GERMANY OFFERS TO PAY NAMIBIANS PEANUTS FOR ATROCITIES

It has been going on for centuries. invading other nations to steal what they want and/or need.

In the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, European nations swept across the globe to control, steal and get what they wanted from nations they invaded.

Now, making a tiny bit of the news, debate is raging in Namibia over whether or not to accept Germany’s offer to pay €1.1 billion over 30 years in reparations tied to the atrocities committed by German colonizers in the early 1900s.

Germany admitted that what happened in Nambia would be called “genocide” today. The Financial Times listed some of the atrocities that included Namibians being forced to boil their own relatives so remains could be sent to German museums.

Hage Geingob, the Namibian president, accepted Berlin’s offer, but the deal was not approved in parliament. Some in the country believe that the payment over 30 years is not enough.

Nandi Mazeingo, the head of the Ovaherero Genocide Foundation, said he wants the deal to be scrapped and have a “fresh start.”

“You destroy two countries [the Oveherero and Nama], you kill 80 percent of a community, and you tell them you are giving them a billion dollars. And that billion dollars is spread over 30 years,” he told the FT.

From 1904 to 1908, colonizers from Germany settled in the region. Historians identified the bloodshed there as the first genocide of the 20th century and seen as an important step “towards the Holocaust in Europe during the second world war,” The Guardian reported.

The genocide started on 12 January 1904, according to the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. There had been tension between German occupiers and residents that led to some German farmers being attacked. 

The Germans responded to this attack with “massive brutality, murdering men, women, and children,” the report said.

Berlin has since only negotiated with the Namibian government and there has been “virtually no negotiations with descendants of victim groups (the Herero and the Nama). 

Neither the Ovaherero Traditional Authority (OTA) nor the Nama Traditional Leaders Association (NTLA) were allowed to take part in the negotiations involving the reconciliation agreement.”

Thomas Craemer, a public policy professor at the University of Connecticut, told the FT that historical reparations are “becoming more and more of an international norm and that’s a good thing.”

TRENDPOST: The Trends Journal has long reported on the impact that European colonization in Africa had on the continent. (See “MALI JUNTA: DENMARK GO HOME,” as we have with the United Kingdom, where “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire” (See “PROTESTS IN MYANMAR KEEP RAGING.”)

When the protest broke out in Myanmar in early 2021 against the military government, we noted that while the media reports on the current brutal conditions being imposed on the nation by its military, long forgotten and never mentioned is how the nation was savagely colonized by the British for over 100 years (1824-1948).