60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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284 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness Does the North have a monopoly on the theory and practice of what is fair and impartial? The point here is not to quibble about legal procedures but to establish an important point of principle, which is that our own countries in the South, our own national courts, in this case Rwandan, must take responsibility for investigating and prosecuting persons accused of the heinous crimes that are committed in their own territory. Of course, there will be problems and limitations – but there should be no compromise on the principle; nor should the principle of respecting the rights of the victims be compromised. In Uganda you have the ICC demanding the extradition of leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) for prosecution, but religious leaders from Uganda and others feel that if mechanisms on the national and local level for justice are there, and willing to address issues of impunity, there is no clear role for an ICC. It gets in the way of peace negotiations. We know there are problems in the whole system of criminal prosecution (what country does not have them?), yet we are also witnessing how those shortcomings are actually utilised by the United States for purposes of so-called extraordinary renditions – that is, transferring prisoners to compliant neo-colonial countries so that torture and other inhuman, degrading and cruel treatment can be applied. So if it is for purposes of the war on terror, extradition is fi ne; and the less developed our national justice systems, the better they are for purposes of the war on terror. One could say that we deal with ‘their’ criminalised and they deal with our criminals. Some justice. Is it a case of there being particular yardsticks for ‘justice’ – as for ‘good governance’ or ‘corruption’ – that apply only to Africa and the South? Should we award prizes, like the Mo Ibrahim Prize, for ‘good justice’ in Africa? No apologies accepted It is fashionable now in some quarters to apologise. The suggestion seems to be that somehow, if the intentions were ‘good’, then what resulted was a historical injustice, not a historical crime, not a crime against humanity, not genocide. The criminals thus get off Scot free, both in the historical record and in terms of prosecution, because everything was done in the name of progress, civility and civilisation. It was the white man’s burden, his civilising mission, his manifest destiny. And it is in this way that the greatest crime ever committed against a people goes not simply unpunished but often unrecognised. I am talking about the crime of colonial expansion and colonialism. The crimes are against those on the receiving end of the ‘civilising’ expansion of capitalism, beginning with the so-called ‘age of discov-
is there a south perspective on genocide? 285 ery’. The results are still with us today. Yet even Marx felt that capitalist expansion, though it could be cruel, was progressive, as he made clear in the fi rst section of the Communist Manifesto. Yet for the ‘discovered’, for the objects of the civilising mission, the expansion of capitalism amounted to genocide, in the form of disease, theft of land and other resources, destruction of language and culture, and either forced labour or outright slavery. Anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro calculates that at the end of the 15th century, when the fi rst Spanish conquerors arrived in the Americas there were approximately 70 million indigenous inhabitants. Only 150 years later, he states, there remained just 3.5 million, left in indigence and deprived of the land that had belonged to them for centuries because it now all belonged to the Spanish king. So to solve the problem, the slave trade began taking the genocide to the shores of Africa. This is what we call ‘the indigenous genocide’ because the European conquerors implemented a series of practices that had the result of virtually exterminating the population, enforcing inhuman work practices in order to produce the tons of gold and silver that underwrote the expansion of commerce in Europe and the Industrial Revolution (practices that sometimes led to mass suicides when communities saw that their future was misery and slavery). And then there was the unspeakable crime of slavery and the holocaust that it produced, and yet at the last Conference on Racism in Durban in 2001, the Northern countries objected strongly to formally recognising and apologising for the crime. Genocide: not only an event but also a process The killing and dispossession continues. To this day white people from Canada down to Argentina and Chile continue to confi scate indigenous land, while the communities suff er and remain in a limbo, as their land is not recognised by much of Western law. The same is the case with the descendants of the slaves in the Americas. Look at the situations of the indigenous communities today, and the rebellions (including the electoral rebellion that more than 500 years after the conquest has produced the fi rst indigenous social leader to become president in Bolivia). Otherwise, though, it is the same pattern of racism and contempt that prevails today. They are second and third class citizens – ‘indios’. Eduardo Galeano ironically stated 5 that these are indigenous populations who don’t speak languages, but dia- 5 In his poem ‘The Nobodies’ (1997).
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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Page 236 and 237: 234 development dialogue december 2
Page 262 and 263: In short, both the understanding of
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Page 299: The Voksenåsen Statement Genocides
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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