Germany will pay Namibia $1.3bn as it formally recognizes colonial-era genocide

Germany will support Namibia and the descendants of the victims with €1.1 billion for reconstruction and development and ask for forgiveness for the “crimes of German colonial rule,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement on Friday.

“Our goal was and is to find a common path to genuine reconciliation in memory of the victims. This includes naming the events of the German colonial period in what is now Namibia, and in particular the atrocities in the period from 1904 to 1908, without sparing or glossing over them. We will now also officially call these events what they were…