Working Group on Minorities, Seventh Session, 14-18 May 2001
Agenda Item 3 (b)
Examining possible solutions to problems involving minorities,
including the promotion of mutual understanding between and among minorities and Governments
If I could express a feeling in words, and that is difficult to do, I would like to say thank you to the Chairperson, Mr. Eide, Mr. Bengoa, and other members of the Working Group for their guidance, and for being dutiful to their profession.
The United Nations does not recognize us, the African American people in the United States, or know where we fit, I have seen. Four hundred years of plantation slavery and its lingering effects have left us deprived of and denied our 'mother tongue', and thus, outside of a definite place within the UN system, in violation of Article 27 of the ICCPR. This is an ongoing wrong. It is our prayer that the Working Group on Minorities will eventually recognize us, for we do recognize ourselves as the African American people, internally.
We are all from a common territory, Africa, and from many tribes who spoke many languages. Like the Indigenous Americans, who were colonized and are receiving recognition as peoples, and reparations, we recognize ourselves as a "race" of people, by virtue of our common origin, the sufferance of slavery and its legacies, and the wrongful act of forced breeding between the slaves which produced a changed African American people. Thus we are without a recognized identity as to tribe, nation or a people, and we are not in control of our future.
We are a people experiencing, in reality, the process of ethnogenesis. We ask that the Working Group on Minorities let us know what it recommends in relation to our desire to reconstruct our lost ties and reconstitute ourselves, since there are at present no international instruments, arbitrations, mechanisms or laws requiring the recognition of minorities that can restrain ethnic conflict.
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