02 15 01 - Rónán Mac Lochlainn Legal Fund

British War Crimes in the news
Monday February 19, 2001

"My message to the British royal family is clear," said King Sagcawu, who
claims direct descent through 20 Xhosa kings, including a heroic
great-grandfather who was captured and shot dead by British soldiers in
1835. "A hundred years is not a long time for us. We will not give up our
claim. We will remember." 

The Irish Freedom Committee
www.irishfreedomcommittee.net
************************************************

AFRICANS DEMAND BRITISH PAY FOR COLONIALISM'S SINS 

Chicago Tribune
By Paul Salopek 
Tribune Foreign Correspondent 
February 19, 2001 

BUTTERWORTH, South Africa -- Clad in a rumpled black business suit and
doting over his beloved cows, King Xolilizwe Sagcawu hardly seems the sort
of man to take on a mighty empire as his ancestors once did--by hopelessly
pitting their wooden clubs and iron spears against guns of the British
colonial army. 
To begin with, Sagcawu, the burly herder-king of the Xhosa people, is not
a violent man. 
And more importantly, he has thoroughly modernized his people's arsenal:
Today, he is challenging the British crown on the bloodless--if no less
bruising--battlefields of public opinion and international human-rights
law. 
"We want Prince Charles to sit down with us at a round table," said
Sagcawu, who is launching South Africa's first tribal reparations case
against a former colonial overlord. "They killed us by the thousands and
they stole our land. Now, after so many years, we are asking them to show
remorse." 
Like any savvy monarch, Sagcawu left it to his royal court, mostly unpaid
relatives who meet irregularly in a nearby cinder block hut, to drop the
bombshell on his old enemy: Either Buckingham Palace pays up for colonial
wrongs committed more than a century ago, the Xhosas say, or the king will
sue the British royal family in World Court to the tune of $1.5 billion. 
If the notion that one of the world's poorest royal houses can sue one of
the world's richest royal houses over an obscure colonial war seems
faintly ludicrous, it's worth noting that nobody in London or impoverished
Butterworth is laughing these days. 
Indeed, the Xhosas' demand for payback is just the latest example of a
revitalized and growing reparations movement in Africa, a trend that
mirrors the ongoing U.S. debate over compensating African-Americans for
the evils of slavery. 
Paying for the sins of ancestors is an old idea in Africa. Appeals for
reparations have been surfacing for decades, especially since colonialism
began collapsing there in the early 1960s. 
But experts say the ripple effect of recent international human-rights
cases such as the arrest of Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet and the
establishment of war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the Balkans has
breathed new life into the movement. And the success of Holocaust
survivors in suing Swiss banks and German businesses for World War II
abuses has inspired a flurry of new African cases. 
Over the last three years, traditional leaders and civil rights groups in
countries as far-flung as Namibia, Kenya, South Africa and Ghana have
pressed former European governments to pay for the ravages of war, slavery
and the looting of natural resources that took place during centuries of
colonial rule. 
The Herero people of Namibia blazed the trail in 1998 by demanding that
Germany apologize--and pay at least $1.5 billion--for the genocidal
slaughter of their forebears a century earlier. The case is pending. 
In 1999, a reparations convention in Ghana even put a continent-size price
tag on "a just claim on behalf of all African people who were victims of
the slave trade and colonialism": $777 trillion. 
"Whether or not you agree with these calls, they're not going
away--they're getting louder," said Ian McIntosh, director of Cultural
Survival, a U.S.-based indigenous rights groups that is following scores
of reparations cases around the world, from Australia to Taiwan to Canada. 
"What we're seeing is an unintended side effect of globalization,"
McIntosh said. "The more the world economy wants to homogenize us, the
more people look back and cling to their roots. And if you look back long
enough, you'll doubtless find somebody you want to take to court." 
In fact, looking back too far, legal experts say, is the problem with most
African reparations cases. 
Australia has paid millions for its brutal separation of aboriginal
children from their families in the 1950s. The U.S. government has
compensated Japanese-Americans for harsh and shameful mass incarcerations
during World War II. And the famous Holocaust lawsuits involved living
individuals or their children suing existing banks or companies. 
Yet in Africa, aside from a recent appeal by the survivors of Kenya's
1950s Mau Mau rebellion, the injustices in question lie deeper in the past
and are harder to try in court. 
