Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: La "soluzione finale" inizio' in Namiba

From 1904 to 1915, the Kaiser's troops systematically exterminated as
many as 80,000 Herero, a scarcely known slaughter of Teutonic
efficiency that produced forced labor camps, sex slaves and the first
academic "studies" of supposed Aryan superiority.
Herero leaders, frustrated that justice eludes them while other groups
find atonement, are pressing Germany to remember them, too - with an
apology and compensation.
"We're equal to the Jews who were destroyed," said Paramount Chief
Kuaima Riruako, the Herero king. "The Germans paid for spilled Jewish
blood. We say, "Compensate us, too!' It's time to heal the wound."
But unlike the cries of Jewish inheritors of stolen Swiss bank accounts
and former slave workers, Herero pleas ring faint.
Modern Germany, still a powerful influence in Namibia, has so far
offered only sympathetic words - no apologies. The Herero can find no
help from their national government either, owing to tribal politics.
Chief Riruako said his efforts to enlist the support of American Jews
during trips to New York have gotten nowhere.
"For 10 long years, I have been saying this and nobody will come to our
rescue," said the chief, whose royal family lost all of its land and
cattle during the period. "Even the Americans don't give a damn."
German Embassy officials in Washington and in Namibia's capital,
Windhoek, note that this country of 1.6 million people gets more German
development aid per capita than any other, about $500 million since
1992.
"And that is because of historical reasons," said Rolf Ulrich,
counselor general of the Windhoek embassy. "Certainly, a lot of
thinking has been going on in Bonn and Windhoek about this. But the
idea continues to be that Namibia is the largest recipient."
A number of prominent U.S. Jewish advocates and organizations involved
in reparation efforts seemed unaware of the Herero plight or its
connection to their own.
"To be honest, I know nothing about it at all," said Gideon Taylor,
executive vice president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims
against Germany, a group that has negotiated $50 billion for Jewish
victims of the Nazis.
The Herero believe that their past and present obscurity - and the fact
that their story did not emerge until the 1980s - works against them.
Many outsiders may know of them only from travel book photographs
depicting their highly unusual sense of fashion.
Herero women commonly wear distinctive hats and colorful, hand-made
hoop skirts that rustle and sway when they stroll the deserts. Some
even twirl parasols.
Many Herero men, sporting broadcloth suits and old German uniforms or
copies of them, add more Victorian dash. Though quaint, these fashion
oddities pay a dark, unintended tribute to their German oppressors; the
clothing style was adopted from the first German missionaries who
entered the area in the 1870s.
The discovery of diamonds in the 1890s brought settlers who began
pushing the cattle-herding Herero and Nama tribes from their
traditional communal territories. The rival Nama rebelled against the
Germans first but were quickly put down with Herero help - hence the
German uniforms that Herero men still wear today.
By the turn of the century, though, the Herero were feeling the pinch
of German land grabs and abusive rule that often included arbitrary
lynchings.
It was in Okahandja, the Herero capital, that Herero leaders mounted an
armed rebellion in 1904. Their campaign - against military targets only
- went well initially.
But Kaiser Wilhelm II sent Lt. Gen. Lothar von Trotha in with 10,000
troops. The general was already well-known for his brutal campaigns
against uprisings in German East Africa.
According to recent historical works, the general soon vanquished
Herero troops and embarked on a campaign of annihilation against
civilians that was to hint ominously at the Nazi holocaust to come.
Gen. von Trotha drove 80 percent of the tribe into the Omaheke Desert,
after poisoning the water holes. While soldiers blocked escape, he
issued the "Vernichtungsbefehl," or extermination order: "Within the
German borders, every Herero, whether armed or unarmed, with or without
cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women or children. I
shall drive them back to their people" in the poisoned Omaheke.
Those who were not bayonetted, shot or starved, perhaps 20,000, were
condemned to slavery on German farms.
There were Herero "comfort women," slave camps, identification tags,
murder with impunity. German geneticists conducted racial studies of
presumed Herero inferiority, theories that Adolph Hitler later adopted
as Nazi philosophy and which Nazi universities taught.
