“Self Determination is our right, Separation with all our might, Reparations is our fight.”
“The prayers of African Americans for justice and reparations have been rejected by the U.S. Government and, seemingly, the United Nations. Because the struggle seems hopeless, the African American population has reached a state of extreme anxiety. We observe that some leaders are considering changing their tactics because of the failure of peaceful and legal means of solving the problem. We believe that African Americans may decide to use extreme measures and thereby gain the attention of the world community. We fear that the U.S. Government may respond with imprisonment of African American leaders.”
— The Honorable Silis Muhammad, written statement to the United Nations, 1997
Mr. Muhammad’s abbreviated list of United Nations (UN) interventions delivered in advancement of Afrodescendant human rights and reparations for plantation slavery is listed below:
1994 Petition for Reparations to the UN under 1503 Procedure - Mr. Muhammad delivered a 1503 communication to the UN WOrking Group on Communications on behalf of African Americans. Although it was received, it was not heard nor was it responded to by the UN.
1997 Written Statement to the UN - Mr. Muhammad recommended a forum so that African-American human rights grievances, that formed the basis of a petition submitted, can be expressed systematically, as well as officially recorded, evaluated and remedied. [Siphwe Note: Here then is the vision that first called for the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD)].
1998 Written and Oral Statments - Mr. Muhammad urged the Commission on Human Rights to assist African Americans in their efforts to recover from official U.S. policies of enslavement, apartheid, and forced assimilation. Mr. Muhammad prayed that the human rights of African Americans be recaptured politically and amicably, rights to self-determination rectified, and the damages sustained be awarded in great measure in order to accomplish the cathartic cleansing mentally, emotionally, and physically of 400 years of long-suffering. Mr. Muhammad prayed that the U.S. Government not be given tacit approval of the UN to subvert the opening of a forum wherein African-AMerican grievances can be expressed systematically and officially recorded, evaluated and remedied.
1999 Written and Oral Statements - Mr. Muhammad requested recognition of the African American choice of human rights and inalienable rights. He requested the crime of plantation slavery, and its lingering effects, be rectified - which was, and is still, a crime against African Americans and against humanity. Mr. Muhammad asked the U.N. to establish a forum for the purpose of restoring African American human rights, their political being, and their status as a people. Mr. Muhammad urged recommendation that the Sub-Commission pass a resolution recognizing slavery and the slave trade as a crime against humanity. He urged the writing of a working paper as a way to begin analyzing African American’s situation. Mr. Muhammad urged African American inclusion in the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, or a new declaration be written for African Americans. Mr. Muhammad asked the International Labor Organization to look into America’s privately owned prisons.
2000 Written and Oral Statements - Mr. Muhammad asked that the U.S. pay reparations to the so-called African Americans, since the U.S. cannot restore the “mother tongue” of African Americans if ever it wanted to. Mr. Muhammad recommended the U.S. be held liable, at the least, for the last 51 years, plus the additional years which are needed to resolve this issue. He asked that the UN place a reparation sanction upon America if the identity and language of minorities and Peoples are to be preserved. Mr. Muhammad asked that a precise dollar amount be given at a future date, if warranted, and that he stated that he would ask for the release of a number of African-American human rights victims who have been unjustly incarcerated in federal and state penitentiaries. Finally, Mr. Muhammad asked the UN to impose a sanction on the U.S. in the form of exemption from all taxation upon our people for as longa s this issue is in the hands of the UN.
World Conference Against Racism Written and Oral Statements - Mr. Muhammad recommended that the World Conference Against Racism declare a decade to consider the issues of slave descendants, including whether “LOST FOND Peoples” is the term that best identifies slave descendants.
Regional Seminars for Afrodescendants Oral Statements - Mr. Muhammad put forth the name Lost Found Peoples as a name in order to gain human rights protection for slave descendants, but the name Afrodescendants was agreed upon by unanimous consent.
