Readers will no doubt remember the scandalous tale of WWF thugs attacking forest peoples in Cameroon. But apparently it doesn't stop there. French TV station Canal Plus has recently uncovered widespread human rights abuses in the WWF-sponsored Kanha Tiger Reserve in India. There's a transcript of the programme here.
...in the Kanha Reserve, 2200 families are affected. Some villages...will be resettled. Others...simply removed, with no place for their inhabitants to stay. From this document we learn that resettlements began forty years ago and that dozens of villages...have been eradicated like the others. We also find that, in the two other reserves on Nouvelle Frontières' tour, people are being moved left, right and centre. 2374 more families. At least 22,000 people resettled.
Some of these tribes are apparently thought to have been living in the forest for 20,000 years.
The director of Survival International, a charity that tries to defend native peoples from threats such as those posed by the environmentalists is quoted as saying:
So-called ‘conservation’ continues to destroy tribal peoples as it has for generations. They’ve never threatened the tigers, who would do better if the tribes remained and the tourists stopped. Tribal peoples are generally better conservationists anyway than industrial-sized NGOs like WWF which stand by in silence while the parks forcibly evict people like Sukhdev and his family. It’s time these evictions are stopped and this scandal exposed.