Abu Bakr attempts to make reparations a trivial event

Mar 21, 2014 Letters

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Dear Editor
Abu Bakr is a well-read intellect who knows his history better than most. It was therefore very perplexing to read many of the statements Abu Bakr  made in his Letter to the Editor entitled “we learn a certain narrative of our past” (Stabroek News March 20, 2014).
Let me use this opportunity to clarity a few of the incredible statements Mr. Abu Bakr  made in his letter
First, and I quote from his letter “it is know that among the Akan peoples from many in the English speaking world are descended, slavery was a socially accepted practice”  and speaking of some tribes in African (a few of the 3000 that exist) Mr. Abu Bakr further states “they bought, sold and exported slaves for hundreds of years. They committed the crimes. They reaped the profits. But it is considered useless to press these unfortunates, long fallen on hard times, to subscribe to the reparations fund”.
How can a man of vast knowledge and intellect like Abu Bakr, make some troublesome and totally false statements. On whose agency is he writing these delusional statements?
European slavery was chattel slavery where human beings were defined as inhuman and property. African tribes never practiced chattel slavery. Never.
Slavery practiced by African tribes was never a “crime against humanity”. Chattel slavery was evil and was purely because of criminal enrichment.
How else do you explain the forced migration of 16 to 20 million Africans and millions of deaths from chattel slavery? Chattel slavery was an industry of rape, murder, exploitation, free labour, inhumanity and has never had chattel. Were African tribes building huge ships to take these “gifts” away to a foreign land of extreme cruelty and death?
Yes, some African tribes participated in selling other Africans to Europeans. But these same tribes never practiced chattel slavery.
Chattel slavery was about Indigenous genocide as in the case of the Garifuna in St. Vincent. Chattel slavery was about African genocide for profit.
European chattel slavery was the world’s first nuclear bomb that annihilated Africa, African culture, African family structures, African institutions, African pride, African civilizations, African commerce, African science and African economic development.
Chattel slavery was designed by Europeans for European criminal enrichment and made a crime against humanity……legal for profit.
Mr. Abu Bakr has for some reason attempted to blame Africans for chattel slavery and has joined the ranks of those who, despite the evidence that abounds, chose to blame the victims. Certainly, Mr. Abu Bakr is well aware that European Governments:
1.    Were owners and traders of enslaved Africans
2.    Instructed genocidal actions upon indigenous communities
3.    Created the legal, financial and fiscal policies necessary for the enslavement of Africans
4.    Defined and enforced African enslavement and native genocide as in their ‘national interests’
5.    Refused compensation to the enslaved with the ending of their enslavement.
6.    Compensated slave owners at emancipation for the loss of legal property rights in enslaved Africans
7.    Imposed a further one hundred years of racial apartheid upon the emancipated
8.    Imposed for another one hundred years policies designed to perpetuate suffering upon the emancipated and survivors of genocide and,
9.    Have refused to acknowledge such crimes or to compensate victims and their descendants.
Chattel slavery was the crime that developed Europe, period, and underdeveloped Africa, while creating the politics and practice of racism that exists today.
Royalty, businessmen, bankers, religious groups, merchants, shipbuilders, arms makers, citizens…. all made billions of blood money from chattel slavery and their descendants still enjoy this wealth today. How can a man of Abu Bakr’s stature make the statement “we learn a certain narrative of our servile past. We learn that the European started the slave trade and bought and sold     Africans for “beads and mirrors”. I saw in this newspaper a few years ago, in a Project Syndicate article with someone bearing an African name repeating the absurdity”.
Mr. Bakr is correct only in one part of that statement for it was the Arabs, whose name he bears, that African slavery began and lasted for 11 centuries.
Perhaps it is the name Mr. Abu Bakr carries that makes him plunge into disinformation, deceit and plain lies.
The second statement Mr. Abu Bakr makes is one that tries to discredit the Reparations Movement. He states in his letter, and I quote “the Coordinator of the efforts (reparations) is Dr. Hilary Beckles, and we had earlier read, the local organisers include Eric Phillip of ACDA”.
Mr. Abu Bakr fully well knows that it is Sir Hilary Beckles, not Dr. Beckles, and that the reparations initiative has been unanimously approved by the Heads of States of CARICOM.
Abu Bakr attempts to make reparations a trivial event. He purposefully has left the reader in the dark. He has purposefully hidden the fact that sovereign nations of the Caribbean will sue eight European countries, including his beloved France, for crimes against humanity and criminal enrichment. He tries to hide the fact that France, like many European countries, was built on the backs and deaths on millions of Africans and that even today France has an imperialist hold on the money of many African nations.
Let it be known, Mr. Abu Bakr, that this effort to stigmatise and weaken the Reparations Movement with lies and European propaganda has no chance of success but rather diminishes him, the subtle bearer of self-hate. Let it be known there is a CARICOM Reparations Commission, chaired by Sir Hilary Beckles and comprised of the Chairs of National Reparations Committees in the Caribbean. This Commission reports to a Heads of State Reparations Committee comprised on the Heads of State of Barbados, Guyana, Haiti, St. Vincent, Jamaica and Suriname. I am not a local organiser. Guyana has a National Reparations Committee.
With so much time on his hands, I hope Mr. Abu Bakr will read about 1100 years of the  Arab Slave Trade which was blessed by Islam and which has fallen through the cracks of time and which had  its own special horrors or rape, plunder murder and criminal enrichment..
Finally, Editor, there seems to be great dis-information about Reparations. So I end with what Reparations is about.
What is Reparations?
Reparation is the process of repairing the consequences of crimes committed, and the attempt to reasonably remove debilitating effects of such crimes upon victims and their descendants. International law provides that the economic and social system referred to as chattel slavery – the legal denial of persons’ rights to human identity and the control over their bodies – was and is a crime against humanity subject to reparatory justice.
Reparation seeks reconciliation between victims and beneficiaries. As such it is non-confrontational and conciliatory. Reparation seeks to restore equity in social relations, equality before the law, and justice within the fabric of human diversity that typifies humanity. Reparation seeks to heal, atone, and bring closure to the human tragedy of mass slavery. It seeks, finally, to restore a higher moral order by removing the shame and guilt that persistently poison the relations between descendants on all sides of the crime.
The legal process of Reparation demands of perpetrators and beneficiaries the following:
(1) An Apology, rather than a Statement of Regret that expresses no responsibility for the suffering of victims;
(2) Admission of wrong doing;
(3) Commitment to reasonable reparatory actions;
(4) Commitment to non-repetition.
Eric Phillips

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