🔘 continued 🔘
4. Mr President, Members of the Court, I stand before you as a representative of a country where Germany brutally carried out the first genocide of the twentieth century against the Herero and the Nama peoples. A country that has known only too well the pain and suffering of occupation, colonialism, systematic discrimination, apartheid, and their entrenched consequences. It is because of this history that Namibia considers it a moral duty and sacred responsibility to appear before this Court on the question of the indefensible occupation of Palestine by Israel.
5. The parallels between Namibia and Palestine are striking and painful. Both were integral parts of the mandate system established after World War I. And in both cases, the so-called “sacred trust of civilisation”, which aimed to guide these nations towards self-determination and independence, was utterly betrayed. Instead of achieving self-government, both Namibians and Palestinians suffered the loss of human dignity, life, liberty and the outright theft of their land and natural resources. Hundreds of thousands of their people were violently expelled from their homes or forced into exile, joining the ranks of the world’s refugees.