January 14, 2012 marks the 51st commemoration of the barbaric assassination of Patrice Lumumba, anti-colonial leader and the legally elected prime minister of the Congo in 1960. Two other leaders, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, were also murdered on that day.
The murder of Patrice Lumumba and the destruction of his government by the U.S. and Belgian governments and the subsequent imposition of neocolonial regimes in the Congo were key moments when all African people witnessed the theft of our right to self-determination.
The Lumumba Day Organising Committee will be hosting an international conference to coordinate efforts to create the World Tribunal for Reparations to Africa and African people, which seeks to challenge and end imperialist impunity that is characterised by genocide, theft of our natural resources and human labour and the assassination of our genuine leaders.
We unite with the spirit of the UN-sponsored Durban conference in September 2001 in South Africa, which stated that “slavery and colonialism were crimes against humanity.”
We call on all African people and any other honest force seeking social justice for African people to unite with the African Socialist International's effort to build an international tribunal on reparations to Africa and to African people worldwide.
Africans will travel from around the world to converge in Germany, where the partition of Africa took place in 1884, leaving a terrible scar due to the imposition of illegitimate artificial borders that divide our people and our land for the sole benefit of European and North American capitalists and their African puppets.
In the words of Omali Yeshitela, the Chairman of the African Socialist International: “The tribunal will enable us to begin an actual quantification of the value of the human and material resources stolen from Africa and other places, Africans were colonized as well as the value of our expropriated labour within the highly industrialized imperialist centres, as well as for physical, psychological and cultural damage.”
This event is to elevate our daily consciousness for those who died for the love of African people and for our inalienable right to be free from imperialist foreign domination of any kind. These heroic comrades will be held as the highest type of human being that every African person should aspire to be.
This 51st anniversary of Patrice Lumumba’s death is a time for African people to decisively advance Lumumba’s uncompromising ideas of freedom and African unity.
The Conference will convene on Saturday, January 14 at 3 p.m. at the Studierendenhaus/Kommunikationszentrum, Mertonstr. 26-28, Frankfurt. For more information, contact asigermany@hotmail.com
