A Harsh New World

On 29 and 30 November Algiers hosted an International Conference on Colonialism in Africa: Towards the Reparation of Historical Injustices through the Criminalisation of Colonialism.

The delegates – among whom foreign ministers, academics, jurists, and representatives from non-governmental organisations – held a high-level ministerial session and several thematic parallel sessions, all intended to “deepen reflection”.

In fact, despite the large number of delegates and the fact that they had only a short weekend in which to mull these substantial subjects – they all duly agreed — surprise, surprise — that colonialism was a crime against humanity and that huge reparations were due.

This, it turns out, was the climax of “the Year of the AU 2025”, whose theme was “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations and the Eradication of Racial Discrimination”.

Two African Union (AU) Summits were held, in February and May, the first one declaring that not only colonisation but also slavery and deportation were both crimes against humanity and acts of genocide.

It was argued that in international law any injustice should be remedied by compensation, though delegates were considerably discomfited when told by lawyers that while that modern law applied to the present, it could not be made retrospective to apply to what had happened in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

Similarly, at the second summit there was a strong push to declare colonisation to be a crime against humanity and delegates were unhappy to learn that there was nothing in international law that explicitly outlawed colonisation. Nonetheless, as we have seen, this did not hinder the onward rush towards “reparatory justice”.

What to make of this

What is one to make of this? The use of the terms “genocide” and “crime against humanity” goes back to the Nuremberg trials in 1945-46. The world was staggered at the enormity of the evils perpetrated by the Nazis, which were only fully understood after the war’s end. There was no doubt that the Nazis had intended – indeed, Hitler said so – to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe and Russia, along with gypsies and various dissident groups. This was such a vast and, indeed, industrialised enterprise that to accuse the Third Reich of murder fell far short of the awful reality. Hence these new terms: genocide and a crime against humanity.

The problem is that these rapidly became new benchmarks so that anyone who wished to de-legitimate an enemy attempted to accuse them of these extreme crimes. Hence the declaration that apartheid was a crime against humanity – an absurdity, for however bad apartheid was it hardly rivalled the Holocaust.

Similarly, pro-Palestinian marchers attempt to insist that the death of some 70 000 in Gaza (a figure produced by Hamas propaganda, disputed by demographers) constitutes genocide. Yet there was no declared intent by Israel to kill all Gazans (a key part of the definition) and undoubtedly a good half of those fatalities were Hamas soldiers. And even so, after two years of warfare the Israelis had killed only 3.5% of Gazans. As one surveys the mere rubble that Gaza has been turned into, 3.5% seems an extraordinarily low figure, particularly when one considers the awesome strength of the Israeli military. This is not to say that the loss of 70 000 people is anything but awful, but claims of genocide are clearly wildly inflated.

What has happened is akin to grade inflation in the educational world, where almost every student gets As for everything. The International Criminal Court has clearly gone along with this trend and says that not only extermination but murder, torture, deportation, rape, sexual slavery, and apartheid are all crimes against humanity.

When one considers that there are now 64 murders a day in South Africa and heaven knows how many rapes, it would seem that crimes against humanity are an everyday commonplace in South Africa.

This is certainly not what the judges at Nuremberg intended. They were so horrified at the exceptional evil they faced that they wanted to invent a whole new language for it. But there we are.

Legacy

It would, of course, be possible to quarrel with the characterisation of colonialism as a crime against humanity. Indians have always said that Britain created India by uniting its many parts into one, and by giving it a major railway system, an army and a civil service, which remained central institutions in Indian life thereafter.

Much the same could be said of South Africa, Canada, and Australia. In Africa the colonial period also saw a huge increase in the African population due to the impact of colonial medicine: the very opposite of genocide.

But in the end, this is not a fruitful debate: one remembers the famous sketch “What have the Romans ever done for us?” in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian.

The point is just that the colonial period, with its rights and wrongs and achievements and demerits, is now a settled and vanished historical experience, at least as far as the British, French, Portuguese, and Dutch empires are concerned. They are long gone and no one has the aim of reconstituting them.

Russia, however, is in the middle of a large war to recolonise Ukraine and speaks openly of wanting to do the same to the Baltic republics. Similarly, China is attempting to force back into the Chinese empire the long independent states of Sinkiang, Tibet, and Taiwan and it publishes maps showing other, more distant territories as really belonging to China.

Presumably the AU condemns this continuation of the imperial urge?

