First Oral Statement to the 9th Session of the Working Group on Minorities, May 2003
Speaker: Mr. Silis Muhammad
Greetings Mr. Chairman. The Afrodescendant people, throughout the Slavery Diaspora, are, to this date, struggling for the protection of the UN. We are a diverse people, we know, in the lingering effects of slavery, and speaking no one common language. Albeit, we know, we are one common people seeking recognition of our inherent human rights.
We, Afrodescendants, have experienced total destruction of our essence: our original identity, language, culture and religion, as articulated in the Declaration on the Rights of Minorities and in Article 27 of the ICCPR.
These rights are denied us by systematically eliminating from our minds our mother tongue, culture and religion. By denying us these rights, generation after generation, in our homes and in our schools, the U.S. Government, in particular, destroys us mentally, and this is in breach of both the Minorities Declaration and Article 27.
These rights are an impossibility to recapture. The damages to us cannot be repaired due to forced mixed breeding during 400 years of slavery. The injury lingers on amidst us, collectively, to this day. We have been cross-bred by the slave masters, with no more regard than the regard given to animals. In America the slave masters cross-bred horses and donkeys in order to get a mule, which they used for plowing. We, like that mule, are a mixture of different people speaking different languages. We do not know what language we should speak, and tracing DNA cannot correct our dilemma.
We live either as numerical minorities, or minorities with regard to wealth and power, throughout the Region of the Americas and the Slavery Diaspora. We are the powerless and wealth-less minority, especially in the Islands, South, Central and North America and in the Slavery Diaspora. We are therefore new minorities, and we ask the UN to officially recognize us.
The children of the slave masters are reaping immense benefits from slavery, sanctioned by their Governments. By placing Afrodescendants on the UN agenda as recognized minorities, the UN and its Member States will give justice to us, and justify us as being human beings, equal to the slave master's children.
The ex-slaves are rising from a state of civil death. Other people of African descent, whose ancestors were not subject to slavery, still have their original identity, mother tongue and culture. It is axiomatic. We do not. The Working Group on People of African Descent has, in its first two sessions, failed to recognize this fact: that we have experienced civil death, and that we are now experiencing ethnogenesis.
I recommend that the Working Group on Minorities organize a second Regional Seminar for Afrodescendant Minorities in the Americas Region, similar to the very beneficial seminar, that was attended by our leaders from 19 countries, in La Ceiba, Honduras. Afrodescendant leaders wish to continue the work begun at that Seminar.
In closing, we, Afrodescendants, believe that United Nations protection of our collective human rights will place us on a path of recompense. We would like to thank the Working Group on Minorities for consistently demonstrating its concern for Afrodescendant Minorities.
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