Edmund Dene Morel

Edmund D. Morel

Red Rubber 1906

Edmund Dene Morel , actually Georges Edmond Pierre Achille Morel de Ville (born July 10, 1873 in Paris , † November 12, 1924 on a farm near Bovey Tracey , Devon ), was a British journalist , author and politician .

Life

The first years

Edmund Dene Morel was born in Paris in 1873. His mother was English and his father was French, but he died early. Morel himself was fluent in both languages. In order to earn some money to support his mother, he began to freelance for various newspapers about trade with Africa. In his early twenties, he took a job with the British shipping company Elder Dempster , which had a monopoly on trade with the Congo Free State . The fact that Morel got the job was due to his biography (knowledge of Africa, good education, knowledge of French). In 1896 he married a British woman, lived in England, took on British citizenship and from then on only traded with the initials ED Morel .

Fight against the forced labor system in the Congo Free State

Elder Dempster had the monopoly on trade with the Congo Free State. This was the private property of the Belgian King Leopold II. Morel had access to files on the company's activities due to his working position. When he saw with his own eyes how ships going to the Congo were practically loaded with only weapons, he became suspicious and began to investigate. He discovered that slave labor and forced labor for the production of rubber was carried out in the Congo (so-called Congo horrors ; around ten million Africans died). In the following years, Morel became the greatest critic of the forced labor situation in the Congo: He founded the Congo Reform Association , was editor of the newspaper West African Mail , which he founded, wrote several books and gave countless lectures. One of his partners in the Congo Reform Association was the Irishman Roger Casement , who prepared an official report ( Casement Report ) on the situation in the Congo Free State for the United Kingdom. In the first modern human rights campaign, both succeeded in mobilizing an overwhelming majority of citizens in the United Kingdom and the United States (the success in the rest of Europe was certainly worth seeing, but still less) against the conditions in the Congo. In doing so, they also relied on a new invention: photography , which represented many examples of atrocities. For example, the photo Nsala of Wala in the Nsongo District (Abir Concession) published by Morel became known . The public pressure became so strong that Leopold II had to officially sell his beloved private property to the state of Belgium in March 1908 at an inflated price. In the period that followed, the situation improved for the Africans, whereupon Morel's action was solemnly declared over in 1913 and victory proclaimed.

Criticism of the "senseless war"

When England entered the First World War and Germany declared war in August 1914 , Morel resigned from the Liberal Party in protest and founded the pacifist Union of Democratic Control . Although not a pacifist himself , he disapproved of the declaration of war, because in his opinion the United Kingdom was bound by secret treaties to France (the one under attack by Germany), but was not attacked by the German Reich itself. The majority of the British had supported his engagement against the forced labor system in the Congo Free State; The British did not follow his condemnation of entering the war. In 1917 he was arrested under an old law that banned the publication of pacifist books in neutral countries and sentenced to six months of forced labor in a prison.

Role in the Black Shame campaign

After the occupation of the Rhineland by Allied troops (including French units from blacks and Turkos ), Morel published several articles and pamphlets in which, partly out of anti-French motivation, he used racist diction to describe this occupation by supposedly " primitive " troops from Africa as a cultural disgrace and "Prostitution" of the Rhineland. He attested that these people were driven by instincts - often accompanied by syphilis - which, in contrast to Europeans, was not regulated by law, and accused them of numerous sexual assaults. Rape by black Africans had, as he wrote, " well-known physiological reasons "! - often serious injuries or death. In the end, Morel joined the racist and pseudo-anthropological argumentation used not only in Germany by nationalist parties.

Morel as a parliamentarian

After the war his reputation was partially restored by the Labor Party and its victory in the elections. In 1919 he founded the monthly Foreign Affairs as the official organ of the Union of Democratic Control , which he took over. He was elected to the British House of Commons in 1922 (and even won that election over MP Winston Churchill , who had been jointly responsible for the indictment against him five years earlier). In Parliament he was able to convincingly use his great gift, his talent for speech, and thus became one of the most prominent and respected speakers of the Labor Party in matters of foreign policy. When, in early 1924, Ramsay MacDonald became the first Labor MP ever to be elected Prime Minister, many saw Morel as the future Secretary of State, but he was still widely discredited in British society for his war conduct. As compensation for the ministerial post that was not received, MacDonald proposed him as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize - again unsuccessfully. Years of hard work - first against the Congo Free State, then against the war, and in the end in prison - came at a price. Since his arrest, he has never been able to fully recover physically. Edmund Dene Morel died on November 12, 1924 at the age of only 51 while taking a walk.

Appreciation

It was Edmund Dene Morel who started the first major international human rights movement of the 20th century. His work against the Congo Free State, together with the Casement Report, was decisive in ensuring that Leopold II had to cede the Congo to Belgium in 1908, so that the situation for the Africans slowly began to improve. Morel, however, was by no means a critic of colonialism . He always defended British colonial possessions, since the British took care of the development of the colonies and therefore there was a marked difference between the British colonies and the Congo. The atrocities and mass murder in the Congo Free State faded into oblivion over time. For this reason, too, the achievement and work of Morel disappeared behind the veil of history. Only in the last few years, when the past of the Congo came back into the general canon of history, people remembered Morel, who to a large extent single-handedly took up the fight against criminal activity in the African colony and almost ruined himself financially in the process . In the 1998 book by Adam Hochschild Shadows over the Congo and in the 2004 documentary by Peter Bate "White King, Red Rubber, Black Death ", Morel's services to the end of Leopold II's private rule over the Congo are shown.

Publications

• Affairs of West Africa . 1902.
  • New edition: with an introduction by Kenneth Dike Nworah. Frank Cass, London 1968.
• Red rubber: the story of the rubber slave trade flourishing on the Congo in the year of grace 1906

With an introduction by Harry H. Johnston; New edition: New York, Negro Universities Press, 1969, 213 pages, ISBN 0-8371-1161-7

• Great Britain and the Congo . 1909.
• The black man's burden. The white man in Africa from the fifteenth century to World War I.

ED Morel. Repr. Ed. 1920

• The horror on the Rhine

ED Morel; Vorw. V. Arthur Ponsonby. Trans. V. Hermann Lutz; Berlin: HR Engelmann, 1920, 22 pp.

Movies

• White king, red rubber, black death . Documentary, Belgium, 2004, 90 min., Director: Peter Bate, summary by arte
• Shadows over the Congo. (OT: King Leopold's Ghost. ) Documentation, USA 2006, 95 min., Script and director: Pippa Scott, production: Linden, German first broadcast: May 5, 2008, WDR , synopsis from WDR, film website
  Award-winning documentary based on the same name Book ( King Leopold's Ghost ) by Adam Hochschild .

literature

• Catherine Ann Cline: ED Morel, 1873-1924. The strategies of protest. Blackstaff, Belfast 1980, ISBN 0-85640-213-3 .
• Mario Vargas Llosa: The Celt's Dream . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-42270-0 .
• Robert C. Reinders: Racialism on the Left. ED Morel and The "Black Horror on the Rhine". In: International Review of Social History 13 (1968), pp. 1-28.

Web links

Commons : ED Morel  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Literature by and about Edmund Dene Morel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Edmund Dene Morel in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Heinrich Cunow : The poison that destroys . In: Die Neue Zeit - Wochenschrift der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie, No. 10/1922, p. 222:
2. ↑ Awards from King Leopold's Ghost