No, it doesn’t.

In the same way, one notes that there is plenty of condemnation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade but not a word about the Muslim slave trade, which went on for many centuries longer at the expense of East Africa. No explanation is offered for these inconsistencies, though they considerably undermine the case.

Ancient

Similarly, no attempt is made to deal with the fact that both slavery and colonialism are as old as the hills, that the ancient Greeks had colonies right across the Mediterranean, that Rome colonised all of Europe and beyond, that the Romans enslaved innumerable Britons, French, and Germans, that the Mongols colonised and enslaved the Russians, and so on. In the light of modern-day morality this was wrong, but nobody is thinking of demanding reparations from the Romans or Mongols. Again, no explanation is offered for this inconsistency.

So, what is this really all about? In effect, all the African delegates gathered at Algiers and also the African and Caribbean countries who are demanding reparations for slavery (again, only for the trans-Atlantic slave trade) are making demands for, literally, trillions of dollars in compensation from the Western world. They clearly hope to strengthen their case by creating or playing on guilt feelings in the West.

It’s absolutely hopeless, of course. The transfers of capital they are aiming at are simply unthinkably huge and no Western politicians will even begin to consider bankrupting their countries in order to placate these quixotic demands. One only has to see the enormous unpopularity of relatively small cuts to the welfare budgets of Western states to see what the fate of cuts hundreds and thousands of times as large would be.

In effect, the situation boils down to this: since 1947 almost all the Third World has been decolonised. Since then, a number of these “new” countries have set about their economic development with a will and have already moved into the middle- or even upper-income category: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, India, and a number of others. But the large majority have either not made such an effort or have remained too handicapped by corruption and mismanagement for such an effort to succeed.

In addition, there are many states that are too small or weak to matter, and whose best hope was to associate themselves with a larger, stronger power – but have nonetheless failed to do that.

The result is that there are a large number of Third World countries – especially in Africa – whose economic development has been disappointing and that remain poor or extremely poor. Many of them have relied on foreign aid, but latterly Western countries have been reducing or even cancelling their aid budgets. (Even Sweden has cut its aid budget so as to be able to offer more help to Ukraine.)

Accordingly, the still-under-developed countries are now casting around for any way in which they can achieve large infusions of Western capital and have alighted upon the notion of reparations for slavery and now, also for colonialism.

In addition, of course, these causes cast them as self-righteous victims which is pleasant for their self-esteem.

Won’t work

But it simply won’t work. They can’t hope to use this sort of moral blackmail to make Western countries pay huge amounts to compensate for the historical wrongs of distant ages. The brutal fact is that there is really no alternative for these countries but to try to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. This is all the more true because of the decline of the rules-based Western liberal order and its replacement by the new multi-polar world – which effectively means that every country is on its own.

This new world is already visible. Various left-wing countries (such as South Africa) disapprove of the way President Donald Trump is threatening regime change in Venezuela, but who is actually coming to President Nicolás Maduro’s aid? No one.

Similarly, South Africa is indignant that the US is trying to expel it from the G20, but which country is stepping forward to try to prevent that? There isn’t one. The National Executive Committee (NEC) of the African National Congress has apparently decided to appeal to other G20 members to stand up to Trump and insist on South Africa’s inclusion.

Indeed, Thandi Moraka, a deputy minister for foreign affairs and NEC member, says that it’s impossible for Trump to exclude South Africa, that Pretoria can always participate online, if not in person. I’m afraid Ms Moraka and the NEC are about to receive a rude awakening.

South Africa and its friends in BRICS may cheer on the rise of the multi-polar world but in fact it ushers in a dog-eats-dog world in which there are no more rules except might is right. Ms Moraka and the NEC are appealing for solidarity, but solidarity doesn’t exist in a multi-polar world. Nor, indeed, does international law.

President Cyril Ramaphosa may feel that he is morally one-up on Trump but that won’t make South Africa’s relegation from the G20 any easier to swallow. Poland has already been lined up to replace South Africa and Poland really is one of the world’s top twenty economies, which South Africa used to be but is no longer. Ramaphosa may hope that the AU will speak up for South Africa at the next G20 but it’s quite likely that the AU won’t get invited there either.

At some point in the future South Africa may look back and ask: how could we have wanted this new multi-polar world when the old liberal rules-based order was so much kinder to countries like ours?

It’s a good question but it should have been asked some time ago.

RW Johnson