- BAR: Brussels Conference Act of 1890 Archived Message
Posted by sashimi
on December 1, 2022, 12:54 pm
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Editors, 30 November 2022 (quote) The 1890 Brussels Act provided Europeans with the legal and humanitarian justification for the colonization of Africa. Why have so few heard of it? The deceptive notion of "humanitarian intervention" as cover for Western imperial theft and hubris has a long history. In fact, if there's anything that European nations and its white dominions ("the West") are good for is looting the resources of the world and telling us that it's for our own good. "Humanitarianism," in the language of bringing Christianity to "savage" Africans, was the reason given by Belgium's Leopold II, the unabashed "Monster of the Congo," for the theft of Congo's resources and the genocide of its peoples. Leopold's hold on the Congo was solidified via the 1885 Berlin Conference, where European nations (along with the US) met to partition and continue their conquest of the African continent, through the principle of "effective occupation." The Berlin Conference was effectively an agreement among thieves, and "effective occupation" gave European powers the right to claim areas of the African continent. But there is no honor among white thieves. In 1890, European powers got together again - this time in Brussels - to settle their ongoing disputes over the African continent, and importantly, to find ways to control the trades in firearms and liquor, which they believed threatened their hold on parts of the continent. Africans with access to firearms could potentially challenge the European goal of "effective occupation," while African access to liquor, Europeans believed, diminished their productivity as colonial laborers. At the same time, Europeans needed to consolidate their control over African land, people, and resources -and diminish the potential for more inter-European disputes. While the Berlin conference had nominal humanitarian claims - the 1885 Berlin Act had a nonbiding aim of ending the slave trade in Africa - the Brussels Conference Act loudly proclaimed itself as a primarily humanitarian venture. Many have heard of the 1885 Berlin Act, the decree partitioning the African continent for European colonial rule. How many know of the 1890 Brussels Conference Act? And how many are aware of its role in providing the Berlin Act its "legal" and "humanitarian" justifications? Officially named the "Convention to the Slave Trade and Importation into Africa of Firearms, Ammunition, and Spiritous Liquors," the Brussels Conference Act both laid out in detail the process of formal colonization of the African continent, and gave colonization its moral argument by framing it through a discourse of humanitarianism. We are supposed to believe that European nations who had begun, continued, and massively benefited from the transatlantic commercial trade in Africans as well as the industrialization brought about by the institution of slavery, were suddenly concerned about African welfare. In the Brussels Act, the colonial powers explained away the establishment of the colonial administration apparatus, protecting its missionaries, while providing its corporations and trading companies with African labor - in effect, establishing theft of African land and the exploitation of African labor as an antislavery measure. A quick review of the first article of the Act tells a different story. The article calls for, among other things, the "construction of roads, and in particular railways," "organization of administrative, judicial, religious and military services in the African territories placed under the... protectorate of civilized nations," and "the establishment of telegraphic lines." We are asked to accept that only European colonial rule would end the slave trade and slavery on the African continent. We reprint the first fifteen articles of the one-hundred-article Brussels Conference Act of 1890 below in part to show how systematic the European colonization of the African continent was, and how European laws of conquest were rebranded as "international law." Most importantly, the text of the Act also demonstrates how devilish, self-serving, and hypocritical European powers have been in covering their crimes under the veneer of humanitarianism. Readers today should be able to see that the thieves have not changed their tactics. (/quote) -- Cont'd at https://blackagendareport.com/excerpt-brussels-conference-act-1890 |
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