SEPTEMBER 28 — Saturday saw the official opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.

For many it will signify healing, justice and the long sought recognition so long denied them. For others it is a time and place to reflect on the cruelty of man and the appalling atrocities he is capable of inflicting on his brethren.

The building stands on the site of the first public slave auctions, where men, women and children were traded like cattle. Sold into positions in life with no choices, no freedom and subjected to the harshest and most brutal of abuse and exploitation.

As we use this time to reflect, it is hard to imagine that it was ever allowed to go on at all. With the hindsight we now possess, we can see with such clarity that this was absolute in its wrongness.

The opening of the museum highlights this. It is viewed as an institutional acknowledgement of wrongdoing and rightly so. The African American population was wronged by all echelons of society and that now must be accepted and faced by all.

But why is that, although we have now been able to acknowledge such wrongdoing, we are still not learning from it?

The slave auctions of the 1400s that we now so vehemently abhor are still going on today. The exploitation of a whole people, the rampant sexual abuse of innocent women, and the senseless killing without impunity still goes on today. They just happen in a different country, to a different group of people.

Isis has been responsible for so many atrocities during their rampage of terror through the Middle East, but few are considered as deplorable as their extermination of and abuses against the Yezidi people.

This is an issue that has been brought to the fore this week after Amal Clooney and Nadia Murad, a Yezidi girl who escaped Isis, delivered a scathing reproach to the United Nations over their inaction in protecting the Yezidi people. It is an issue that needs to be highlighted, listened to and actioned on, for the plight of the Yezidi is a very real and painful one.

Since Isis’ invasion of the Yezidi towns and villages around Sinjar in August 2014, they have openly bragged about the execution of thousands of Yezidi men and the capture of countless women and children.

These women were to be sold at slave auctions, cast off as sex slaves to be subjected to systematic gang rape and forced labour. Current estimates are that 3,200 women and children are still in Isis hands and yet nothing is being done by those in power to impinge on these actions and not one single Isis fighter has been prosecuted in international court.

As Clooney pointed out, these women do not seek revenge, but justice. In the hope that what happened to them will not be allowed to happen to anyone else in the future. That should not be too much to ask, and yet still they stand ignored.

We have seen these types of abuses happen again and again throughout history, only this time we’re in a position to do something about it. Despite this, world leaders sit idly by allowing it to continue. It’s as if history has taught us nothing.

There will come a time when we will look back at this period with shame and wonder then, as we do now, how we could allow it to go on for so long without intervention.

It cannot only be through the lens of history that we acknowledge our wrongdoings and idle inactions. It must be now that we act to prevent the next generation from having to build more museums for the downtrodden and the persecuted.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.