The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Germany, in addition to the Vatican, have carried out public acts of compensation in this century.
▲ The Congo was colonized by Belgium. In the image, residents displaced in that African nation due to internal conflicts.Photo Afp
Armando G. Tejeda
Correspondent
La Jornada Newspaper
Sunday, September 29, 2024, p. 18
Madrid. Most European countries were imperialist and, therefore, their history, both remote and recent, is plagued by abuses, massacres, plundering, genocides and the imposition of segregation systems that perpetuated one of the greatest shames in the history of humanity: slavery.
The United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, Denmark and Spain stand out due to the severity of the damage caused to the native populations. The only ones that have made any gesture of apology or forgiveness for their collective crimes are the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, the Vatican, Portugal, Denmark and Germany.
One of the triggers for European politicians to understand that this past of grievance was still alive and it was necessary to look at it head-on was the Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in the United States but spread throughout the world and placed slavery, racism and human exploitation due to skin color as a current issue. This week, the Spanish government refused to attend the inauguration of Claudia Sheinbaum as president of Mexico, because King Felipe was not invited, because he refused President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s request to apologize for the abuses committed during the colony and thus begin a new stage in the relationship between both countries.
Some European countries took the first steps to make amends with their own past and with the societies of their former colonies, where truth, justice and reparation continue to be demanded.
In Namibia and Tanzania
Germany was the first country to demonstrate and assumed only part of this history of disgrace, which refers to the massacre of thousands of people from the Herero and Nara ethnic groups in Namibia and Tanzania, who were exterminated by the army of the German Empire between 1904 and 1908. The German government, then chaired by Angela Merkel, defined it unequivocally as a genocideand apologized publicly in May 2021, and then in Tanzania itself, during an official visit by the German head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, last November. I bow to the victims of German colonial rule, and as German president, I would like to apologize for what the Germans did to their ancestors here.Steinmeier explained before the memorial in Songea, a city in southern Tanzania, a region that was the scene of excesses just over a century ago. Between 1905 and 1907, German soldiers caused the death of between 200,000 and 300,000 people in the Maji-Maji rebellion of several native peoples, who rose up against the forced labor forced upon them by the occupying power. Along with you I grieve for the others who were executed; Anyone in Germany who knows more about German colonial history must be horrified by the magnitude of the crueltySteinmeier said.
The past Belgian Congo
One of the cruelest passages of European colonialism is Belgium, which developed a regime of terror, exploitation and segregation in its African colonies, but above all in the Congo, where it subjected its population to long working hours with the sole purpose of increasing the coffers of the State and the Belgian monarchy. In June 2020, King Philippe sent a letter to the Congolese government expressing his deepest regret for the wounds caused in the pastas well as for the suffering and the humiliation.
The monarch noted: I want to express my deepest regret for the wounds of the past whose pain is revived today by the discrimination that is still too present in our societies.in a speech in which he did not refer to the main person responsible for the murder and mutilations of millions of Congolese, his ancestor on the throne Leopold II.
From Mauritania to Senegal
France’s record as a colonizing country is also devastating, especially in nations like Algeria, where it imposed a regime of terror. The country has not expressly asked for forgiveness, but it did begin a campaign for reconciliationwhich consisted of several trips by President Emmanuel Macron, in 2017, to former colonies, especially where the main acts of violence and slavery were recorded, such as Mauritania, Ivory Coast or Senegal. As for Algeria, in a speech, the French head of state recognized that its colonization was a crime against humanity and regretted the torture perpetrated against the country’s population.
Furthermore, France recognized its responsibility in another of the most dramatic passages in recent history in Africa, the genocide in Rwanda, in which around 800 thousand people, belonging to the Tutsis and Hutus, were executed.
Wounds in Libya and religion
Italy and the Vatican have also voiced a mea culpa for its colonial history. The government of then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on a visit to Libya spoke of the deep wounds caused by its imperialist past and promised to carry out an investment package of 4 billion euros for infrastructure projects, as a gesture to repair the wounds.
From the Vatican, the current Pope Francis apologized for the complicity of the Catholic Church in the violent episodes of the Conquest: Some may rightly say that when the Pope talks about colonialism he forgets certain actions of the Church.while admitting to being dismayed because Many serious sins have been committed against the indigenous peoples of America in the name of God..
South Africa and the apartheid
The Netherlands also spread terror to its former colonies and in some cases, such as South Africa, its settlers were, along with the British, responsible for developing and implementing the apartheidthe system of racial segregation that was abolished in 1992. But in 2020, the Netherlands for the first time compensated the victims of colonial violence in Indonesia and apologized for the violence of its troops, especially that relating to the 1940s when thousands of men were murdered.
The so-called police actions of the Dutch troops against the nationalist rebels seeking independence were bloody. In March 2021, King William was responsible for exposing his sorry so he called violence abuse.
With more blame in Africa
The United Kingdom, perhaps one of the countries with the most guilt to purge, did apologize partially and only for some of them, when apologizing to the Kikuyu people of Kenya for the outrages to which it was subjected in the 1950s of the 20th century, during the counterinsurgency campaign against the Mau Mau guerrilla. Furthermore, during his visit to India, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, apologized for the Amritsar massacre, dating back to 1919, which left at least 400 people dead and a thousand injured.
The grievances of the British Empire are many more and extend throughout the world, from Tasmania to Jamaica, passing through Iraq, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Africa, India and, of course, the native peoples of what is now the United States.
human trafficking
The colonial past of Portugal, which for a time came to dominate a good part of the African continent and in America extended its claws in Brazil, apologized for its participation in the slave trade, which it put an end to in 1836; It is estimated that Portuguese and Brazilian ships transported nearly 6 million slaves over 400 years, almost half of the total number of people who crossed the Atlantic as labor.
Taxation in Greenland
The Nordic country apologized to its former colony Greenland for one of the most sinister programs in its recent history: the kidnapping of 22 children from Greenlandic families to transfer them to their country in an attempt to close the cultural gap with its then administrative dependency. The experiment consisted of taking the children to Denmark, where they were promised a better life, but away from their families of origin. The idea was that some time later they would return to Greenland as assimilated Danes to form a future elite that would link Copenhagen (capital of Denmark) with Nuuk (capital of Greenland). We can’t change what happened. But we can take responsibility and apologize to those we should have taken care of but didn’t.said Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in her public pardon, 70 years later.
