India: BBC report reveals shocking impact of
shoot-on-sight conservation – and WWF involvement
Kaziranga park guards are
heavily armed and instructed to shoot intruders on
sight
© Survival
A
BBC investigation has revealed
that tribal peoples living around a national park in
India are facing arrest and beatings, torture and death
under the Park’s notorious “shoot-on-sight” policy.
The
report for television,
radio and the BBC news website featured
interviews with park guards, tribal people who have been
affected by the policy
in Kaziranga National Park, and a spokesman from
WWF-India, which helps fund,
train and equip park guards and advertises
tours of the park through its website.
The
park gets over 170,000 visitors each year. Fifty
suspects were extrajudicially executed there in the last
three years, and a severely disabled tribal man was shot
dead in 2013. The BBC has estimated that 106 have
been killed in the last 20 years. In the same period,
only one official has been killed.
Reports confirm that
seven-year-old Akash Orang will never fully recover
after having been shot by Kaziranga park guards in
2016.
© JEEPAL
The
BBC interviewed one local man
who had been beaten and tortured with electric shocks
during a detention by park officials before they
realized he had no involvement in poaching.
The
program also featured Akash Orang, a seven-year-old
tribal boy who was shot
in the legs by park guards last July. Akash said
that: “The forest guards suddenly shot me” as he was on
his way to a local shop. His father said: “He’s changed.
He used to be cheerful. He isn’t any more. In the night,
he wakes up in pain and he cries for his mother.”
Park
guards have effective immunity from prosecution and are
encouraged
to shoot suspects on sight – without arrest or
trial, or any evidence that they might have been
involved in poaching. One guard admitted that they are:
“Fully ordered to shoot them, whenever you see the
poachers or any people during night-time we are ordered
to shoot them.”
Several Kaziranga park guards
and officials have been accused of involvement in
poaching and the illegal wildlife trade in recent
years.
© BBC
WWF has provided equipment – including
what the BBC calls “night vision
goggles” – which have been used in night-time operations
and “combat and ambush” training.
When asked by the BBC how donors
might feel about their money being used to enforce this
brutal treatment, WWF India’s spokesman said that:
“What is needed is on-ground protection… We want to
reduce poaching and the idea is to reduce it with
involving other partners.”
Survival
International is leading
the global fight against these abuses and first
brought the park’s high death toll and serious instances
of corruption
among Kaziranga officials – including involvement in
the illegal wildlife trade they are employed to stop –
to global attention in 2016.
Survival’s
Director Stephen Corry said: “Conservation
organizations, including WWF,
are supporting a model of conservation which is
resulting in gross human rights abuses. They have failed
to condemn policies that are leading to widespread
extrajudicial executions. For too long, conservation has
relied on its positive public image to hide its horrific
and sustained attacks on indigenous and tribal peoples’
rights. We’re working to stop this. It’s time for
conservationists to work with tribal people, the best
conservationists and guardians of the natural world.
It’s time for conservation organisations to call for an
end to shoot on sight policies.”
Read
this online: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/11586
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