Colonial Genocide By The British And The Europeans
For decades Asians, Africans and American ( originals) Nations peoples have been seeking the truth about colonisation.
Today Europeans justify their intervention in Middle East and other parts of the World, in the name of HUMAN RIGHTS.
Earlier for nearly 300 years they simply ravaged the world. In the first few decades after their first contact with peoples in both North America and South America, they carried out wholesale massacres and cultural destruction.
In the name of trade blankets infected with smallpox were given to the Red Indians and Mexicans. Thus only Europeans were able to establish colonies in the Americas and almost all other corners of the globe.
The horror in Africa is beyond comprehension. How could any civilized person tolerate slavery. It could be practiced only by blood sucking draculas. In China they ensured addiction to opium. In India the contemporary of Hitler, Winston Churchil killed more Bengalis through planned starvation than were Jews present in whole of Europe.
It was only in the latter part of the 20th century when the European decline commenced that some of their academics, governments, and interestedsted citizens began to work alongside those ravaged Indigenous peoples to bring out the true stories and actual history of establishment of these colonies.
Last month, Canada has finally admitted to “race-based genocide” against the original Canadian people.
The Canadian Prime Minister in a tweet has stated “We accept their findings including that what happened amounts to genocide,” said @JustinTrudeau about #MMIWG report. “There are many debates ongoing around words… Our focus as a country, as leaders, as citizens must be on the steps we take to put an end to this situation.”
Even after the establishment of a British Government in Canada, it is now acknowledged that the authorities “ displayed a continuous policy … to destroy Indigenous peoples physically, biologically, and as social units”. This finding is the result of a three-year national inquiry into disappearance of more than 4000 indigenous men, women and children. The report is known as the MMIWG report which confirms these mass murders.
This inquiry in Canada has implications for even Australia and New Zealand, where Indigenous peoples are still subject to considerable scio economic disadvantages when compared to other settlers.
The Canadian action is a reminder of the fact that Australia does not have any formal treaty with the indigenous people. Though Victoria and Northern Territory are pursuing regional treaties. The report may also form the basis for the Indigenous people to pursue truth and justice in Australia and New Zealand and even in USA and many Asian islands or archipelagos like Chagos etc still under illegal occupation.
Many European countries denounce Myanmar for injustice on Rohangiyas. Though they forget that the United Nations Genocide Convention clearly defines the crime as any “committed intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, through killing, grievous bodily harm, the manipulation of the group’s living conditions, restrictions on births, or the forcible transfer of children from one group to another.
Marking Aboriginal massacres
In 1828, the bodies of about 30 Aboriginal men were thrown from a cliff in Tasmania’s far north west. The Cape Grim massacre is not officially commemorated, but some think it’s time to mark the day.
Though the current definition fails “to incorporate Indigenous perspectives” and that genocide includes both “lethal and non-lethal acts”.
In Canada Inuit and Metis children were forcibly taken from their homes and adopted into non-Indigenous homes. In Australia also, just a few decades back Indigenous children were taken from their parents and raised in state-run institutions or Mission Schools,
Jill Gallagher AO believes that genocide continues in Australia today. (Supplied: Victorian Government)
Jill Gallagher AO, a Gunditjmara woman from western Victoria and the Victorian Treaty Advancement Commissioner, told the ABC genocide against Indigenous Australians had cast a long shadow over her own family.
“We’ve been looking at a facility to look after my 93-year-old mother and she lived through the Mission School Era,” she said.
Ms Gallagher added that the disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the rates of homelessness, unemployment, children in out-of-home care, and the ability to practise their culture, even today, exemplified indirect genocide.
She added that Indigenous Australians are the most incarcerated people per capita in the world.
The latest Australian data on out-of-home care showed that Indigenous children in 2017 were 10 times more likely to be taken away from their families than non-Indigenous children, prompting Australia’s first Aboriginal children’s commissioner, Andrew Jackomos, to call the situation a “national disaster”.
“Academics of a certain age and socio-economic bracket do not have a conception of genocide being a nuanced thing — it’s very much a body count,” Mr Latimore said.
“Genocide or cultural genocide in Australia is ongoing and it’s part of the colonial project.”
Will Canada’s report prompt bids for justice abroad?
Jennifer Balint, an associate professor specialising in genocide at the University of Melbourne, told the ABC that obtaining justice for past or continuing genocide in any legal system was “extremely exhausting with very limited success”.
She said prosecuting charges of genocide involved proving “bad intent” — as in the case of Rwanda, and Jews during World War II — whereas history had shown that genocide also happened under “good intent” such as colonial policies of cultural assimilation.
In the Commonwealth, there has only been one instance where justice has been delivered to victims of colonial violence — in 2012, surviving Kenyan torture victims took on the British Government and won compensation.
Both Australia and Canada are in breach of a number of domestic and international human rights statues and agreements, including the Commonwealth Charter, where member states must ensure “equality and respect for the protection and promotion of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights” of all citizens.
While there is no reference to colonisation or decolonisation in the Commonwealth Charter, the United Nations has pressed member states to continue decolonisation efforts — a call first made in 1960.
Within international law, Ms Balint explained that the MMIWG report’s findings may provide a framework for similar initiatives, as they document the “testimonies of what the destruction was”.
India too needs to have a Commission to enquire into Deaths during Bengal Famine, the Massacres Carried out by British Troops during 1942 movement and also document the genocide committed in the aftermath of First War of Indian Independence in 1857.
