Namibian President asks Germany to stand on the right side of history
JVL Introduction
Germany has chosen to back Israel at the ICJ. Now the President of Namibia, Hage Geingob, has raised serious concerns about this action and reminded Germany about atrocities it carried out against the Indigenous Herero and Nama peoples in that country between 1904 and 1908. The killings were part of a German campaign of collective punishment and are widely recognised as the 20th century’s first genocide. Historians David Olusoga and Casper W.Erichson even referred to this as “The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s forgotten genocide” as the title to their book of 2010.
Germany has always acknowledged its responsibility for the Nazi era Holocaust but it took more than a hundred years (2015) for Germany to acknowledge that what took place in Namibia under its rule was a genocide; negotiations regarding reparations are still unsettled.
Britain – likely nervous of its own colonialist past – annually marks the Nazi Holocaust and some that have taken place since, such as in Rwanda and in former Yugoslavia but does not include any genocides that predated the Nazi era. So Germany does the same and in its backing for Israel at the ICJ has shown that it has it has particularised rather than universalised the meaning of “Never Again”.
You may also want to read about the President’s statement in The Namibian
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This article was originally published by Al Jazeera on Sun 14 Jan 2024. Read the original here.
Namibia condemns Germany for defending Israel in ICJ genocide case
The Namibia presidency slams Germany for failing to draw lessons from its own genocide against Namibian people in the early 20th century.
Namibia has criticised Germany’s “shocking decision” to support Israel in the genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) brought by South Africa, as Israel’s war on Gaza entered its 100th day.
“Germany has chosen to defend in the ICJ the genocidal and gruesome acts of the Israeli government against innocent civilians in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian Territories,” the president of Namibia, Hage Geingob, said in a statement on X on Saturday.
A two-day public hearing in the case at the World Court – the highest legal body of the United Nations – took place on Thursday and Friday during which South Africa and Israel presented their arguments.
South Africa told the court on Thursday that Israel’s aerial and ground offensive – which has laid waste to much of the enclave and killed almost 24,000 people, according to Gaza health authorities – aimed to bring about “the destruction of the population” of Gaza.
Israel accused South Africa of presenting a “distorted” view of the hostilities, denying that its military operation in Gaza is a state-led genocide campaign against Palestinians.
The statement by the Namibian presidency added that Berlin was ignoring Israel’s killing of more than 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza and various United Nations reports disturbingly highlighting the internal displacement of 85 percent of the besieged enclave’s 2.3 million people amid acute shortages of food and essential services.
The Namibian president expressed “deep concern” over “the shocking decision” communicated by the government of Germany on Friday, in which “it rejected the morally upright indictment” brought forward by South Africa.
“No peace-loving human being can ignore the carnage waged against Palestinians in Gaza,” it said.
The statement claimed that Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century in Namibia between 1904 and 1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions.
“Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations Convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza,” the presidency said.
“President Geingob appeals to the German government to reconsider its untimely decision to intervene as a third-party in defence and support of the genocidal acts of Israel before the ICJ.”
Hage Geingob – President of Namibia
Atrocities in Namibia
German colonial forces carried out atrocities in Namibia against the Indigenous Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1908.
The killings were part of a German campaign of collective punishment between 1904 and 1908 that is today recognised as the 20th century’s first genocide.
Henning Melber from Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden said that the statement issued by President Geingob was an unexpected turning point in the already fragile German-Namibian relations.
“Germany publicly took side in the ICJ case with Israel on January 12, which marks 120 years of the beginning of what many Namibians call the German-Namibian war, which then resulted in the first genocide of the 20th century,” he said.
“While Germany scored a lot of good points internationally in the way it engaged with the mass destruction of the holocaust, it was in denial of the genocide committee [with Namibia] until 2015,” Melber said.
He added that in the last eight years the German and Namibian governments have been in negotiations on the Namibian genocide since 2015.
