A senior government official offered Germany’s first apology on Saturday for a colonial-era crackdown that killed 65 000 ethnic Hereros — a slaughter she acknowledged amounted to genocide.
”We Germans accept our historic and moral responsibility and the guilt incurred by Germans at that time,” Germany’s development aid minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, said at a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the Hereros’ 1904-1907 uprising against their German rulers.
”The atrocities committed at that time would have been termed genocide,” she said.
While ruling out financial compensation for the victims’ descendants, she promised continued economic assistance, particularly in land reform.
”Everything I have said was an apology from the German government,” Wieczorek-Zeul concluded, to the delight of the 1 000-strong crowd, who clapped, cheered and shouted: ”Yes, yes.”
Wieczorek-Zeul is the first top German official to attend a commemoration of the war.
During the ceremony, held in the Waterberg region, about 250 kilometres (155 miles) north of the capital Windhoek, Hereros re-enacted scenes of their ancestors being shackled and enslaved.
Many of those in attendance were dressed in the khaki military uniforms worn by their former colonial rulers.
German General Lothar von Trotha, who was sent to what was then South West Africa to put down the Herero uprising in 1904, instructed his troops to wipe out the entire tribe, historians say.
When the extermination order was lifted at the end of the year, prisoners were herded into camps and allocated as slave labour to German businesses, where many died of overwork and malnutrition. About two-thirds of the tribe was wiped out.
The slaughter is regarded here as the first genocide of modern times. But until Saturday, German officials had avoided the politically loaded term.
The Herero people have for years sought reparations from Germany. In 2001, they filed a $4-billion lawsuit against the government and two German firms in a US district court in Washington.
But German authorities, who have paid billions in reparations to victims of the Nazis during World War II, have dismissed the Hereros’ claims, saying international rules on the protection of combatants and civilians were not in existence at the time of that conflict.
In light of the apology, Ranongouje Tjihuiko, chairperson of the commemoration committee, said the Herero leadership might now consider dropping the court case.
Hifikepunye Pohamba, Namibia’s minister of land, resettlement and rehabilitation, also welcomed Germany’s gesture.
”That is what we have been waiting for a very long time,” he said, noting that the apology came on the spot where the German-Herero war ended.
Germany took over the diamond-rich, semi-desert country in 1884. After Germany’s defeat in World War I, South Africa occupied the territory for more than 70 years before Namibia became independent in 1990.
Namibia is now a leading recipient of German aid, getting about $14-million a year.
After Saturday’s ceremony, Wieczorek-Zeul inaugurated a German-financed cultural and tourism center for the Herero community. On Friday, she met with tribal leaders and laid a wreath on the grave of Paramount Chief Samuel Maharero, commander of Herero forces during the three year uprising.
She wraps up her four-day trip on Sunday with a meeting with Namibia’s health minister to hear about the country’s struggle against the Aids pandemic that is ravaging southern Africa. ‒ Sapa-AP