Oral Statement to the 61st Commission on Human Rights (2005) Agenda Item 14 b Minorities
Note: This statement was prepared to be delivered by Mr. Silis Muhammad, but it was not delivered orally due to a schedule change of the CHR. It was delivered to the Members in written form by the Secretariat.
We, the Afrodescendant people, living in the position of minorities throughout the Americas Region and Slavery Diaspora, want to be recognized on the agenda, or in a decision or resolution of the Commission on Human Rights. We, the formerly so-called African Americans have chosen for ourselves an identity: Afrodescendants.
Leaders of Afrodescendants, from 19 countries, met in the year 2002 in La Ceiba, Honduras, under the supervision of the UN Working Group on Minorities. We have often praised and thanked this Working Group for they, in their wisdom, knew that we had no human rights. They have recognized us and sought diligently to help us. In La Ceiba we chose Afrodescendants as our internal recognized identity, for we have these kinships and uniqueness, to wit: we are a dead, a stateless people, or civilly dead to the knowledge of self: and have been, or are, purposely, being kept so, especially by the United States.
Due to slavery, we are 400 years removed from the land in which we lived, Africa. In the lingering effects of slavery, we are rendered a stateless people.
We are now experiencing ethnogenesis. At present, we Afrodescendants, numbering 250 million, have no collective protective human rights. Since, as a people, we are not recognized as citizens of any country, we call upon member States of the UN to grant us recognition and the protection of the UN.
We wish to do what the Scriptural prodical son did: get up from the savage condition in which we have been forced to live, through assimilation, and return to our home to be welcomed by our brothers and by our father. The world knows that we originally came from Arabia: all of us. It is the home of civilization and we were there at the origin of civilization.
The doors cannot close upon us, the Afrodescendants. We are an element of the earth, born from the beginnings of civilization, and all people know that of us. We exist. We were scattered through no choice of our own, but through the European slave trade which deemed us savages.
Will the Commission on Human Rights recognize us?
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