On July 6, a delegation of Namibian leaders, lawyers, and
heads of civic organisations, arrived in Berlin hoping to meet with German
President Joachim Gauck, to present him with a petition signed by over 2,000
German public figures including members of the Bundestag, the German national
parliament. The document, titled "Genocide is Genocide ", called on
the German government to accept "historical responsibility" for the
genocide perpetrated against the Herero and Nama people over a century ago.
In October 1904 General Lothar von Throtha, the commander in
German "South-West Africa", issued an extermination order - to kill
any Herero, armed or not, found within the borders of German colonial
territory. As the Herero fled into the desert towards Botswana, the German authorities
sealed off the border. Thousands died of thirst and starvation, the rest were
sent to concentration camps. By 1909, 65,000 people had been killed, and an
estimated 80 percent of the Herero people and 50 percent of the Nama had been
wiped out.
In 2001, the Herero People's Reparations Corporation filed a
civil lawsuit with a US court requesting $2bn in recompense from the German
government and several corporations. The legal case was unsuccessful.
In 2004, at the hundred year anniversary of the Herero
uprising, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany's development aid minister
expressed regret for the mass killing. "We Germans accept our historic and
moral responsibility and the guilt incurred by Germans at that time". But
the minister dismissed calls for financial compensation for the victims'
descendants. Many Namibian activists thought the minister's statement did not
go far enough.
In 2011, the skulls of 20 victims of the genocide - for
decades stored at the Berlin Medical Historical Museum - were handed over in an
official ceremony to a Namibian delegation.
In 2015, a motion was submitted in the German parliament by
the Left Party calling on Angela Merkel's government to apologise to Namibia,
and repudiating the effort to use development assistance to deal with the
historic trauma, calling it "a unilateral move, made without consulting
the Namibians". The motion said development assistance is entirely
different from "restorative justice", which requires that the
injustice first be recognised.
When the Namibian leaders arrived in Berlin, they were planning
to reiterate their demands for an apology, reparations, and for the
repatriation of the remaining skulls to Namibia. Yet by the second week of
July, reports emerged that the Namibian delegation was given the "cold
shoulder", did not get to meet with President Gauck, and that the petition
was handed to a lower-level bureaucrat in the president's office. The
delegation was confined to a street entrance, and not invited to sit down to
present the document. The Herero leader, Chief Vekuii Rukoro, who led the
delegation, was displeased by the reception. He denounced the German
government, saying:
"The refusal of the German president to personally come and
receive such a historic document at this critical juncture and the uncivilised
manner in which his office decided to receive such a dignified and high ranking
delegation ..." - adding that the behaviour showed the "punch of typical German arrogance and
paternalism which we reject with the contempt they deserve".
On July 8, Norbert Lammert of the Christian Democrat party,
and president of the Bundestag, wrote in Die Zeit, that Germany perpetrated a
"race war" and a "genocide" in Namibia.
The Namibian delegation has now set October 2 as the
deadline for an answer to their demands for reparations. The activists have
since travelled to London where they met with a team of lawyers to ponder legal
action against Germany, should it miss the upcoming deadline.
"The whole of Africa will be united behind the
Ovaherero and Nama of Namibia, and Germany will be the new international exile
state guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity," warned ChiefRukoro.
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