Over the Last three months, acts of unconceivable evil were perpetrated through an eviction operation against indigenous pastoralists in Loliondo. Loliondo is one of the three Divisions of the Ngorongoro District situated in the Arusha Region in Northern Tanzania. The Ngorongoro District Covers an area of about 14037 square Kilometres. Stretching across some 8,300 sq km, is the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, established in 1959 and governed by the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority, and the rest is the Loliondo Game Control Area consisting of the Sale and Loliondo Divisions.

This urgent alert is based on the forceful evictions of Maasai pastoralists from their homes and grazing lands in Loliondo Division, Ngorongoro District in Northern Tanzania and the gross human rights violations that are being committed. 

The eviction operation started on the 4th July 2009 and was conducted by the notorious riot police, the Field Force Unit, with assistance of private guards from the Otterlo Business Cooperation (OBC). They entered the villages by shooting in the air and using teargas before pouring petrol on the Maasai homes and setting them on fire.

"Article 1. The purposes of this Sub-Decree are to determine principles, procedures, and mechanisms for the registration of land of indigenous communities as collective title.

Article 2. The objectives of this Sub-Decree are to provide indigenous communities with legal rights over land tenure, to ensure land tenure security, and to protect collective ownership by preserving the identity, culture, good custom and tradition of each indigenous community."

In recent months, the Rohingyas have been making headlines again. Who are they?
It was reported1 recently that Myanmar Foreign Minister U Nyan Win had told his ASEAN2
counterparts in Hua Hin, Thailand, prior to the ASEAN Summit, that the SPDC is "willing to
accept the return of refugees from Myanmar if they are listed as Bengali Muslim minorities but
not if they are Rohingyas, because Rohingyas are not Myanmar citizens". What does this
signify? To the uninitiated, what difference does it make if they are Bengalis or Rohingyas? Are

Displacement as a result of conflict and human rights violations continued in Myanmar in 2008. An estimated 66,000 people from ethnic minority communities in eastern Myanmar were forced to become displaced in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict and human rights abuses. As of October 2008, there were at least 451,000 people reported to be internally displaced in the rural areas of eastern Myanmar. This is however a conservative figure, and there is no information available on figures for internally displaced people (IDPs) in several parts of the country.

Untold stories in Myanmar obscured by the catastrophic Cyclone Nargis...based on a media trip organised by Burma Campaign UK

A review of policies and interventions effecting pastoralists in Tanzania, including consequences on livelihoods, social relations and access to resources including land.

This policy brief focuses on ecotourism in north-eastern Kenya and is based on the analysis of two key existing ecotourism industry models in Laikipia and Isiolo. The purpose of the work was to provide the Government of Kenya (GoK) policymakers and private sector investors with a deeper understanding of the eco-tourism industry already established in the region. As highlighted, the study is based on two different ecotourism models (and four enterprises) in pro-pastoral communities in Laikipia and Isiolo using a framework of common qualitative measures of analysis.

 In Kenya, the pastoral Maasai’s districts have been the vanguard in rangeland tenure transitions and experimentation as pastoralists’ territory gave way to communal group ranches and to individual land holdings under diverse land-use activities. The tenure transformations have been accompanied by institutional and socio-economic changes that have had bearings on local communities’ capacities for collective action, pastoral livelihoods, and environmental sustainability.

This study looks at the impact of subdivision and sedentarization of pastoral lands on wildlife numbers and production in a savanna ecosystem of southern Kenya. The study uses aerial counts over a period of 33 years to compare changes in wildlife populations on two adjacent and ecologically similar Maasai group ranches. During the period under study, one group ranch was subdivided and settled. The other remained communally owned under shifting seasonal use.

This research has been conducted by RRDTC's action research unit as part of its participation in the Mekong Institute research cycle 2009.

In recent years Laos has experienced rapid changes in land and resource use and tenure. Of those, the allocation of expansive land concessions for rubber production has been amongst the most significant. While rubber is being developed in various ways in Laos, large rubber concessions in southern Laos have frequently overlapped with agricultural and forest lands of importance to local people, replacing them and thus dramatically affecting agrarian livelihoods.