The Rise of Group Rights
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
The Rise of Group Rights The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices By Elazar Barkan Norton. 464 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News...
...The reason is twofold...
...Justice is a human right and there seems to be growing demand to recognize this...
...most recently 10 billion marks were allotted for the mainly Eastern European slave laborers impressed by the Nazi regime and used by German manufacturers during the War...
...German Holocaust reparation proceeded against the background of greater national and international concern for human rights...
...He explains how governments and societies, including our own, have broached the issue of restitution or reparation for historical injustices...
...Compensation for injustice is a corollary of justice itself...
...But unevenly...
...From the founding of the Bonn republic its first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, made it clear that Germany accepted responsibility and was bound to make restitution...
...Those of mixed race...
...And, since empty land cannot, by definition, be populated, the Aborigines who were there were not acknowledged...
...A small group of activists demanded $6 trillion in damages...
...It covers the residue of World War II: German reparations for the Holocaust, the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Army's "comfort women," the tangled history of looted art, the story of Swiss banks and Nazi gold...
...Various restitution proposals have been floated, including the monetary equivalent of the 40 acres and a mule that General William Sherman had ordered to be given to liberated slaves...
...One of the most profound of these evolutions has occurred in human rights—and far from being an urge of the 20th century, it is traceable to the earliest societies...
...Because restitution as the end of injustice cannot successfully be imposed but has to be negotiated, the claim must be realistic if the community is to take it seriously...
...Descendants of slaves...
...Barkan suggests a broader anti-Semitic opposition than I saw while working in Germany in the 1950s...
...This year President Johannes Rau addressed Israel's Knesset in German...
...The Jewish community in Germany is growing...
...They were not given citizenship until the 1960s—a situation conjuring up the problem now facing Israel, a state that also once claimed to be settling "people without land in a land without people...
...All blacks...
...Who shall be compensated...
...Some changes have come dramatically, much like volcanic islands popping out of the sea...
...This represents the culmination of a consensus that society has to progress from assuring individual rights to establishing the rights of victimized groups...
...There was grumbling in some quarters, largely at the size of the obligation to be shouldered by the newly emerging German economy...
...Not so the older, larger, more tragic Native American dilemma...
...Barkan gives the example of the High Court of Australia rejecting the concept of terra nullius in 1992...
...The Guilt of Nations is not light reading, but it rewards attention with a rich counterpoint of ideas and facts...
...Today theepiode has been absorbed as a footnote in the American experience...
...The compensation process continues...
...What remains is, for the most part, an underclass on ghetto-like reservations and the bones of an estimated 600,000 American Indians in museum showcases and warehouses...
...One distinctly dubious statement is that Germany supported anti-Israeli politics, particularly before 1967· On the whole, though, Barkan is fair and determined to touch all the bases...
...land that Senator Bill Bradley in 1987 valued at $2.6 billion in a restitution bill Congress failed to pass...
...Germany's foreign policy favored the Arab world over Israel," he writes...
...Pointing in unfamiliar or unwelcome directions, often violated and more frequently ignored, each nevertheless has gradually built up a new code of conduct and had sweeping practical results...
...It was a classic case...
...Expulsion from their lands, massacre, and poverty have marked practically the whole settler-Indian relationship, not to mention a thick layer of hypocrisy, broken promises and violated treaties...
...The issue of guilt, the identity of victims and perpetrators was never in doubt...
...it must be followed, though, by educational, economic and social equality...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent Over the past 20 years the world has seen all kinds of upheavals...
...Biological experiments and the hundreds of thousands of "comfort women,' sex slaves for Japanese soldiers in occupied territories, are dismissed as American propaganda...
...It was both a moral imperative and a pragmatic political necessity...
...Starting with Hammurabi's Code in ancient Babylonia the milestones—different and often imperfect—have been set by democratic Athens, by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, by our own Declaration of Independence, as well as by the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
...What about class...
...By 1994, according to official figures, it had provided some 95 billion marks and contributed substantially to Israel's consolidation...
