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Génocide, camps d’internement et camps de la mort, des inventions du capitalisme, anglais, allemand, belge et français

12 janvier 2010, 12:51, par Toto

On Jan. 12, 1904, the Hereros launched their attacks on almost every German farm, village, and fort in Hereroland and succeeded in destroying the majority of the farms.

In February and March, German reinforcements arrived, permitting them to oppose the army of poorly armed Hereros with 2500 crack troops. The Germans were armed with the Model 88 rifle, which in the hands of a good marksman could kill a man at ranges upto half a mile. They also had some light artillery and machine guns.

Th e Hereros were armed only with rifles and handguns, and some in their army had no guns at all. They surprised the Germans with their marksmanship and managed to maintain the initiative as well as determining where the battles, which the Hereros usually won, would be fought.

This remained true even after there were far more armed Germans than armed Hereros. The German high command was baffled by all this, so they replaced their commander with the ruthless Gen. Lothar von Trotha.

Driven into the desert

Von Trotha issued a proclamation on Oct. 2, 1904, in which he stated : "Any Herero found within the German borders with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall no longer receive any women or children ; I will drive them back to their people or I will shoot them."

At the battle of Waterbeg, Makarero made a terrible blunder. He gathered 25,000 of his people, including women and children (who always followed the army), in a sandy valley with steep bluffs on three sides. To the open lay a 200-mile waterless desert called the Omaheke sandveld.

Von Trotha was able to force the people into the desert, where he had poisoned the few water wells. His troops locked the Hereros in the desert, where they died by the thousands.

Thus, von Trotha’s tactics turned to genocide. He erected a 150-mile line of German guardposts, keeping the Hereros in the desert. Oral histories say men slit the throats of cattle to drink the blood. They suckled the breasts of new mothers.

Infants withered and died in days. Some Hereros cut open the bellies of the dead to drink the liquid from their stomachs. Men who escaped the desert were lynched KKK style. Women and children survivors had chains placed around their necks and were worked to death. Capitalism triumphed.

The rest of the world ignored what was happening to the Hereros, except for a handful of German socialists-such as August Bebel and Rosa Luxemburg. They spoke out in vain.

Bridgeman reports that "the German losses in South West Africa from January 1904 to March 1907 amounted to about 2500 men killed, wounded, and missing. ... African losses cannot be determined with such precision.

"According to most experts, however, the Hereros numbered 80,000 at the time the rebellion began ; in 1911 only 15,130 were still alive. ... In 1904 there were believed to have been about 20,000 Hottentots in the colony ; seven years later that number had been reduced to 9781."

The Colonial Office issued strict orders in 1907 that no native could own land or cattle (the Ovambos were an exception), all males over 17 had to carry passes, and all natives were subject to forced labor.

In 1908 diamonds were discovered along the coast. As a result, by 1914 the white population had grown to 14,000. The few natives left were cowed creatures serving their white masters.

Just before President Clinton’s visit to Africa in 1998, Mberumba Kerina, a Herero and retired Namibian diplomat, stated, after an appeal was made for reparations from Germany, "The Germans repay the Jews because they’re white. They pat us on the head because we’re Black and African and don’t think we count so very much."

German government officials denied that what was done at the time was genocide and refused reparations, even though it wouldn’t cost much since there are so few Hereros left.

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