60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

272 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
historical relationship with the West, from periods of exploration,
to slavery, to colonisation. At the heart of most confl icts, violent or
slow-burning, there also lies contestation over the use of, and control
over, economic resources and economic conditions, which can create
desperation, ignite or or lead to insane behaviour. It is tragic, therefore,
that the economic dimensions of genocidal violence tend to be
marginalised, as they are in the Genocide Convention itself.
I would also like to note that not all mass deaths, including threatened
extinctions of whole groups of people, arise from the violence
of armed confl ict or even from physical violence. Many, often slowonset
mass deaths are consequences of public policy or the neglect of
the same. Therefore, do not be surprised that my comments are about
more than deaths arising from physical killing and include the economic
conditions triggering mass killing, especially conditions arising
from public policy.
Genocide in Africa is not an exclusively 20th century phenomenon.
It dates back to the period of slavery. Adam Hochschild’s book King
Leopold’s Ghost, a true master-class, chronicles most vividly the horrors
visited upon the people of the Congo Free State in the 19th
century. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children died,
or suff ered amputations, were tortured and maimed owing to King
Leopold II’s pursuit of rubber and other loot. Joseph Conrad, a young
English sailor shocked by the brutality of Leopold’s Congo observed
in his book, The Heart of Darkness, the ‘vilest scramble for loot that
ever disfi gured the history of human conscience’. Mark Twain writes
that between 1890 and 1910, and immediately preceding this period,
Belgium’s brutality may have led to the death of 8 to 10 million Congolese.
Estimates are of course always diffi cult to verify, but even if
only half of these deaths occurred the scale was staggering, especially
compared to the size of the total population at the time.
This was of course the result of internal slavery. Whilst Leopold
was lauded in Europe as an a abolitionist and benevolent king who
brought progress to his African vassals, behind it he created a kingdom
of slaves, of forced recruitment and conscriptions; of hard labour,
driving people people armed with machetes and cutlasses to
fi ght against people with rifl es and guns. And many of his soldiers
were to write how endlessly they fought, month after month, with
these folks coming in droves with sticks and cutlasses, mowed down
by their rifl es. At the height of it, one of these soldiers wrote, ‘I cannot
say that we are anywhere near even subjugating them. They simply
preferred to die’.