Lawyers say the government is attempting to intimidate pastoralists as thousands flee to Kenya amid an escalating row over evictions
Twenty Maasai pastoralists from northern Tanzania have been charged with the murder of a police officer during protests over government plans to use their ancestral land for conservation and a luxury hunting reserve.
The officer was allegedly shot by an arrow on 10 June while attempting to demarcate land in Loliondo, which borders Serengeti national park.
Lawyers from the Tanzanian Human Rights Defenders Coalition say a group of Maasai leaders was arrested on 9 June when they were called in for talks with the area district commissioner about the government’s move to remove them from the land. The men were accused of inciting the community, arrested, and transferred to a prison in Arusha, where they were detained for a week without access to a lawyer.
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On 16 June, the men were brought before a court and charged with murder, along with 10 other men arrested last week.
The men’s lawyer, Paul Kisabo, said the charges were “politically motivated” and designed to intimidate the Maasai, as half his clients were arrested before the police officer was killed. “It doesn’t add up,” he said. He believed the government would drop the charges.
More than 70,000 Maasai face eviction from land in Loliondo. They have been under threat of eviction since 2012 but previous efforts to force them from their land were thwarted.
Members of the community say they found out in January that there were renewed efforts to remove them from 1,500 sq km (540 sq miles) of land to make way for a game reserve, to be operated by a UAE-owned company. At the start of June, military and paramilitary forces arrived in the area to erect concrete boundary posts.
