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Lady Tonge, like JFK before her, excuses the seizure of land by calling those who live on it stone-aged and primitive
Jump to full article: The Guardian (uk), 2006-03-21
Author: George Monbiot Tuesday March 21, 2006 The Guardian
Intro: I think I have discovered the clinching argument for closing the House of Lords. It is the presence in that chamber of a peer called Lady Tonge of Kew. Last week the baroness (formerly the Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Tonge) opened a debate about Botswana with an attack on the Gana and Gwi bushmen of the Kalahari. She suggested they were trying to "stay in the stone age", described their technology as "primitive" and accused them of "holding the government of Botswana to ransom" by resisting eviction from their ancestral lands. How did she know? In 2002 she had spent half a day as part of a parliamentary delegation visiting one of the resettlement camps into which the bushmen have been forced. Her guides were officials in the Botswanan government.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch, a man with whom I seldom find myself in sympathy, alleged that something was missing from her account: the trip, he claimed, including first-class air travel, was funded by Debswana. Debswana, a joint venture between De Beers and the government of Botswana, owns the rights to mine diamonds in the bushmen's land in the Kalahari. . . .
He might have added that Debswana was being assisted by Hill and Knowlton, the public-relations company famous for the unsavoury nature of its clients. It advised the Chinese government in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, set up lobby groups for the tobacco companies and coached the girl who told the false story about Kuwaiti babies being thrown out of incubators that helped to launch the first Gulf war.
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