60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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).