Get out you're on the Diamonds

The indigenous people of Botswana, the San, are under pressure to leave their ancestral home.(http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=37858)The article focuses on the "Botswana government's campaign to remove 5,000 San people from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to clear the way for diamond mining." The San have cultural and spiritual claim to to the land and "anthropologists say they are the oldest inhabitants of the region, having a traceable record of over 20,000 years in southern Africa." This misuse of government power is forcing the San to become an internally displaced people. The article reports that the government is refusing UN and human rights group's intervention. The San won a court hearing but the government is still trying to stop them from returning to the land. The people lack agency to stem the mechanism of physical coercive force exerted by the strong arm of the government that should be fulfilling a role to protect the people under it's jurisdiction. This article, although from 2007, paints the picture of the San as victims but one can't help but wonder if the discovery of a large amount of diamonds, if mined in an environmentally safe way might not raise the standard of living for the whole country. It's a difficult topic because the mining might have a trickle down effect on the populous and provide strong economical growth. Are the ancestral rights of small minority cultures, however strong the ties are, worth the possible advancement of the dominant cultural majority? It's a slippery slope indeed.