Informal Workshop on Afro-descendants in the Americas
Working Group on Minorities
Morning Session
May 19, 2001
Statement by Mr. Silis Muhammad
Greetings Mr. Chairman, members of the Working Group on Minorities. I would like to thank each one of you for your part in organizing this special informal workshop for Afro-Descendants in the Americas. Also, I thank the NGOs that contributed to organizing this workshop.
My name is Silis Muhammad. For four years I have been attending the meetings of the Working Group on Minorities to deliver prayers on behalf of African Americans in the United States. From my first intervention before this esteemed group of experts, my concern has been with the subject of today's Agenda Item 2: The relevance of minority protection to the Afro-Americans, and its relation to the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities.
When we African Americans consider the Declaration on the Rights of Minorities, we conclude that we remain a lost people. While we are a people and not a minority, in the United States we are placed within a minority status. Thus, the U.S. Government, with knowledge that it has denied us our identity for the past 400 years, is in violation of the aforementioned Declaration. In Article 2 the Declaration emphasizes that minorities have the right to enjoy their culture and identity.
In our first intervention before this group we questioned whether the so-called African Americans are in possession of their human rights. We concluded that the UN does not recognize us, or know where we fit. Four hundred years of plantation slavery and its lingering effects have left us outside of a definite place within the UN system, and thus not in possession of our human rights. Today we thank the Working Group on Minorities for demonstrating its willingness to hear our concerns and assist us.
We know that to the extent that we have been deprived of our culture, our religion and our language, we do not have human rights. During the period we were enslaved, we lost our identity: our 'mother tongue', our culture and religion – by whatever names they were then called. Owing to the acts of plantation slavery and its lingering effects, we have been duplicated as a type of clone of the Anglo-Saxon: we speak their English, practice their religion, and have lived their culture. In addition, the wrongful act of forced breeding between the slaves has produced a changed African American people. Thus we are without a definite identity as to tribe, nation or a people, and we are not in control of our future.
African Americans in North, Central and South America and throughout the Diaspora all suffer from the loss of their identity. We did not come to the Americas willingly and we did not come as English speaking Christians with an Anglo-American culture. Neither did we come as Spanish or Portuguese speaking Christians with Spanish or Portuguese influenced culture. African Americans are a people who for more than 400 years have been mindful, daily, of a consciousness of "otherness", with respect to racial differences. We have been forcibly displaced from our common territory and scattered throughout the Americas Region and beyond. The African American "racial" group is a group destroyed, having neither racial dignity nor political bond.
We African Americans in the United States have cried out in many ways over many years for the restoration of our dignity as a people. Yet the U.S. Government commits, daily, the international wrongful act of denying our existence while claiming respect for human rights. It is our desire to reconstitute ourselves, for we do recognize ourselves as the African American people, internally. It is also our desire to receive reparation from the U.S. Government for the ongoing loss of our 'mother tongue', and our internationally recognized political identity. We ask that the Working Group on Minorities let us know what it recommends in relation to our desire to reconstitute ourselves, and to receive reparation and international political recognition.
In conclusion, it is our prayer that this body of experts, the Working Group on Minorities, will become the force within the United Nations for the creation of international instruments, arbitration mechanisms and laws that require States to recognize and respect the dignity of the minorities and peoples under their jurisdiction.
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