Kenya turfs thousands of families from illegal homes

Twenty thousand Kenyan families have left the farms they had set up home in illegally as the deadline for the eviction ran out, officials said. This week security officers went into the Mau forest, in the first stage of a government operation that will eventually see up to 30,000 families leave. The forest is one of the East African country’s key water sources, but many of it’s rivers have dried up and the government wants to restore the eco-system by evicting the thousands of families who have settled their illegally. The country, on the equator has just suffered its worst drought in years.

Amid warnings that the entire ecosystem in the Rift valley and western Kenya was in danger from deforestation, Kenya's government has made saving the Mau its number one environmental priority. A task force last year recommended that settlers in the forest be removed and that cleared areas be replanted with trees.Some politicians protesting against the land grab have called for the nearly 1,700 families to be found somewhere else to live and farm. These people, about 8,000 have been labelled as illegal squatters without rights to the land and are being targeted in the first phase of the operation.But as few as 1,962 families have genuine title deeds, according to estimates. Much of the land was handed out by politicians in the run-up to elections and then re-parcelled and sold on illegally. The government has promised to compensate people who could supply title deeds to their land.

Thousands left at the beginning of the week when they got their eviction notices, but many say they have nowhere else to go. Some of homeless evictees are very angry."We've obeyed the government rules and come out, a distraught man told the BBC: "But the problem we are facing here is the problem of hunger, some are sick, some have injuries, the problem here is mental torture."

The damage to the forest has triggered an environmental disaster downstream, with millions of people suffering from water shortages according to the government. Officials now intend to replant the more than 100 million trees felled by the squatters and illegal loggers. But a serious drought that has led to water and power shortages across the country is another contributing factor. And environmentalists forecast that it will be many decades before Kenya rivers flow again."We have no time to waste here," said Christian Lambrechts, a United Nations environment programme expert seconded to the government's Mau Secretariat. "The ecological services must be restored."

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children