Germany has officially admitted to committing genocide in Namibia in the early 20th century and pledged to pay more than $1 billion to the African nation.
Germany announced it would dedicate €1.1 billion ($1.34 billion) to infrastructure and federal aid programs in Namibia over a 30-year period, reported the BBC. The funds are not considered legally binding reparations. Instead, they are considered reconciliation for the Herero-Nama genocide.
“Our aim was and is to find a joint path to genuine reconciliation in remembrance of the victims,” German foreign minister Heiko Maas said in a statement. “That includes our naming the events of the German colonial era in today’s Namibia, and particularly the atrocities between 1904 and 1908, unsparingly and without euphemisms.
“We will now officially call these events what they were from today’s perspective: a genocide,” Maas added.
The genocide occurred between 1904 and 1908 after the Herero and Namas ethnic groups rebelled against German colonial rule. To punish them, German military leader Lothar von Trotha ordered the extermination of the survivors. Many of them were forced to live in concentration camps in the Kalahari Desert, where they often starved to death. The Herero and Namas were also subjected to forced labor, medical experimentation, sexual abuse and other forms of torture.
Germany has been negotiating a reconciliation deal with Namibia since 2015 and didn’t settle on a deal until Thursday. The nations will issue a joint declaration acknowledging the atrocities as “genocide” but purposefully omitted the words “reparation” and “compensation” to avoid setting a precedent for future lawsuits, reported The Guardian.
A spokesperson for Hage Geingob, President of Namibia, called the agreement “as the first step” in the right direction.
“It is the basis for the second step, which is an apology, to be followed by reparations,” the spokesman said, per The Guardian.
The Council of Chiefs, a group representing descendants of the victims, said the agreement is “an affront to our existence,” reported Deutsche Welle. They also called the proposed amount “insulting” and called for a renegotiation. There were also protests in Berlin and outside the German embassy in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia.
