Dar es Salaam – Tanzanian legislators on Thursday urged the government to put pressure on Germany to compensate for atrocities committed during its colonial rule over a century ago.
“If other countries were compensated for war atrocities, why not us?” asked legislator Cosato Chumi, who is a member of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee.
The government announced Wednesday that it would seek an apology and a settlement for what it says were the deaths of tens of thousands of people during the so-called Maji Maji revolt against colonial rule from 1905 to 1907.
In the south-eastern area of Mahenge “was badly affected during the Maji Maji war, German forces besieged the area and torched down all food reserves and as a result, more than 30,000 people starved to death … this amounts to an act of genocide,” another legislator, Zitto Kabwe, told dpa.
Tanzania wants to follow the example of Namibia, where descendants of the Herero and Nama people are seeking damages for what they say was the genocide of more than 100,000 people under German colonial rule in the early 1900s.
“As a nation, we are supposed to find a best mechanism to be compensated,” Chumi told dpa.
Germany ruled Tanzania, then known as Tanganyika, from the late 1880s to 1919.