Frans Muningua, born in 1904, is perhaps one of the last Herero old
enough to remember some of what happened. Telling his story for the
first time, he said his mother was initially overlooked during the
German roundups. But she was captured later and given to an army
captain, who raped her.
Mr. Muningua said he believes that he got his blue eyes from that
German officer. He and his mother were forced daily to pull heavily
laden railcars along Okahandja's tracks.
"We were worked hard, like donkeys," Mr. Muningua said, walking with
the aid of a cane along the same tracks. "My mother hated them."
The gruesome chapter came to a close in 1915 during World War I, when
allied troops of the Union of South Africa drove the Germans out.
Namibia then became a territory of South Africa and remained so until
Communist insurgents took over in 1990, establishing a modern
democracy.
The Herero experience was always Namibia's dirty little secret, living
only in the tales of Herero elders, until East German journalist Horst
Drechsler documented it in his 1980 book We Shall Die Fighting.
Lora Wildenthal, an MIT professor who specializes in German history,
said the South African regime that ruled Namibia until 1990, backed by
white German descendents, had a vested interest in suppressing the
story as it fought the Communist insurrection.
"They always knew about the war, and the Herero had long said it was a
genocide," she said. "But there wasn't a big hue and cry to lay out big
pictures without it being painted as Communist propaganda."
Herero leaders say independence motivated them to begin seeking
reparations, when it became clear that the new democracy would condemn
Herero descendents of the massacres to second-class citizenship.
They say that is because the Ovambo tribe, which dominates Namibia's
ruling South-West Africa People's Organization party, SWAPO, is more
numerous and prosperous for having escaped the German onslaught.
The much diminished Herero, about 100,000 today, accuse SWAPO of
diverting the $500 million in German aid to Ovambo voters. So, they
want Germany to set up a fund for Herero purchases of land and cattle.
"What we are saying is that the Germans, because they only killed the
Herero and no one else, must uplift us," said Gottlob Mbaukaua, an
opposition party Herero leader in Okahandja.
The Herero also expect continued opposition from Namibia's 25,000 white
German-speaking citizens. They control more than half the country's
farmlands, much of it formerly Herero territory, and remain influential
in Namibian politics. Many of them deny that a holocaust ever happened
and oppose reparations for the Herero.
"Genocide is a relative term if you are involved in a war and you
lose," said Eckhart Mueller, chairman of the German-Namibian Cultural
Organization. "I think they're taking a long shot to get some money. If
not genocide, it will be something else. I think we must bury the past
and look to the future."
It may be that the history itself stands in opposition to Herero
claims. The tribe is hardly the only victim of European colonial
atrocities in Africa. Belgians under King Leopold II slaughtered native
Congolese wholesale during the last century. The French brutalized
natives in Equatorial Africa. The British killed natives throughout the
continent.
But African history specialists say the German campaign against the
Herero was unique.
"This is not tribal conquest. This is actual genocide," said Dr. Atieno
Odhiambo, professor of 20th century African history at Rice University.
"In terms of scale of destruction, there's really nothing to compare in
sub-Saharan Africa. This was deliberate policy."
Still, MIT's Ms. Wildenthal said one reason no European power seems
eager to take up the Herero cause is fear that a payoff would invite
multitudes of similar claims for colonial-era crimes.
"Imagine what Britain would owe," she said. "I don't think any former
colonial power will go anywhere near this."
A flicker of hope for the Herero appeared earlier this year when a new
government under Gerhard Schroder replaced that of longtime German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
The new coalition government includes the tiny Green Party, the only
political entity that had ever taken Herero claims seriously. A Green
Party member was even named Germany's new foreign minister, Joschka
Fischer. One of the new government's first acts was to start work on a
permanent fund to compensate slave laborers under Hitler.
Martin Kotthaus, a German embassy spokesman in Washington, said
recently that while still early, the new government has given no sign
that policy toward the Herero is going to change anytime soon.
But Chief Riruako, emboldened by these recent developments, said he
won't quit until it does.
"We have already written a letter to let them know we are willing to
talk," he said. "We don't want to waste any more time."

blood. We say, "Compensate us, too!' It's time to heal the wound."
I tedeschi hanno pagato per aver *DERUBATO* e ucciso gli Ebrei.
-Stefano