HomeFeatureDoes the West respect human rights?  ...double standards exposed

Does the West respect human rights?  …double standards exposed

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By Elizabeth Sitotombe

LAST week, January 27 marked 77 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp. 

Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, opened in 1940 and was the largest of the Nazi concentration and death camps.

Auschwitz initially served as a detention centre for political prisoners. 

However, it evolved into a network of camps where those sent there were either killed in gas chambers, used in diabolic medical experiments or worked to death.

The main theme of the 77th anniversary marked the beginning of the extermination of Jews in the German Nazi camp Auschwitz, which took place in the spring of 1942 — a holocaust which saw six million Jewish people murdered. 

The Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, was anti-Semite who felt that the Jews were an inferior race and a threat to ‘German racial purity’. 

After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were constantly persecuted, Hitler’s ‘final solution’ — the holocaust — began in late 1941 with the mass transportation of Jews to the concentration camps, starting with those people regarded as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young. 

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17 1942. 

Five more mass killing centres were built at the camps.

The word ‘holocaust’, was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar. 

Since 1945, the word took on a new and sinister meaning: the ideological and systematic state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. 

In his last will and political testament, Hitler blamed the war on “…international Jewry and its helpers…” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “…the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples…” – the Jews. 

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years. 

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German atrocities.

A familiar story indeed, what the Jews experienced is no different to experiences by Africans of mass killings, slavery and forced labour, among other atrocities.

During the protracted armed struggle in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) there was, among many other heinous crimes against the people of Zimbabwe, the Chimoio massacre orchestrated by the Ian Smith regime in an operation codenamed ‘Dingo’ on November 23 1977 in Mozambique. 

A senseless brutal attack on helpless and defenceless refugees — men women and children. 

Thousands of women and children were killed in this unwarranted attack and like Hitler, the Rhodesians celebrated killing Africans.

They went on to get rid of the remaining injured victims by leaving drugs deliberately injected with a variety of highly toxic substances.

But this is as far as the parallel with the Jews ends. 

It is not the purpose of this narrative to delve into atrocities the ‘State of Israel’ has gone to perpetrate against the Palestinians — story for another day.

The Chimoio massacre is a painful memory in the history of this country 

that exposes the genocide experienced in the country at the hands of the settler-regime that to this day has not been acknowledged and no compensation to the victims of Chimoio made.

 The Nyadzonia massacre is another genocide visited on Zimbabweans on August 9 1976. 

A special counter-insurgency unit of the Rhodesian forces, with help from the South African apartheid government, carried out a ferocious attack on Nyadzonia Camp in Mozambique, killing over 3 000 defenceless unarmed men, women and children.

The horrors and carnage were never recompensed to this day; instead the unfeeling and unrepentant colonisers put in a clause in their Constitution stating that crimes committed before 2002 would not be dealt with.

It is this racist psyche that makes the colonialists think they still own a piece of the country and its people and will stop at nothing to effect regime change in the country by using the modern sell-outs to gain control of the country and its vast natural resources.

The trauma remains with the loss impossible to compute; how the opposition and many of the NGOs in this country fail to evaluate the damage that the country still suffers even today is something that is hard to fathom.

The same NGOs and opposition parties make so much noise over Matabeleland disturbances, commonly referred to as Gukurahundi as genocide but choose to ignore Chimoio and many other war crimes.

Instead, they call for sanctions on their own, citing human rights abuse. 

The irony lost on these reckless individuals is that the nations they are reaching out to put their house in order are the same worst perpetrators of these heinous crimes on humanity. 

It would be foolish of Zimbabweans to give power to the people hell bent on destroying the country.

On June 16 1976, hundreds of unarmed school children were killed by the apartheid regime in what is now known as the Soweto Massacre.

The perpetrators of the Nazi holocaust were tracked down and forced to admit to their war crimes. 

They bowed down to world pressure and compensated their victims for it.

In Namibia, the very same Germans, between 1904 and 1907, slaughtered more than 100 000 Herero and 10 000 Namaqua in Namibia. 

An estimated 80 percent of the Herero and 50 percent of the Nama were killed by the Germans, some of them under grisly and merciless conditions in concentration camps.

Again the Germans poisoned wells, shot and hanged their victims who included children, men and women.

On May 28 2021, Berlin officially recognised its responsibility for the atrocities, apologised and agreed to pay compensation of more than US$1,3 billion in aid to the country and descendants of victims as a gesture of recognition of the immeasurable suffering that was inflicted on the victims.

US$1,3 billion is peanuts compared to the crimes committed against the Herero. 

To make matters worse, the amount is to be spread over a period of 30 years.

Many see overt racism in how Germany dealt with the two genocides. 

Germany has so far distributed over US$91.9 billion to victims of the holocaust and they continue to receive compensation to this day — a far cry from the US$1,3 billion given to Namibians.

French President Emmanuel Macron attended a memorial in Kigali where more than 250 000 victims are buried, paid tribute whilst recognising France’s role in the Rwandan genocide — but did not apologise for it!

The question comes down to: Does the West respect human rights? 

Not much has changed in terms of the international community’s reaction to the carnage committed on the African continent.

The world did not sit by and let Germany get away with the atrocities committed during the holocaust, but choose to turn a blind eye on Africa.

Africa has been unable to get reparations for the slave trade and colonialism from the West.

The injustices perpetrated by Western countries on Africa should not be ignored: history should judge these nations harshly until reparations and heartfelt apologies are made. 

Like Auschwitz, the world should acknowledge the genocide that took place in Africa.

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