Genocide

Abstract

With a surface area of 11,700,000 square miles and a population currently estimated at 800 million (resulting in an average density of population of 14.6 PER SQUARE MILE) spread over fifty-four countries, it can hardly be said that Africa is overpopulated.¹ We argue that from the trans-Atlantic slave trade (fifteenth to nineteenth centuries), to the present time, the West has consciously pursued policies designed to control, reduce, and altogether eliminate Africa’s population for the avowed purpose of gaining exclusive access to the continent’s best agricultural land. Such policies are also designed to serve the West’s commodity requirements, as well as to access Africa’s vast mineral resources, particularly those deemed “strategic” (i.e., indispensable to the advanced technology industries of the West, such as electronics, aeronautics, and space). We adopt the definition of genocide contained in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 11, 1946. In Article 2 of this Convention, “genocide” is defined as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures fund provision of care, then in pure economic terms the survivors could be better off and per capita income could rise!”¹¹⁸

Americans and Europeans are accustomed to thinking of fascism and communism as the twin evils of the 20th century but the century has really been home to three great totalitarian systems—fascism, communism and colonialism—the latter practiced at its most deadly in Africa. The West doesn’t want to recognize this because they were complicit in it. Countries that were democratic in Europe conducted mass murder in Africa-with little or no protest from the U.S.

—General Secretary of World Council of Churches in a letter to its members in the Democratic Republic of Congo, WCC, Geneva, July 24, 2006, http://www.oikoumene.org/index