishment in the country with the violation of basic human rights, such as the right to health, education, food and water, among others, the report says.

“Chinese who are evicted often must relocate far from jobs, schools and transportation and those who receive new housing do not always receive the proper legal documents of home ownership – putting them at risk of future forced evictions and, in some cases, preventing them from being allowed to legally sell their homes,” Jannuzi told IPS.

Collective protests have emerged as the only way to oppose coerced evictions of people from their homes and turn central government’s attention to the issue. According to the report, property developers and local governments answer such resistance with reprisals that often result in people being injured, ending up in jail or in Re-education Through Labour (RTL) Centres. Beatings, intimidation and threats occur also on a daily basis, the report says.

“In some cases, victims were killed or injured during the demolition process, including one case in which a woman trying to stop a demolition crew was buried by a bulldozer,” the report states.

A string of self-immolation acts in protest against Chinese rule has spread throughout the region. “There have been at least 41 cases of self-immolation in protests since 2009,” Jannuzi told IPS.

Residents who try to seek redress have little hope of gaining justice. “Efforts to appeal, whether through the courts or government agencies, are routinely blocked and sometimes result in imprisonment,” he said, adding that there are several cases of those who do speak out being persecuted and harassed, including the lawyers who defend housing rights activists.