Third Oral Statement to the 9th Session of the Working Group on Minorities
Speaker: Harriett AbuBakr Muhammad
Greetings Mr. Chairman, members of the Working Group on Minorities. I am grateful to be here again this year in order to learn more about how we Afrodescendants might utilize the Declaration on the Rights of Minorities to bring about justice for ourselves and an end to injustice in the future.
My name is Harriett AbuBakr Muhammad. I represent the National Commission for Reparations. Because I am an attorney at law, I have looked to international human rights law for justice for my people. Since our first UN communication in 1994, we, the descendants of enslaved Africans in the Americas, have been pressing a claim that international human rights law has been violated. We have been denied and deprived of our original identity, mother tongue, culture and religion. For us, the slavery experience is not in the past, as the lingering effects of slavery are within us - permanently. And in addition to this permanent damage, deliberate acts to keep us from rising, collectively, have continued, and are continuing into the present time in violation of international law.
We began to try to establish ourselves collectively around the 1930's. Our movement became very strong in the 1960's. During the 60's and 70's, unknown to many people outside North America, there was a human rights movement running counter to the much publicized civil rights movement. I have deep personal experience of our human rights movement and the destabilization and destruction of our movement by the U.S. Government’s infamous Counter Intelligence Program. During that time I was a member of the family of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. This great leader taught us, even then, that what we need is human rights. Some of you may have become familiar with his human rights efforts through his spokesman, Malcolm X.
Due to the deliberate acts of the U.S. Government from the 1950's to the present, which we claimi are in violation of Article 27 of the ICCPR, we are still today forced to engage in a struggle to establish ourselves internationally, with a UN recognized identity. The world has not yet clearly acknowledged that we exist.
Recently we have had to face another area of struggle within the UN. There seems to be a persistent desire to group us within the same category as other people of African descent who have not experienced the destruction of their original identity, mother tongue, culture and religion. We deeply appreciate our roots in Africa, but this appreciation should not prevent us from telling the world that we have, through force, lost our original identity. As this Working Group knows, people of African descent who have not experienced slavery are able to tell you where they come from, what their heritage is, what their original language is, what God their ancestors believed in. We cannot know these things - ever. What a terrible loss for us - and the world seems to want to gloss it over.
Our task has been to come together with each other, recognize ourselves and re-claim an identity that befits us. On our own, and with the help of the Working Group on Minorities, we have done this. Now we want the UN to clearly acknowledge that the Afrodescendant Minorities are a specific human family, emerging as a result of slavery, destruction of identity and forced mixed breeding. The UN can recognize our existence in the language of its documents and by placing our issues on appropriate agendas for discussion.
Even though the UN is to be applauded for its efforts against racism, and the establishment of a moral argument for reparations in the documents of the World Conference Against Racism, some of the outcomes of this Conference, including the Working Group on People of African Descent, have not yet heard our prayers for official UN recognition of our existence. We know that our rise, our ethnogenesis, is not easily understood, and we thank the Working Group on Minorities for their exceptional loyalty to human rights, and their immediate understanding and response to our first intervention some six years ago. We have come from death to life, and we are grateful to those who have seen and acknowledged this truth.
In conclusion, we agree with Mr. Silis Muhammad that a second Regional Seminar for Afrodescendant Minorities in the Americas Region would be beneficial to us. We ask the Working Group on Minorities to continue to validate our self-chosen identity in its documents, and use any other means available to it, to place the fact of our existence before the UN and the world. We are the Afrodescendant Minorities.
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