Oral Statement to the Working Group on Minorities, May 1999
Agenda Item 3. b), 8 (a) Examination of the causes and nature of the problems affecting minorities and group accommodation, and their possible solutions, including: - the legacies of the slave trade on the black communities throughout the Americas; - issues relating to the forcible displacement of populations.
Greetings Mr. Chairman, Members of the Working Group on Minorities.
The lingering effects of plantation slavery have left me and my people in a state of genocide. Genocide is to a group as homicide is to an individual. Rent from our land, our roots, sold and forced into slavery: we have been recognized as slaves, Niggers, Negroes, Coloreds, Black-Americans and today we are the so-called African-Americans. We are more than 40 million, and yet we are a people dead. We have been dead, as slaves, for 400 years. Is not our struggle for human dignity equally as important as groups fighting for their human life. To be alive, with the knowledge that I am, as a man, dead, is worse than physical death. Death of the physical body sets you free. Death of the human spirit is a living hell.
Commencing with slavery to this date, we are a revolving nation, within the nation of America. We are absent our foundation-- our human rights: culture, religion and mother’s tongue. We have lost our original identity.
Our question is whether America’s refusal to ratify a particular U.N. human rights treaty, which would lead to the restoration of our identity, amounts to a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities flows from the Universal Declaration of Human rights. The Universal Declaration envisages, to quote Professor Eide, "the establishment of a common framework of protected human rights for everyone, everywhere."
The United States knew, upon the adoption of the Universal Declaration on December 10, 1948, that African-Americans did not have their original mother’s tongue, their inherent religion or their ancestral culture. America did not have us in mind at the time of signing that document; or she had the intent to persuade the U.N. that she did. To the extent that the United Nations left us out of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the government of the United States has designed a falsehood which has hampered the United Nations and its member states. We have been left out of the Declaration on the Rights of Minorities also, because of this falsehood.
Our identity as a people, in possession of our human rights, can not ever be achieved if left to the will of the United States. Why? America’s refusal to ratify the Convention on the Non-applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, in 1968, some twenty (20) years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration, makes it blatantly clear, again, that she did not have in mind human rights for everyone, everywhere.
The United States’ omission to ratify that particular convention reveals the intent of the U.S. Government at the moment and time of her act. Her thinking is consistent with her thinking in 1948. Either she did not have us in mind; or she seeks specifically to block the pathway to our human rights. While holding us in this ever revolving state, the United States holds herself out as being in full compliance with the spirit of U.N. protected human rights for everyone, everywhere; and causes us to remain trapped within the Anglo-American culture, regenerating her religion and tongue, in reality, her identity.
The United States has committed fraud against the U.N., genocide against us. Thus we conclude, that since its inception, a consistent violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been perpetrated by the United States.
We ask you to recommend to the Sub-Commission the establishment of a forum, with expert guidance, for the purpose of restoring our human rights -- which only we can reclaim or choose: our legal, political being and status as a people. Within a forum, we will 1) promote respect for the Universal Declaration of human rights amongst ourselves, which will ultimately include the Diaspora; we will 2) rebuild a kind of council or governing body amongst ourselves, absent the social engineering of the U.S. Government. Within this council we will 3) openly discuss the devolution, in pertinent parts, of the Constitution of the United States, which defines us as three-fifths of a human being. This package will be presented to the United States. The venture commenced, intelligence can be gained for the Sub-Commission that might usefully 4) address the continuing legal, political and economic legacies of the slave trade as experienced by the victims. We will 5) discuss reclamation, restoration, repatriation, reparations and migration of some of us to a friendly nation. We want these discussions to 6) benefit race relations in the society of the United States. The establishment of a forum for the reasons stated, would also eliminate the burden of slavery for America’s future generation.
In closing, we thank the Working Group for including in its agenda the legacies of the slave trade.
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