Judge dismisses damages lawsuit

NAMIBIA: GENOCIDE AND PROPERTY SEIZURES ALLEGED

Germany was being sued by descendents of the Herero, Nama tribes.

New York

AUS judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit seeking to require Germany to pay damages over genocide and property seizures by colonists in what is now Namibia more than a century ago.

US District Judge Laura Taylor Swain in Manhattan said Germany was immune from claims by descendants of the Herero and Nama tribes, depriving her of jurisdiction over its role in what some historians have called the 20th century’s first genocide.

Kenneth McCallion, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he would discuss his clients’ legal options with them.

The case is unrelated to Germany’s atonement for its role in the Holocaust during World War II and its payment of more than $70 billion (about R1 trillion) to survivors and others, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

According to the plaintiffs, thousands of Herero and Nama were slaughtered, left to starve or died at concentration camps from 1904 to 1908, when Namibia was known as SouthWest Africa, after the tribes rebelled against German rule.

A 1985 United Nations (UN) report called the “massacre” of Hereros a genocide and Germany has, in recent years, negotiated with Namibia’s government over the claims.

The plaintiffs said Germany was not shielded by the federal Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act because some of its plunder found its way to Manhattan, triggering exceptions covering commercial activity and improper “takings”.

They alleged that misappropriated funds were used to buy buildings housing Germany’s consulate general and UN mission, while skulls and other human remains were sent to the American Museum of Natural History, and a written account of the genocide went to the New York Public Library.

Swain, however, said the exceptions to sovereign immunity were narrow and the plaintiffs’ relatively expansive view could subject Germany to liability for holding cultural programmes or conducting boiler repairs at its buildings.

She also said the transfers of human remains and the account of the genocide bore no “direct” or “immediate” connection to Germany’s activities in southwestern Africa. – Reuters

No direct connection to German activities.