2001 Written and Oral Statements - Mr. Muhammad urged UN intervention to protect and assist African-American leaders within a forum as they seek to determine the damage they have sustained and the means of reparation needed in order to bring them back to life as a People. Mr. Muhammad prayed for the Commission on Human Rights to hear the African American demand for the right to choose to reconstitute, and reconstruct lost ties, since no international instruments, arbitrations, mechanisms or laws requiring the recognition of minorities that can restrain ethnic conflict during 2001. Attorney Harriet AbuBakr, Mr. Muhammad’s wife, asked the Working Group on Minorities to cause minority protection to develop in accord with the African American needs for resurrection.
2002 Written and Oral Statements - On behalf of African Americans, Mr. Muhammad asked the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights to acknowledge the decision that African Americans be recognized as Afrodescendant Minorities. Mr. Muhammad also recommended that the Commission on Human Rights pass a resolution requesting that the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights place African Americans on its agenda, alongside Indigenous Peoples and Minorities. Mr. Muhammad also put forth a prayer for official recognition of a self-chosen collective identity and reparations for African Americans.
2003 Written and Oral Statments - Mr. Muhammd requested official recognition of new minorities, urged the establishment of an International Year for Minorities, requested support for the efforts of the Working Group on Minorities, and recommended that the Working Group on Minorities organize a second Regional Seminar for Afrodescendant Minorities. Attorney AbuBakr asked the Working Group on Minorities to validate Afrodescendants self-chosen identity in its documents, and use any other means available to place the fact of the existence of Afrodescendants before the UN and the world.
2004 Written and Oral Statements - Mr. Muhammad called upon the UN to grant Afrodescendants protected collective human rights. Mr. Muhammad also asked the Sub-Commission to make a commitment to minorities that their interventions will be heard. Mr. Muhammad requested the recognition, protection and assistance of the Commission on Human Rights, and the authorities of the UN.
2005 Written and Oral Statements - Mr. Muhammad recommended santions against all governments that have deprived Afrodescendants, for every day Afrodescendants have been so denied human rights. He also requested assistance to Afrodescendants in efforts to have a self-chosen identity recognized and protected by the entire UN and by the governments under which Afrodescendants live.
2006 Written and Oral Statements - Mr. Muhammad requested formal UN recognition of slave descendant’s self-chosen name, Afrodescendants, and requested restoration of slave descendants to the human families of the earth.
2008 Oral Statment - Mr. Muhammad requested that the UN Working Group on Minorities assist Afrodescendants to establish education for Afrodescendants in their original (mother) tongue.
2014 Open Letter to U.S. President Barack Obama - Mr. Muhammad sent a letter to U.S. President Obama, Congress, General Dempsey, and the Pope of Rome requesting reparations for Afrodescendants.
MY CONNECTION TO SILiS MUHAMMAD
Though I have yet to meet him, I feel a strong connection to the Honorable Silis Muhammad. And that’s because in 1997, I was tasked with studying and submitting a petition to the UN under its 1503 procedure by a former student of Malcolm X, Dr. Y.N. Kly. Although petitioning the United Nations was nothing new - W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey had petitioned the League of Nations, and William Patterson, Paul Robeson and Queen Mother Audley Moore had already petitioned the United Nations, the 1503 procedure was new. In my studies, I came across Silis Muhammad’s 1994 1503 Petition. As far as I know, my 1997 Petition of the Nkrumah-Washington Community Learning Center On Behalf of their Members, Associates and Afro-American Population Whose International Protected Human Rights Have Been Grossly and Systematically Violated By the Anglo-American Government of the United States of America and Its Varied Institutions was the second such petition submitted under the United Nations 1503 Procedure. And hence my collegial connection to the Honorable Silis Muhammad.
But the connection goes a bit deeper. The Honorable Silis Muhammad is a man, a leader, ahead of his time, fighting for our liberation in the international arena with very little acknowledgement or support. Even today his work is under-appreciated in the various movements and I was guilty of overlooking Mr. Muhammad’s contributions to the reparations movement when I compiled this history of the modern reparations movement.
When a national/international forum entitled “Revitalizing the Reparations Movement” was convened at Chicago State University on Saturday, April 19, 2014, incredibly the Honorable Silis Muhammad was not there!