...Others have been reminiscent of tectonic plates in the pace of their movement, their long visibility, thefrpredictable course, and their suddenly apparent cumulative effect...
...That notion of "empty land" justified its seizure...
...That story is among the worst examples of colonial oppression...
...The National Congress of American Indians condemns "the unspeakable indignity of having precious Lakota ceremonies and spiritual practices desecrated, mocked and abused by non-Indian wannabes, hucksters, cultists, commercial profiteers and self-styled 'New Age Shamans' and their followers...
...At the same time Germany supplied Israel with arms and maintained a secret military alliance, and it did not suspend restitution payments even after the Sinai War, when the Americans demanded it do so...
...It deals with the aftermath of colonialism, too, including the treatment of Native Americans, New Zealand Maoris, and slavery...
...Barkan has thought deeply about how restitution may serve as closure to conflict, and about the difficulties that stand in the way...
...Germany, seeking its way back from total disgrace, could not be seen to be equivocating...
...The 1975 Helsinki Agreement's "third basket" reflected and fed this rising tide...
...No major claim has resulted in the return oflandtolndians...
...In the United States the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 provided for compensation to Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor...
...In the 1980s,Barkanfinds, the movement took on critical mass...
...For the United States the largest minority problem is AfricanAmericans...
...That such a preference had something to do with the Nazi era is, at the very least, probable...
...The legislation ineluded an apology and declaration of principle that historical injustices should be amended...
...In Brazil, the largest slave society in the New World, the descendants of the victims have been politically inert...
...Helsinki Watch organizations proliferated and the movement helped to undermine the Soviet empire...
...Gradually, as public sentiment has been aroused, steps are being taken to give the culture and religion of these people the respect they merit...
...The group seeking redress must organize to pursue its claim, and the community it addresses must move beyond acknowledging individual rights to accepting those of the group...
...Continuous moderate pressure on Congress by the victims enlistedbipartisanandpublic help...
...The matter of restitution for it and the world's other victimized groups is raised by questions Barkan poses: Is there a statute of limitations on national injustices...
...Payments were made and increased...
...All whites...
...Politically, that is no longer a problem...
...But reparation has got little support from the American public and not much more from the African-American community...
...Long cast in the role of victim for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan has not officially acknowledged any guilt for the invasion and occupation of Formosa or Korea, or its war in China, let alone the conquest of Southeast Asia in World War II...
...Descendants of slave owners...
...The government...
...A few gambling casinos bringing some survivors wealth beyond their wildest dreams only punctuate the misery of the majority...
...An especially striking development is examined by Elazar Barkan, chairman of the Cultural Studies Department at Claremont Graduate University, in The Guilt of Nations...
...The process stopped right there...
...One could argue, in the case of African Americans, that the answer is assimilation...
...In Western countries great progress has been made in a short time...
...Says Barkan, "slavery is the most glaring example of an unaddressed historical injustice...
...Society in general...
...That was a sordid affair, a panic shot through with lust for the victims' property...
...The wartime looting of art objects demands correction...
...although, in a way, both are still being stolen...
...Even so mild a remedy as affirmative action, however, has run into resistance...
...None of these issues is new, but until recently most of them have remained essentially in the limbo of regret...
...To date the biggest act of reparation has been Germany's payment to individual Jews who survived its heinous World War II anti-Semitic practices, and to Israel for the death and devastation of the Holocaust...
...Yet this has barely begun to make itself felt in Japan...
...In this case that leads to contradiction...
...In addition, Germany has been making its peace with its neighbors— strikingly with Poland and the Czech Republic...
...What gives Holocaust restitution symbolic power is its manifest success in moving the parties toward reconciliation which is, after all, the purpose of reparation...
...Who should pay if at all, how much and in what form...
...Swiss banks have been forced to open their books to Holocaust survivors largely under the pressure of what Barkan calls "public shame...
...The Sioux, for their part, wanted the land not the money...
...Another American predicament on a larger scale is the aftermath of slavery...
...For the U. S. government, the largest-ever financial award of over $ 100 million closed the case of the Black Hills, stolen from the Sioux...
Vol. 83 • May 2000 • No. 2
