60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

is there a south perspective on genocide? 289
usually at bargain prices to capitalists, often to foreign investors from
the core countries. Core governments push such policies as liberalisation,
opening local markets to transnational capital, lower taxes
on capital, and a smaller role for government through deregulation
of markets and reductions in the social wage. Thus peripheral states
have been reorganised in form and function by the global economic
governance institutions to extract to the maximum locally produced
surplus and allow its appropriation by foreign capital and local collaborators.
Imperialism, by its very nature, is genocidal. It is not simply a Clinton
or a Bush. The idea is the expansion of corporate through the creation
and modifi cation of trade and investment relations on a global
terrain..
The right to reparations
If slavery was a form of genocide, then should not the descendants of
those that benefi ted from that awful business compensate the descendants
of those slaves? Manning Marable, a black US scholar, looked at
this issue and found that in the US, when asked whether ‘corporations
that made profi ts from slavery should apologise to black Americans
who are descendants of slaves’ 68 per cent of African Americans
responded affi rmatively, with 23 per cent opposed, while 62 per
cent of all whites rejected the call for an apology, with only 34 per
cent supporting it. On the question of fi nancial compensation, however,
whites closed ranks around their racial privileges. When asked
whether corporations benefi ting from slave exploitation should ‘make
cash payments to black Americans who are the descendants of slaves’,
84 per cent of all whites responded negatively, with only 11 per cent
supporting payments. A clear majority of African Americans polled,
by contrast, endorsed corporate restitution payments, by a 57 to 35 per
cent margin, with 8 per cent expressing no opinion. …. ‘America’s
version of legal apartheid created the conditions of white privilege
and black subordination that we see all around us every day. A debt is
owed, and it must be paid in full’, says Manning Marable. 11
Genocide, like racism, is also a structural issue; it may be more
grounded in institutional processes than in individuals’ behaviour.
Marable explains: ‘Racial prejudice is reproduced by America’s basic
institutions – economic, educational, social, and political – of our
society. The racial myths of white history are used to rationalise, explain
away, and justify white supremacy and black inequality. What
11 Marable, Manning, ‘In Defense of Black Reparations’, ZNet, 30 October 2002.