The exclusion of Mr. Muhammad’s work and legacy is unfair. I feel this same way about my own work, begun in earnest in 2003.
Like Mr. Muhammad, in the mid to late 1990’s, my focus was on the United Nations as an arena for the reparations struggle. However, Let us recall that in 1996 the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations granted consultative status to the Rastafari Movement who were represented by Ras Bongo Spear and Ras Boanerges. In 1998, at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Ras Bongo Spear and Ras Boanerges asked: “What is the responsibility of the nations to Africans in the diaspora with respect to the age-old quest for Repatriation?” Said the Rasses, “Our advice from that committee and from the UN Office of Human Rights . . .. was simple:
“The United Nations as an organization of states cannot at this time in any serious way entertain the issue of repatriation without the consent of the African states and the African Governments to which we want to go in Africa. So we were directed to seek the support of African governments with respect to the acquisition of land. And after that, the matter can be brought up again to the United Nations and the issue of [settlement] can take place.”
As a young, devout Rastafari youth, I then switched my focus to repatriation and the Organization of African Unity (OAU). In 2003, I went to Ethiopia, and as a credentialed journalist for the Rastafari Speaks newspaper, attended the 1st Extra-Ordinary Summit of the Assembly of the African Union in Addis Ababa. It so happened that, like Malcolm X at the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1964, I was the only Afrodescendant at the African Union when the decision was made to invite and encourage the African Diaspora in the African Union through the Article 3q amendment that was adopted while I was there. As the de facto representative of the Afrodescendants at this pivoral moment in history, I felt a deep sence of responsibility and obligation. Ultimately, I becme the Director of the African Union 6th Region Education Campaign, working in this new arena of the African Union. At the time as well as now, much of my work went unreported and thus, un-recognized. It was my job to make the importance of the new AU 6th Region known and elevate the struggle to have Afrodescedants’ Right to Return to their ancestral homelands recognized.
So at the time that Silis Muhammad was championing the cause of Afrodescendants at the United Nations, I was championing the cause at the African Union.
It is no coincednce that at this next pivotal moment in our history, when Burkina Faso President Ibrahim Traore and the Alliance of Sahel States is leading the fight against neocolonialism and imperialism in Africa, that the Afrodescendant Nation led by the Honorable Silis Muhammad and myself are playing key leadership roles in the Friends of President Ibrahim Traoré In the West Delegation. Some things are just a matter of destiny.
Oral Statement to the Forum on Minority Issues, First Session,
Agenda Item VI: The Relationship Between Desegregation Strategies,
Cultural Autonomy and Integration in the Quest for Social Cohesion, December 2008
Greetings Madam Chair, Madam Gay McDougall, Experts, Country Representatives, Scholars and Minorities:
One of the purposes of this Forum is the identification of challenges and problems facing minorities and States. We, Afrodescendants, want for ourselves and for our children an education, especially now at our inception as an internationally recognized human family. We want an education in our original (mother) tongue. UN scholars state that language, not just any language, but one's "mother tongue" is intimately bound with identity. Thus, the right to such an education is an identity right.
Article 1, Section 1.1 of the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to Minorities indicates States shall protect and promote the identity of minorities. The United States of America, mainly, as well as other States, have breached this United Nations obligation. Since the abolition of slavery until now, Afrodescendants have been denied self-identity: education in our mother tongue. It is the very dignity we are without. The former slave-holding States have a duty to protect not only the existence but the national, ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic identity of Minorities.
Mr. M. Cherif Bassiouni stated, in his final report to the 56th session of the Commission on Human Rights, that economic compensation for victims of gross violations of human rights should be provided for any assessable damage resulting from violations of international human rights and humanitarian law: (b) lost opportunities, including education. Since we were forcibly deprived of our mother tongue due to slavery and its lingering effects, we want compensation from those States, especially the United States, responsible for denying us an education intimately bound with identity. Afrodescendants claim the right to compensation for violations of international law, articulated in the Declaration on the Rights of Minorities as well as Article 27 of the ICCPR, due to lost opportunities, including education.
