Extreme sports, fast cars, fishing, and safaris around the world … the Crown Prince of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a hectic globetrotter. Nor does he seek to hide it; Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – whose pen name for his romantic poems is 'Fazza' ('he who helps') – freely shares his privileged life on social networks.
One such post shows the Crown Prince, with his imposing physique and close-cropped beard, standing in the middle of some elephants. In the background the skyscrapers of Dubai are plainly visible. It is an incongruous image, seeing these huge animals in the desert sands of the Emirates. The Crown Prince published the image with the tags #WildLife and #MyDubai.
Until very recently there were no elephants at all in the Emirates. These endangered mammals have been imported from Africa, in particular Namibia and Zimbabwe; in addition to Dubai, African elephants have now appeared in the majority of zoos in the UAE.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum also regularly goes game hunting in game reserves in Tanzania where there are other large emblematic animals such as lions. In a video in poor taste that was published on March 21st 2018, he is shown with a young girl whom he invites to sing. She is covered in a red and black shawl that is typical of the Maasai community, who live in the Ngorongoro District of north-east Tanzania, bordering the famous Serengeti national park.
It was in this region that a David against Goliath episode recently took place; on June 10th the Tanzanian army opened fire with live rounds on protesters armed simply with bows and arrows. The latter had come to remove boundary markers put in place by the authorities to mark a new zone of some 1,500 square kilometres that is now banned to the Maasai people and their herds. In the resulting confrontation around 30 protesters were wounded, livestock were killed and 25 people – including some local councillors – were arrested and accused of murdering a police officer. The trial was due to start on July 14th.
According to the United Nations, a total of 150,000 people in this area could be moved against their wishes under the displacement plans. The Tanzanian authorities say they have to move these people from their ancestral lands to preserve the local fauna and to extend conservation zones. But many disagree. “This unlawful forced eviction is shocking in both its scale and brutality,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s Director for East and Southern Africa.
Insatiable demand from the tourist industry
On paper the Maasai people are every bit as much part of the Tanzanian culture and folklore as the country's animals and exceptional scenery. Yet in reality this community has been a victim of the conservation and tourism industries since British colonial days. Back in the 1950s the Maasai were evicted from the Serengeti and asked to move to the Ngorongoro District, in the name of protecting the region's fauna. Now they are being told to move again.
The old paternalistic claims that the pastoral practices of the Maasai are damaging to the environment – something which many experts dispute – and that this community needs to be civilised are arguments still used by the Tanzanian authorities to justify their actions. Yet the reality is that this large-scale eviction is being carried out to meet the insatiable demands of the tourist industry. Tourism is the biggest provider of foreign currency for Tanzania, the second largest contributor to GDP and the third biggest employer in the country. It is thus a vital sector and one that has long attracted the attention of private investors such as high-end hunting and safari specialists Otterlo Business Corporation (OBC).
In 1992 OBC negotiated a concession to 400,000 hectares of land in Loliondo, part of Ngorongoro District and east of the Serengeti, for an initial period of 20 years, for tourism use, including hunting. Very soon it was accused of barring access to the land and drinking water for the Maasai people and their herds. There were also claims that the company relied on the Tanzanian army and police to drive people out and burn their farms.
'Loliondo's killing fields'
The man behind the agreement between the Tanzanian state and this private company was Mohamed Abdul Rahim Al Ali, a former junior defence minister in the UAE who is close to the royal family. So in return for investments in the Tanzanian army the president of the day, Ali Hassan Mwinyi (in office from 1985 to 1995), discreetly sold off the Maasai lands.
The tourism business run by OBC, whose incursions into protected zones have been criticised by local activists, came to a halt in 2017 following revelations of a network of corruption inside the country's ministry of natural resources and tourism. But it resumed the following year after the dismissal of the company's local executive director and some senior Tanzanian officials.
Several local sources have told Mediapart that one of the main shareholders in OBC is Abdulrahman Kinana, the vice-chair of Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the political party which has effectively held power in Tanzania since independence in the early 1960s. Secretary general of the CCM from 2012 to 2018, Kinana can be seen in a video in March 2018 welcoming the Crown Prince of Dubai's father, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, as the latter descended from an aircraft onto the Tanzanian savannah. The plane had touched down on a 2.5km landing strip built by OBC.
OBC's activities, which principally serve the Emirates' royal family and friends, range from luxury safaris – to see lions, leopards, elephants and other big game – to upmarket game reserve lodges. Each week hundreds of kilos of game killed in the hunting is flown out of Tanzania, none of it inspected by the country's authorities. Meanwhile hundreds of animal carcasses are left scattered on the land. Some local wardens speak of the 'killing fields of Loliondo'.
Attempts to expel the Maasai people to extend the zone of this butchery are nothing new, taking place in 2013, 2015 and 2016. In September 2017 four villages in Loliondo filed a case to the East African Court of Justice. A year later, on September 25th 2018, the court issued a temporary injunction – valid until June 22nd 2022 – against the government. The court granted this interim order “restraining” the government or its agents from “evicting the … residents from the disputed land, being the land comprised in the 1,500sq km of land in the Wildlife Conservation Area bordering Serengeti National Park” and from “destroying their homesteads or confiscating their livestock on that land” until the case was determined.
The court rejected the government's argument that the expulsions were necessary immediately in order to protect the local ecosystem. “We take the view that in the short term the important duty to avert environmental and other ecological concerns pales in the face of the social disruption and human suffering that would inevitably flow from the continued eviction of the … residents,” the court stated. A new case was filed on June 13th this year after the events in Loliondo.
In the meantime information from different sources suggest that the Tanzanian state has reallocated a part of the money it was given by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – the country's tourism industry was badly hit by the Covid pandemic – away from the Ngorongoro district. Documents from Jumaa Mhina, executive director of the Ngorongoro district, which have leaked on social media, suggest that that some 55.5 million shillings – or 144,000 euros – of the money originally earmarked for Ngorongoro is now to be used instead to build classrooms and boarding facilities in Handeni, the region where people who voluntary choose to leave Ngorongoro will go. Some human rights activists apparently see this move as a “punishment” for those who refuse to move. The IMF did not respond to Mediapart's questions on this.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter