After long negotiations on a reconciliation agreement to come to terms with the German colonial era, Germany and Namibia have apparently agreed on the assessment of the injustice caused by the German colonial power at the time and on current German support to Namibia.

The German press agency, citing the Namibian negotiator Ueriuka Tjikuua, reported that at the end of the most recent round of negotiations in Berlin a final report had been drawn up, which was now submitted for approval to the governments in Germany and Namibia as well as to the bodies of the Nama and Herero, who were once persecuted by the German military will.

Johannes Leithäuser

Political correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

    According to a report by Deutschlandfunk, the German side is now ready to recognize the expulsion and killing of thousands of members of the two tribes as genocide.

    Representatives of the Nama and Herero, but also the Namibian government, had been demanding this recognition for years; it is now reportedly to be combined with an official apology from the German head of state.

    Neither Tjikuua nor the negotiator on the German side, the former CDU member of the Bundestag, Ruprecht Polenz, wanted to comment on the details of the agreement reached;

    Polenz announced that the confidentiality agreed between the two sides still applies.

    The end of May is Remembrance Day

    The efforts to reach an agreement between Germany and Namibia, which regulates the questions from the common past, go back more than six years. The question of whether the destruction and expulsion operations of the German imperial protection force should be considered genocide had international law and financial aspects that were clarified in several rounds of negotiations. The German side asserted, among other things, that the acts were committed at the beginning of the twentieth century long before any international law definition of genocide; The Namibian side made it clear that the planned agreement did not intend to create any binding international law that could be linked to financial compensation claims.

    The question of legally justified financial compensation was brought before a court in New York, before the representatives of the Nama and Herero, who had not been involved in their negotiating council with the German side, wanted to assert their claims.

    However, the court did not take her case to trial.

    After this clarification, the type and manner of material aid that Germany intends to provide to the Namibian side has now evidently been clarified.

    It should not be about compensation for the descendants of the displaced and murdered, but about reconciliation and reconstruction aid that should benefit the entire Herero and Nama communities, i.e. investments in education and infrastructure, health care or land acquisition.

    In previous rounds of negotiations, May 29 had been suggested as the date of signature of the agreement. A speech by the German Federal President in Namibia was also sought in earlier deliberations on this date, which is the day of remembrance of the genocide. The conclusion of the negotiations was long delayed by the Covid pandemic. Now time is pressing on the German side because the mandate of the German negotiator Polenz ends with the federal election and it would be open whether the new federal government would accept the state of negotiations.