Message by Alice Wairimu Nderitu, Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
On March 21, 1960, in Sharpeville South Africa, police fired on and killed 69 black people, wounding several more, as they peacefully demonstrated for the abolition of South Africa’s racist pass laws requiring them to carry a passbook. Pass laws served to severely limit the movements of black people, focusing on segregating populations according to skin color, enabling the easy allocation of migrant labor and managing urbanization as black people needed a passbook to enter any city. The pass laws kept families apart, and violations, common, as people violated the laws to find work, meant threats, arrests and harassment. The pass laws were a hated symbol of what the apartheid system meant in practice. Following the shooting a state of emergency was declared in South Africa with thousands of people detained.
March 21st, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination – references the Sharpeville Massacre, commemorating the lives of those who died fighting a system - apartheid - built on racial discrimination.
On December 10th, 1996, the President of a now independent South Africa, Nelson Mandela, symbolically signed into law the country’s new Constitution in Sharpeville, at the site where the people were killed. 10 December is symbolic too as the day when, in 1948, 75 years ago, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a declaration that affirmed the equal enjoyment for all - of all human rights - without distinction of any kind, including race and color.
A day before, on 9 December 1948, the General Assembly adopted its first human right treaty on the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Genocide Convention protects against the most heinous crime, a crime that is set out as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group, based on their identity. The groups protected under the Genocide Convention are national, ethnical, racial, and religious groups.
The Genocide Convention, born out of the horrors of the Second World War and the the Holocaust encapsulated the commitment to “Never Again” allow such atrocities to occur. Unfortunately, we know that this promise “Never Again” of the Convention has far too often not been fulfilled. There are reasons why it has not been fulfilled.
The theme of this year’s international commemoration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is “urgency of combatting racism and racial discrimination” recognizes the fact of racism being core to the non-realization of “Never Again”.
Despite the fact of there being no scientific basis for race and racism to be part of social reality, race as a mode of social categorization and racism as a form of discrimination, violence and oppression nonetheless persists.
Genocide is not a random or spontaneous event. It constitutes the end point of a process which develops over time, with several risk factors and early warning signs, present. The process leading to genocide starts with the discrimination, exclusion, dehumanization and hate against groups based on identity. Racism powered the Nazi ideology and policies designating people into inferior and superior races fueling discrimination, hate speech and stigma against the Jewish community. In Rwanda, hate speech and the dehumanization of the Tutsi community was frequently utilized. In Bosnia Herzegovina, years of leaders and the media portraying neighbors in categories of “us” and “them” led to incitement of and justification of the violence that led to the Srebrenica Genocide.
In Myanmar years of hatred and exclusionary rhetoric against the Rohingya Muslims both online and offline, together with deeply discriminatory practices restricting this group’s access to basic services, freedom of movement and other fundamental rights - led to a climate in which mass violence against this population occurred. In Iraq, the targeting of the Yazidi by Daesh was preceded by a long history of exclusion and marginalization on this community.
Combatting racial discrimination and discrimination on other grounds such as religion and ethnicity is therefore part and parcel of genocide prevention, unless we do so, ‘Never Again” will remain an unfulfilled inspiration. We therefore know that while non-discrimination and equality -a core basis of ending racism - have been as a fundamental human right for 75 years, the reality has been much more uneven.
Despite progress made, racism continues to affect the human rights and daily lives of millions. Racism is also rooted in legacies of slavery, colonialism, segregation, and apartheid and passed down to new generations through our failure to fully understand and address these legacies and their lasting impacts.