The Hereros, for example, are tenuously invoking the 1899 Hague Convention
prohibiting reprisals against civilians to bolster their claim against
Berlin. 
Redressing even older crimes, such as slavery, has no legal precedent,
experts say, and invites historical onion peeling: Go back far enough, and
it emerges that even some African societies kept slaves or ruthlessly
displaced earlier hunters and gatherers from their lands. 
"We understand the importance that these past events have for previously
colonized peoples," said Andrew Turner, the political attache at the
British High Commission in Cape Town, South Africa, which has been
involved in the Xhosas' case. "But we believe the best way forward is to
look forward. Compensation is not on the agenda. Nor is any sort of
apology from the queen." 
But in the grassy, rolling hills of Xhosa country, one of the poorest
corners of rural South Africa, King Sagcawu and his court are not
discouraged. 
"We are fearless about this," said Zolani Mkiva, the king's spokesman, who
has sent a letter requesting an audience with Queen Elizabeth's son Prince
Charles "because he is more broad-minded than his Mum." 
To date, the House of Windsor has not replied to the House of Sagcawu. 
If Charles continues to rebuff dialogue, Mkiva said, the Xhosas plan to
hire lawyers in May and sue the British royal family on human-rights
grounds in the World Court at The Hague. A public-relations campaign also
will be fired up to pressure the royal family, he added. The Xhosas blame
the British crown, not colonial bureaucrats, for their ancestors'
suffering. 
"We will ask not less than 1 billion pounds" or about $1.5 billion, said
Mkiva, whose second job is as a praise-singer for former President Nelson
Mandela, also a Xhosa. "They looted our lands, killed our cattle and
forced our men to work in gold mines. We are asking for what is ours." 
Certainly, nobody questions the Xhosas' steeliness; they fought the
longest struggle by any African people against colonial rule. For 100
years starting in the 1770s, they battled first the Dutch and then the
British in a series of bloody frontier wars. 
Worn down by the encroachment of English settlers on their lush pasture
lands, they committed cultural suicide in 1857 when a teenage prophet
ordered that thousands of their cattle be slaughtered in a sacrifice to
rid the land of whites. By 1879, Xhosa resistance was broken, and their
lands were stripped away by the colonial government. 
"My grandfather was chased off his land like a dog," said Sizakele
Matiwane, an octogenarian Xhosa historian who can rattle off 500 years of
oral history in one spellbinding hour. "The British destroyed us. They
treated us like sub-humans. Now they don't have the common decency that
would fill a teaspoon to say, `I'm sorry.'" 
The Xhosas' old territory, located in a defunct, apartheid-era tribal
homeland formerly called Transkei, does in many ways look destroyed. 
Though beautiful, with its vast, open grasslands dotted by a confetti
dusting of tiny pastel houses, the region is plagued by poverty and
crumbling infrastructure. 
Many of the 450,000 residents of Butterworth and surrounding farms scrape
by on $80-a-month government pensions pulled in by an elderly family
member. 
Unemployment tops 50 percent. AIDS victims swell the dusty cemeteries. 
That sense of decay extends to the trappings of tribal royalty, which
South Africa's old apartheid regime sometimes manipulated in its effort to
control the masses. 
At Nqadu Great Place, the Xhosas' royal compound, the king maintains his
office in a forlorn hut on a hilltop. 
The king's farm is modest, with only a few ramshackle corrals; royal
family members arrive there on dirt roads, chucking empty beer bottles out
their truck windows. And modern Xhosa princes risk injuries somewhat more
severe than Prince Charles' polo tussles; one was recently shot and
wounded in a murky power struggle. 
"I offered them some of our rural grants because the region is truly
underdeveloped," said Turner, the British diplomat. The Xhosa, betting on
memory over forgetting, turned him down. 
"My message to the British royal family is clear," said King Sagcawu, who
claims direct descent through 20 Xhosa kings, including a heroic
great-grandfather who was captured and shot dead by British soldiers in
1835. "A hundred years is not a long time for us. We will not give up our
claim. We will remember." 

************************************************
© The Irish Freedom Committee NewsList - IFC Updates

Permission to re-publish any article from this post is granted provided
signature is attached and the active link back to this site is included.

To Subscribe to this list go to http://IFCUpdates.listbot.com/ and click
SUBSCRIBE. To view Archives, follow HELP instructions or email
deemail@msn.com for assistance.
************************************************


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, write to IFCUpdates-unsubscribe@listbot.com