&RORQLDO*HQRFLGHDQG5HSDUDWLRQV&ODLPVLQWKHVW &HQWXU\7KH6RFLR/HJDO&RQWH[WRI&ODLPVXQGHU,QWHUQDWLRQDO /DZE\WKH+HUHURDJDLQVW*HUPDQ\IRU*HQRFLGHLQ 1DPLELD UHYLHZ *DU\0DUTXDUGW Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 24, Number 3, Winter 2010, pp. 491-493 (Review) 3XEOLVKHGE\2[IRUG8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hgs/summary/v024/24.3.marquardt.html Access provided by Westminster College (9 Mar 2016 12:15 GMT) hegemonic powers. Trujillo obtained valuable US support through collaboration, negotiation, and manipulation. Wells also shows that the colonists’ previous lives influenced their relationship to Dominican society. Although the author stresses the difficulty of recovering the voices of Dominican workers, one wishes that he had found some to interview, for that would have permitted not only an assessment of the attitudes of the locals to the refugees, but also a more accurate assessment of the attitudes of the latter. An open question remains whether the attitudes of the Sosúa settlers toward local society were atypical: comparing them with other Jewish immigrant communities in Latin America would have been illustrative. G. Antonio Espinoza Virginia Commonwealth University doi:10.1093/hgs/dcq051 Colonial Genocide and Reparations Claims in the 21st Century: The SocioLegal Context of Claims under International Law by the Herero against Germany for Genocide in Namibia, 1904 –1908, Jeremy Sarkin (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2009), ix þ 308 pp., cloth $75.00, Kindle eBook $54.00. Since its hundred-year commemoration in 2004, many publications about the war of 1904 to 1908 and the resultant genocide of the Herero population have appeared.1 To academics in the social sciences and humanities the importance of this event is clear, for it shaped future colonial policies and illustrates pacification practices involved in the scramble for control over Africa. However, this historical chapter is not over: since Namibian independence in 1990, a major push by several of the country’s ethnic groups has been under way to hold Germany legally accountable for crimes of the early twentieth century. Until now, no major publication focusing on Namibia has been able to clarify the murky legal terrain associated with the issue of reparations for a pre – World War II genocide. Sarkin’s unprecedented analysis connects the event to today’s processes of legal and economic redress. In addition to Sarkin’s past work with the United Nations Human Rights Council and as an acting judge in the Cape High Court in South Africa, he currently serves as a senior professor of law at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and also as a legal advisor to Herero Paramount Chief Kuaima Rirauko. His lengthy survey of legal history and interpretation is focused, if at times confusing. Its five chapters cover a number of legal and historical matters: a historiography of the genocide, legal precedents established by German treaties, nineteenth- and twentieth-century human rights and humanitarian law, and the “past, present and future” of reparations for colonial-era crimes. Book Reviews 491 The most valuable part of the book for those wishing to understand the legal issues, Chapter 2, concentrates on the definitions and interpretations of gross human rights violations and humanitarian law, Sarkin’s strength. This chapter challenges doubts about the legal precedents for claims deriving from genocide or gross human rights violations in the pre– World War II era. The author employs the “Martens Clause” to effectively thread this chapter together. Adopted by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the Martens clause addressed “the status of civilians who took up arms against [an] occupying force” ( p. 66). However, in cases such as the “genocidal phase” of the 1904 war, Sarkin argues, this clause can incorporate more than human rights protections: it offers a solid legal precedent for collective claims under international law. What makes the Martens Clause particularly relevant is that all of the European colonial powers, including Germany, supported it. Therefore it offers a legal tool against the German state. Sarkin cements the argument that Germany knowingly contravened international human rights protections with a detailed discussion of the country’s 1870 Lieber Code, which promised protection for civilians affected by international and civil wars. An equally beneficial, albeit vastly different, chapter discusses the historical trajectory of apologies and reparations for human rights abuses. Sarkin discusses Germany’s attempts at contrition for its actions in 1904, the difficulties of individual and group claims in this case, and how the case fits into the context of comparable international atrocity and abuse cases. Here we get much more than an editorial: an informed and lively account of the need for, and difficulties associated with, sincere apologies and workable reparations agreements. In the Namibia instance, the implicit problem is the passage of time. Reparations paid after World War II to victims of German crimes, most notably to Holocaust survivors and/or Israel, contrast sharply to other cases in the century after the genocide in German Southwest Africa. The German government has changed immensely since the early twentieth century and so too has the structure and ownership of firms that worked closely with the German state in 1904. In the present century German leaders have offered to Herero communities apologies and reparations so feeble that they have generally been refused.2 Such experiences have prompted Herero to pursue weightier packages targeting both the government and multinational companies. Herero have lost many court cases, while the German government has ignored others that were in fact favorable to the Herero. Sarkin chalks this up to a current international political environment favorable to former colonial powers. Still, the author predicts that Africans will eventually prevail in their quest, and that the first successes will spawn further successful claims against former colonial entities. Though needful and illuminating, Sarkin’s study is not entirely without deficiencies. One of the most lamentable is its failure to address certain major 492 Holocaust and Genocide Studies influences on and parallels to the genocide. Chapter 2, for instance, leaves out anything on “racial science” and its role in the concentration camps in Southwest Africa. The Germans there routinely sent the heads of Africans who died in concentration camps to museums and schools at home in the name of “science”; certainly legal implications can be drawn from such actions. German atrocities during the 1905 Maji Maji Rebellion in modern-day Tanzania are rarely discussed ( p. 156); a more sustained comparison of with this event would have enhanced our understanding of the issues. A few errors in the supplemental materials also detract: the most glaring appears in the caption to a photograph of the execution of Chief Nikodemus in 1896 that reads “Executions committed during the period of 1904 – 1905” ( p. 72). Overall, however, Sarkin provides scholars and legal experts an invaluable resource. For teachers, his book provides a detailed but accessible classroom-friendly discussion of the legal repercussions of genocide. For lawyers and legal historians, it may well prove a foundational work on the interpretation of the 1904 genocide. In both cases, Sarkin has filled a gaping hole in the literature and provided a starting point for legal discussions of human rights abuses in colonial Africa. Notes 1. Among them are Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, eds., Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 and Its Aftermath (Monmouth, Wales: Merlin Press 2008); Jeremy Silvester and Jan-Bart Gewald, eds., Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia. An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book (Boston: Brill, 2003); Casper W. Erichsen, “What the Elders Used to Say”: Namibian Perspectives on the Last Decade of German Colonial Rule (Windhoek: Namibian Institute for Democracy and the Namibian-German Foundation, 2008). 2. Sarkin, 139 –40. Germany has paid out approximately $100 billion to the Nazi-era victims, and continues to distribute $1 billion annually. In contrast Germany’s latest offer to Namibia amounts to ten annual payments of a mere $25 million each. Gary Marquardt Westminster College (Salt Lake City) doi:10.1093/hgs/dcq057 Africa’s World War: Congo, The Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe, Gérard Prunier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), viii þ 529 pp., cloth $29.95, pbk. $19.95, Kindle eBook $9.99. Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, Timothy Longman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), xi þ 350 pp., cloth $99.00, eBook $72.00. Gérard Prunier’s considerable contributions to the study of Africa’s Great Lakes region have elicited some controversy. His landmark study of the 1994 genocide in Book Reviews 493