With Annalena Baerbock, Germany has a new foreign minister and, if she has her way, will also have a different foreign policy. It should be based on human rights and feminist. If that is more than just rhetoric, it can help to break the hardened borders in an area that is increasingly damaging Germany’s international reputation: dealing with the genocide of the Herero and Nama. The Angela Merkel government left a heap in ruins here. Since May there has been a draft agreement with the Namibian government, which names the genocide as such, at least in today’s sense, an apology from the Federal President and a “reconstruction aid” of 1.1 billion euros, spread over 30 years – however, the majority of the Herero and Nama reject this agreement. It came about with a lack of transparency, without satisfactory participation by the victim groups, and with far too little reparation, which is also not referred to as reparation.
Without prejudice to this, the then Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) described the agreement as a milestone at the end of May, but also as the last word in this matter, at least with regard to contractual obligations.
Toxic masculine style
After the expected approval of the Namibian government, Maas wanted to sign the initialed agreement in Namibia, the plane was already booked. But nothing came of it, because after five and a half years of negotiations behind closed doors, the result is an affront for the descendants of the victims. This is mainly due to the procedure. While the governments and their negotiating delegations were celebrating themselves in early summer, protests began to hail from Namibia and internationally. The – meanwhile deceased – eloquent Paramount Chief of the Herero, Vekuii Rukoro, even declared Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to be an undesirable person and announced protests in the event of his planned apology speech in the Namibian parliament. In any case, Heiko Maas no longer flew to Namibia to sign the contract.
An official approval of the Namibian parliament should invalidate the draft treaty from the accusation that it had been negotiated over the heads of the individual victim groups, even if the result is in view of the overwhelming majority of the SWAPO government and the fact that many leading Herero and Nama to the opposition belonged, would have been badly limited in its expressiveness. Even this has not yet materialized.
Nothing shows the failure of the German negotiating delegation under the leadership of the former CDU General Secretary and Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Bundestag, Ruprecht Polenz, more clearly than the showdown in the Namibian parliament in summer and autumn. The tensions within Namibia on this issue have been exposed. Now, twice, the fact that the German side apparently did not try or did not manage to achieve broad participation by Herero and Nama in the negotiations and thus also approval of the results took revenge. Instead, she covered this with a brisk demeanor, which soon earned her criticism in Namibia for behaving like colonial rulers. When Ruprecht Polenz taught the descendants of the Nama at a meeting in 2016 that they should not compare themselves with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the scandal was complete. Polenz thus poisoned the mood among many of the victims’ descendants. Anyone who uses the singularity of the Holocaust to crush or limit claims for reparation by victims of other (historical) human rights violations should actually have been replaced immediately. That this did not happen can only be explained by the fact that Merkel had long since lost interest in this question, if she ever had, or that the federal government was also able to use any rhetorical means to get rid of historical obligations.
In the meantime, the resistance within Namibia is so great that the Namibian parliament discussed the treaty but did not allow it to be voted on. And at the beginning of December it was now said that parliamentary approval was not even necessary. Instead, they want to renegotiate the reparation amount in the coming year. That too answers the question of the acceptance of the agreement to a certain extent.
This is a serious problem for the German government, because only broad approval could cure the procedural errors and ensure the agreement’s credibility retrospectively. The former also includes the accusation of violating the UN Convention for the Protection of Indigenous Minorities, according to which the latter must be involved in all negotiations that affect them with self-elected representatives. The few handpicked Herero and Nama who took part in the negotiations were not chosen by themselves. The many Herero and Nama who live in the diaspora as a result of the genocide were also not involved. You are not a Namibian citizen, so you cannot be represented by the Namibian government. The German government has not yet found a solution for this either.
Historical injustice in particular cannot be adequately addressed against the will of the descendants of those affected, but only with them. Otherwise the injustice would continue! This turns the question of how to deal with the genocide of the Herero and Nama into a test case of human rights-oriented and feminist foreign policy. Will the Federal Foreign Office continue to rely on power politics, which dictates the framework conditions for the other side to come to terms with historical injustice, or is the style changing? What the commandment of humility as a representative of the former perpetrators was unable to do in the face of historical trauma, perhaps a new, feminist foreign minister can do – to put toxic diplomatic masculinity in its place.
However, it is difficult to find a way out if you want to avoid losing face. There will be nothing left but to put the agreement between the governments into force and at the same time to initiate a second round of negotiations with all civil society groups in Namibia and also in the diaspora. In the end there would be two agreements, but if that were the price of true reconciliation, it would certainly be worth it. On December 12th, the Ovaherero Traditional Authority chose Mutjinde Katjiua as a new Paramount Chief after Vekuii Rukoro died of Covid-19 in the summer. The fact that two new representatives would face each other at the negotiating table should not be a disadvantage.
Hope in Claudia Roth
Since the foreign minister and the state minister for culture come from the same party in the Scholz government, there is also the chance to really make a fresh start in dealing with Germany’s colonial heritage. Of the three major areas that should have been resolved in the last government: dealing with the genocide of the Herero and Nama, the Humboldt Forum and looted colonial art, only real progress can be recorded in the area of the latter. The announced restitution of the Benin bronzes shows what diplomacy can achieve if only it wants and if you let it.
The Humboldt Forum, on the other hand, stumbles from one scandal to another. After the looted colonial art, the debate about the dome cross and the dome verdict, now the dispute over right-wing extremist donors. The real scandal, however, is still left out: the building itself, which can also be understood as a stony line with which the concentration on the “dark” sides of German history in the 20th century is pushed back in favor of a supposedly “brighter” story before 1914, when Germany was also the country of poets and thinkers, before it became that of judges and executioners, so the reading. Last but not least, the genocide of the Herero and Nama, on the other hand, indicates that genocide and the racial state were part of German history even before 1933, in precisely the era that glorified the Prussian Disneyland known as the Humboldt Forum.
Could there be a better way than the new cultural policy, which, according to Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth, should also include a modern remembrance policy, to initiate and support a real breakthrough in the historical reappraisal of colonial crimes? And as a memorial to the genocide, one of the beautiful inner courtyards of the city palace could be filled with sand from the Omaheke desert, where thousands of Herero died, and the facades covered with barbed wire, reminiscent of the first German concentration camps, in which Herero and Nama were exterminated abandoned through neglect. The money from the anonymous donors would then at least have been used to strengthen the critical debate and not to glorify Prussian-German history, which was also a history of violence.
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