In conclusion, we suggest that the regional forums for Afrodescendants, started under the auspices of the former Working Group on Minorities, be continued so that Afrodescendants can discuss practical, acceptable and adaptable solutions to the unique problems we face.
Thank you.
Mr. Silis Muhammad
OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA 2014
President Barack Obama/President of the United States,
U.S. Congress, General Martin E. Dempsey, Joint Chief of Staff and The Pope of Rome
Silis Muhammad
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
THE LOST-FOUND NATION OF ISLAM
TO: President Barack Obama, President of the United States
U.S. Congress
General Martin E. Dempsey, Joint Chief of Staff
Pope of Rome
FROM: Silis Muhammad
RE: THE BLUEPRINT: OUR PLAN FOR AMERICA AND ITS AFRODESCENDANTS
DATE: January 15, 2014
The peoples and Governments of the world are well aware of the duplicity of the United States Government as it calls for Human Rights and democracy while continuing, to this day, systematic discrimination against and disenfranchisement of its Afrodescendant population--the inheritors of the legacy of plantation slavery (the so-called African Americans). While we recognize that moral leadership is the tone that the United States Government wishes to convey to the world, it as failed to take the key moral action that would begin to repair the ongoing wrong that has existed since the very inception of this government. Does anyone recognize the significance of this key to peace?
I am Silis Muhammad, Chief Executive Officer of the Lost-found Nation of Islam. If we could summon the hatred our ancestors had for this Caucasian American Government and bring that condition to bear on the shoulders of this generation of Afrodescendants the resulting wrath would be like unto a blaze of fire, the size of which would engulf the United States. It would burn for 1,000 years! The evil done to the Black man by the American government far surpasses the evil done by any other Government, especially the Governments of France, Germany, Great Britain, and Canada.
We are determined to leave America, not less than 144,000 of us, Arfodescendants. We, the children of plantation slavery, were subsumed by the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments of the Constitution of the United States of America, which does not, in the least, express our will. We want no part of the prophesied imminent doom of America.
We want the United States, in cooperation with the International Monetary Fund, to arrange for forgiveness of all debts owed by St. Kitts and all other members of CARICOM, who would welcome, with full citizenship, appropriate numbers of educated and industrious Afrodescendants from the United States. We are asking for sea-going and air-going ships or vessels and freeway, highway, bridge, and road building materials and equipment. We are asking for equipment to cultivate land. We need materials and machinery with which to make clothing, shoes, and furniture and we need materials and equipment to for putting in infrastructure. We want housing, apartments, and multi-story building materials and equipment. In addition, we ask for the cost of a one-way ticket to whatever islands that would accept us as full citizens. Whether the Government of America will or will not give this, we, not less than 144,000 of us, are determined to leave America and live amongst our own kind.
The American Government gives billions of dollars to Israel each year. It has committed to giving Haiti $20-million per year for the next four years, for food. In addition, she gives to Haiti and other countries her surplus old clothing, foods, and machinery. Will she give to her ex-plantation slave children our request of her? Abraham Lincoln stated, "keep them here as our underlings."
We, today, observe daily that we are treated and kept as underlings here in America. The images of how we are looked upon by this Caucasian American Government are yet on our minds and in our lives today.
The killing of Travon Martin in 2013 is a prime example, of which the world is well aware. Yet, perhaps the greatest example of the systematic immorality of the United States Government is her claim to the largest prison population in the world--prisons filled with Black men and women due to discriminatory policing, prosecution, and laws. There is no justice here. We are subjected to an ongoing slavery system--slavery by another name. The world can see that you are not our brothers and neither are we yours.
The ex-slave masters of the CARICOM countries have departed and left the Governments in the hands of their ex-slaves. What has this American Government given to her plantation slave children besides a subservient position as her underlings?
Psychiatrists and those in other related sciences say if a husband hits or beats his wife, his wife is to leave him immediately. Has the American government not done far worse to us, Afrodescendants? We have been whipped until blood gushed from our backs, boiled while yet alive until dead, and hung from trees: to say nothing of the cruelest of inhumane treatments. The loss of our mother tongue, culture, and religion renders us a spiritually dead nation. . These are losses of Human Rights as defined by Article 27 of the ICCPR of the United Nations.
