Posted on 10/01/2011 9:20:40 AM PDT by Iron Munro
The United Nations Friday announced an international competition to design a memorial honoring the victims of slavery. It’s estimated that over 500 years, more than 18 million people were abducted from Africa and forced into slavery in the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe.
The sculpture will be located at U.N. headquarters in New York. Its official name is The Permanent Memorial at the United Nations in Honor of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
“The issue of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade stands out still today as a crime against humanity - one of the first manifestations of man’s inhumanity to man,” said Ambassador Raymond Wolfe of Jamaica, chair of the memorial committee.
The memorial, he said, is not an attempt to dwell on the past.
“It is to bring the international community to acknowledge, to take note of what has been one of the worst chapters in human history is finally being acknowledged and honored here at the United Nations and what better place,” he said.
The memorial is expected to cost around $4.5 million dollars. An urgent appeal is being made to both the public and private sector to raise the needed funds.
Wolfe said, “Now we also understand that we are still experiencing a very severe global economic recession and ability of member states to contribute from government coffers is limited. But there are a number of countries which really have gotten us to where we are in terms of very significant contributions.”
UNESCO, the U.N. educational, scientific and cultural organization, is playing a major role in the creation of the memorial – including an education campaign. Philippe Kridelka, UNESCO’s U.N. representative, says,”In order to build peace in the minds of men and women, it’s important not to forget the tragedies of history,” such as the Holocaust and other events.
“That is why,” he said, “UNESCO has put the cell where Nelson Mandela was detained on Robben Island on the list of World Heritage of Sites mankind. That is now why with partner countries working on school programs on apartheid so that apartheid is never forgotten. That is why we’ve been working Ethiopia, Italy and the African Union so that the Obelisk of Axum in Ethiopia, which had been stolen during the colonial period, has been brought back to Ethiopia.
Efforts now begin to let designers around the world know that the Permanent Memorial Committee on Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade is now accepting their ideas.
The current timetable calls for the memorial to be completed by the end of 2013. It is not yet clear where on the U.N. grounds it will be located. The memorial will be erected under the theme: “Acknowledging the Tragedy; Considering the Legacy; Lest We Forget.”
Information about the design competition will be posted at www.unslaverymemorial.org
*** The Europeans were not allowed to go inland and capture their own slaves; they were stopped at the coast by the black tribes along the coast who were in the business of capturing and selling slaves.***
I have an old book, THE DEFEAT OF JOHN HAWKINS in which he went on a slaving mission.
In Africa something terrible was happening in the interior driving blacks out to the coast. The coastal tribes would kill all they found.
John Hawkins made a deal to bombard the fort of some of these interlopers if the tribes would then sell the captives to him.
It worked. A massive slaughter of interior blacks took place, so bad that Hawkins had to intervene to save enough blacks for slavery in the New World.
They loaded the ships, and headed West to South America. those captives Hawkins could not rescue for slaves, were killed AND EATEN by the coastal blacks.
Hawkins sold his cargo from South America to Mexico when the Spanish betrayed him and captured his ships. The captured slaves on the ships were then sold by the Spanish.
A figure dwarfed by the tens of millions taken in the trans-Sahara and Indian Ocean slave trade. But I guess they don't deserve their own monument.
When Americans finally boot the U.N. out of our country, we need to make sure that they take this goofy “memorial” with them.
Good point.
It might also be a good place for demonstrations by working taxpayers to protest Obama turning us into wage slaves for Holders People and other democrat voting moochers.
The problem is that this particular monument is dishonest. It implies that slavery was something that Europeans and Americans did to Africans, period, when in fact the Arab slave trade dwarfed the transatlantic slave trade.
Sounds more like a monument to socialism.
That's the Alex Haley school of history.
When I was in the Ivory Coast 20 years ago, My interpreter would tell me as we traveled through some villages that “those people used to be my ancestors slaves.”
This speaks to the nature of man not any particular race.
Why don’t you, the UN, start doing something about current slavery?
Or is that just too much trouble?
What, no memorial to the non-Hispanic white peasants in much of Europe during the same time? Sheesh, my race has been reduced to a negative definition of others, AKA “Net Taxpayers”.
Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers and subjected to one outrage after another—not the least of which is having master’s wife accuse him of rape because he wouldn’t have sex with her!—and yet came out of it smiling and full of grace even towards his evil brothers. Why? How?
Because he knew GOD!
Slavery, with God, is better than freedom without. Something the UN and all other plaint merchants know nothing of.
Why is there going to be a memorial when slavery is till legal in many countries?
There were MILLIONS of victims in that traffic.
But if you really want to slap around Europeans take note of the several tens of thousands of Sa'ami from the Sapma who were kidnapped by the Swedish Empire and sent to America to cut trees.
Then, if you can work that one around in your head, consider Thailand ~ they were busy from the 1300s working away in Indonesia making slaves of everybody they could catch. Those people were put to work harvesting spices.
Did I miss somebody in that 500 year period? Oh, yeah, the Iroquois spent a lot of time in the Ohio Valley attempting to reduce all the indigenous peoples there to being nothing but tributaries to the Iroquois nations! That didn't end until the mid 1600s when a very nasty plague hit them.
Regarding the African kings who sold their citizens ~ they sold an awful of them!
I’ve got an idea. We could make a sculpture of FDR and LBJ roasting Americans on a spit. That is slavery you can believe in.
Ironic that many UN-member nations still practice slavery.
Slavery has been going on since the beginning of time. They will have their politically correct version of it though.
No mention of fellow Africans involved in the slave trade. Facts are stubborn things. We are in the days of the Twilight Zone. There is no escape in this world. Death is the great equalizer.
The United States sure paid with blood. They don’t want to discuss that of course.
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