Hereros mark genocide in Botswana :: Namibia Internet Gateway cc ::

Articles: Hereros mark genocide in Botswana

Posted by admin on Monday, July 19, 2004 - 02:12 AM

Hundreds of Herero people gathered in Botswana on Saturday to pay homage to ancestors killed by German soldiers in Namibia who almost wiped out their people a century ago.
Tribal leaders used Saturday's commemoration to press their demands for US$4 billion in compensation from Germany's government and companies which they say benefited from slavery and exploitation under German rule of what is now Namibia. "The Germans killed our people. They destroyed us as a nation. That's why we want compensation from them," Paramount Chief Kuaima Riruako told the crowd gathered in the village of Tsau in north-western Botswana, near the border with Namibia. When the Herero people rebelled against slave labour and the confiscation of their land by Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II's army forced them into the desert to die from thirst and starvation. About 65 000 of the 80 000-strong tribe under Samuel Maharero were wiped out between 1904 and 1907. Some of those who survived escaped to Botswana, where their descendants live to this day. Germany has assumed moral responsibility for the killings but has refused to make a formal apology. Hundreds of people in traditional dress - modelled, ironically, on the German military uniforms of the time - walked solemnly in procession early on Saturday to the graves of Maharero's mother and elder brother in Tsau, a remote village near Botswana's Okavango Delta, a popular tourist destination. The remains of Maharero himself were taken back to Namibia for reburial years ago. Some campaigners say the Herero genocide set the pattern for Nazi Germany's Jewish Holocaust three decades later and argue that Berlin should pay compensation to the Herero people just as it did to the Jewish community. But Berlin has refused to do so. The tribe has filed a legal suit in a US federal court, but experts say the case has only a limited chance of success because international conventions on genocide were not agreed until decades after the Herero campaign. Chief Riruako appealed to the international community to help press the Herero case with the German government and promised that any compensation would be distributed among all ethnic Herero, not just those remaining in Namibia. Scattered when their rebellion was crushed, Herero have communities in Botswana and some live in South Africa. Saturday's commemoration was part of a year-long series of events to mark the centenary of what historians say was the first genocide of the 20th century.

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