We, the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, have been in the International community since 1989. Our first written statement to the U.N. was in 1993. Our first oral statement to the U.N. was in 1998. Our last statement and appearance in the U.N. was in 2006. We spoke to the Commission on Human Rights, the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, and the Working Group on Minorities and had significantly gained their attention. But the American Government along with the British Government , the Governments of all slave-holding countries and other countries whom Britain and America provide support, shut down the Commission on Human Rights, the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, and the Working Group on Minorities--every U.N. group whose attention we had gained. In its place, they created the Human Rights Council.
We spent nine years in the U.N. only to learn that we did not exist as a Nation of people, with God-given human rights. As Americans, we were classified along with Caucasian Americans in the United States. We had achieved a unified name and identity that Black people from 19 countries agreed upon, in 2002--Afrodescendants. God-given Human Rights are: the right to speak your own mother tongue in community with others who speak your mother tongue; the right to practice your own culture in community with others who practice your culture; and the right to practice your own religion in community with others who practice your religion Our Human Rights were lost during plantation slavery. This American government made us a debased people. This is why this letter is presented to the President of the United States and the United States Government. We are determined to achieve ethnogenesis.
The following is a statement of American history. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote "The Truth Behind 40 Acres and a Mule," on pbs.org's '100 Amazing facts About The Negro'.
January 16, 1865, Union General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, upon approval of President Lincoln: "The islands from Charleston, South Carolina, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negros now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States (Abraham Lincoln).
400,000 acres of land--a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. Johns River in Florida, including Georgia's Sea Islands and the mainland thirty miles from the coast--would be redistributed to the newly freed slaves.
For the first time in the history of this nation, the representatives of the Government had gone to these poor debased people to ask them what they wanted for themselves.
Baptist minister Ulysses L. Houston, one of the group that had met with Sherman led 1,000 Blacks to Skidaway Island, Georgia where they established a self-governing community with Houston as the "Black governor." And by June, 40,000 freedmen had settled on 400,000 acres of "Sherman Land." By the way, Sherman later ordered that the army could lend the new settlers mules; hence the phrase "40 acres and a mule."
What happened to this astonishingly visionary program, which would have fundamentally altered the course of American race relations?
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. goes on to say:
Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor and a sympathizer with the South, overturned the Order in the fall of 1865, and, as Barton Myers sadly concluded, 'returned the land along the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida coasts to the planters who had originally owned it--to the very people who had declared war on the United States of America.'
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, along with 450,000 followers, from 1960 until the day of his death in 1975, repeatedly asked this Government to establish a state or territory of our own. The American Government turned a deaf ear. Is there not a moral-minded Caucasian in America's Government today? In 1865, we have in evidence at least two moral-minded statesmen: the United States President, Abe Lincoln, and General Sherman. They, at least, possessed enough moral insight to inquire of the new allegedly free Blacks what it is they wanted: "To live scattered amongst Whites or to live separate?" "Land" was the Black soon-to-be governors answer. Moreover, the Black soon-to-be governor stated, "there is a prejudice against us in the South. We would rather live in a separate territory." To date, the majority of Black people everywhere in the United States still experience this prejudice.
Is the Government of the United States incapable of the moral fortitude that it would take to grant to not less than 144,000 souls our humble request? Is there not one white man in the Government today, who has the wisdom, moral fortitude, and leadership ability of General Sherman and Abraham Lincoln? Ease the souls of my people, as well as make clean the souls of white people, by correcting your nation's wrongs. You claim that your nation has has changed, but our lawyers, doctors, teachers, and people feel your nation's prejudices even today.
To quote my daughter, Amira Arshad Muhammad, who is an attorney: "We are the peace that the world has been waiting for." You know what is right to do; just do it. Nature equips you from birth with the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. You know more about our history than the majority of us do, for it was your government that placed us in plantation slavery, debased us, and made us your underlings. Men and governments advance in age and in wisdom. Has your government advanced in wisdom, or does it lag behind?
______________________________________
Silis Muhammad
Servant of Allah
