Berlin: In a landmark admission of historical guilt, Germany is to recognise the massacre of 110,000 of the Herero and Nama people of Namibia by German troops between 1904 -1908. A spokesperson for the German government said the country would formally apologise to Nambia.
The extermination of up to 100,000 Herero and around 10,000 Nama people by the German colonial troops is widely considered as the first genocide of the 20th century and a precursor to the Holocaust. The colonial troops literally drove tens of thousands of people into the desert to die of starvation and dehydration while others were sent to concentration camps where they died of disease and abuse.
Many of the victims of the atrocity were beheaded and their skulls sent to Germany for scientific experiments. The German foreign ministry guidelines started referring the killings as a “genocide” a year back, it was only last week that the government confirmed in a written answer to a parliamentary question that it would now be official policy. The government, however, made it clear it would not pay any repatriations to Namibia, but would, however, contribute towards development aid.
The genocide in Nambia began as an operation to suppress a revolt against German colonial rule by the Herero and Nama. However, systematic killings continued long after the uprising had been put down. During the second half of the 19th century, European powers of UK, France, Italy, Germany, Portugal and Spain, who divided the African continent amongst themselves with nothing more than a pencil and a map. Among its various overseas colonies like Congo, South West Africa,Tanzania, Kenya.
In Namibia, its people were basically tribes who warred with each other. The colonial powers used the tension between the tribes to support one over the other which further created more disputes. In the course of human history the above phenomenon is nothing new. The massacre of 2 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman troops, the conflict in Algeria in the 1960s and 1970s, the Maji-Maji Rebellion during the first world war in present day Tanzania and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919.
