South Africa very much used townships and bantustans as a means of pushing both black South Africans and Namibians off land they wanted for whites. Yes, it is explicitly a racist ideology, but part of that racism is used to justify a treatment of others that enables confiscation and colonization.
The Bantu peoples also pushed the original inhabitants of Southern Africa off of their land (San, Khoi). If we’re going to apply the term apartheid to non-South African contexts[1] then we should also be intellectually rigorous in applying it in the case where the San and Khoi were victims of the Bantu expansion (and later European and Asian).
The crime of apartheid under international law only looks at existing regimes and whether they apply oppression along racial lines. It does not include provisions on historic oppression done by the ancestors of the currently oppressed. That would be ridiculous.
So saying: “But they did it to a different people, dozens of generations ago” is not admissible as a justification for the crime of apartheid for the ICC. In fact the crime of apartheid has no clauses for any justification, at all, under international law.
People are using “apartheid” without the technical, legal meaning and that is what I have a problem with.
Here is a list of countries that have been accused of apartheid:
- China
- India
- Iran
- Israel
- Malaysia
- Myanmar
- North Korea
- Nigeria
- Qatar
- Saudi Arabia
- Soviet Union
- Sudan
- United States
I would be interested to know whether any country, other than South Africa, has been found guilty of the crime of apartheid by the ICC and what the repercussions for said regime had been.
No, because it's not used about just pushing people off your land. Either you're being disingenuous, or you're unaware of the characteristics of the apartheid Bantustans.