He said Germany still falls short of recognising the incidents in Namibia as a genocide in legal terms, which means it refuses the obligations to pay reparations.
The ICJ is likely to present a provisional measure in the coming days but a final verdict will take years. South Africa has urged the court to order an immediate halt to Israel’s devastating military offensive in Gaza.
The 1948 Genocide Convention, enacted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
South Africa filed the ICJ case on December 19, accusing Israel of genocidal acts in Gaza.
Several countries and international organisations have backed South Africa in its case, while Israel has received the backing of the United States, its main weapons supplier and close ally.
Several global entities, including Human Rights Watch, have determined that Israel is engaging in war crimes in Gaza.
It is good that Human Rights Watch agrees that genocide is being committed by Israel in Gaza, because HRW supported the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006. This shows that the evidence must be even more indisputable than we thought!
This isn’t just about Germany, of course. Britain’s governing circles are still even more attached to maintaining national self-image as the opener of Belsen, the emancipator of slaves… Their defence of the Balfour Declaration seems viscerally linked to fear and rage at being forced to look at this country’s own history in Africa.
It really seems plain that the State of Israel is set on a course of genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine and has been for some time.
I observe the significance placed by Israel and its supporters on the attack by Hamas in October 2023. This was indeed bad, indeed brutal and unpleasant, but it came after very many years of oppression, dispossession and brutality by the State of Israel towards the indigenous people of the country.
I also believe that it is impossible that the Hamas attack in October 2023 was not known about in advance by the Israeli intelligence and its sophisticated eavesdropping systems which are in place. So I am again suggesting the obvious unpleasant conclusion that it was allowed to happen in order to justify the genocide. I believe that this likelihood has not gone unmentioned but I observe that it is dodged by the overbearing establishment media.
The President of Namibia’s statement is yet another indicator of how Germany’s status and soft power are reduced in many countries around the world as a result of measures such as its financial, diplomatic and military support for Israel’s atrocities, the cancellation of international artists supportive of the Palestinians, and the dismissal of the Palestinian journalists in its international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle.
The German government only officially recognized its genocide against the Herero and Nama in 2021. The financial settlement offered was 1.1 billion Euros in development aid, but this is spread over 30 years. In reaching the agreement, the German government dealt with the Namibian government on a state-to-state basis, much to the anger of many Herero and Nama people, who feel that their voices are not heard.
Namibia is not the only African colony where Germany committed atrocities. In what is now Tanzania, in response to an uprising that led to the deaths of 15 Europeans, up to 300,000 indigenous people were killed. This is only now beginning to be acknowledged.
The link between colonial genocide and the Holocaust has been very controversial in Germany. In reference to the 1980s historians’ dispute about the status of the Holocaust in German history, it has led to what some call ‘Historikerstreit 2.0’. Many are reluctant to accept anything that challenges the singularity of the Holocaust.
Of course, Germany is not the only colonial power to have committed atrocities in the countries under its rule. Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Italy killed millions in their colonies through military attacks, hunger, disease, dispossession and displacement. Most of this remains unacknowledged.
The following is from a Consortium News article posted on Jan 10th:
The terrible human toll of the Israeli assault on the population of Gaza in terms of death and injury from Israeli bombing is well known. What is not generally known to the U.S. public is evidence provided in the South African document that Israelis have deliberately chosen the most indiscriminate way of bombing possible.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas of the world, so indiscriminate weapons are far more lethal there than in normal situations. Yet despite the availability of precision guided weapons, as the South African document points out, Israel has been dropping completely unguided “dumb bombs” and 2,000 pound munitions that have a lethal radius of up to 360m and cause serious injuries for 800m in all directions.
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Regardless of whether what Israel is doing meets the criteria for genocide, it must be blatantly obvious to everyone that BN and Co have created a Hell on Earth for the people of Gaza, as they set out to do, and I have no doubt whatsoever that they are throughly enjoying every single minute of it.