An unexpected boost in the fight for reparations

Mar 11, 2018 AFC Column, Features / Columnists

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Guyana’s National Reparations Commission is one of the more active of counterpart organizations in the Caribbean Community, so it is little wonder that the issue was one of the key agenda items at this week’s International Decade of Peoples of African Descent (IDPAP) confab that is scheduled to end today at the Marriott Hotel in Kingston.
Organized with funding from Government and the United Nations among others, the conference saw dozens of academics, activists and writers from around the world descending on Guyana. Among them of course is Julius Garvey, the son of 20th century global Black nationalist, teacher and motivator, Jamaican Marcus Garvey.
Foreign Minister Carl Greenidge, performing the duties of President while His Excellency David Granger is on duty overseas, delivered the main opening remarks at the four-day conference which began on Sunday last. He touched on a few broad areas, suggesting that while the UN has in recent years acknowledged some of the horrible wrongs and atrocities meted out to Africans over the centuries, there is yet to be a full acknowledgement of the moral debt incurred and provision of reparations.
But he did insist that Caribbean governments are committed and determined to pursue efforts to right the wrongs against people of African descent. He vowed that Guyana will do its part to ensure justice.
“They insist that we should only look ahead rather than peer into the past. However, the call for both reckoning and reparation, in monetary and non-monetary terms, is one that cannot be ignored or forsaken on the altar of altruism. The call is premised on the principles of justice and ethics.”
Once he had done his part and had returned to State duties, several speakers at the conference touched on the topic of reparations, urging governments not to give up the fight to make European nations pay for the transatlantic slave trade.
Dr. Hilary Brown of the Caricom Secretariat wasted little time in pointing to a key development in the United Kingdom that is certain to give the regional Reparations fight greater and new impetus.
She pointed to the release of a recent tweet from the British Treasury that laid bare the fact that successive British governments and administrations had in fact still being paying off the loan authorities had taken during the colonial era to pay British slave and plantation owners for the loss of their ‘property’, meaning slaves who were labouring on plantations in the West Indies.
To many governments, national reparations commissions and Black activists, the tweet was sweet music to the ears of the region, as those in the halls of power in London had been dismissing slavery as a genocide and atrocity that had occurred so long ago that no court would have considered it as relevant today.
Former Prime Minister David Cameron had had the audacity and arrogance to tell the Jamaican parliament that Caribbean peoples should forget the past, look to the future and suck up aid opportunities as well as British financial aid, rather than be pressing for reparations in various forms.
But once the tweet was released for all the world to see; once it was noised abroad, it had provided just the type of confirmation that Professor Hilary Beckles and others on the Regional Reparations Commission had needed to fight the case at the World Court.
This is so because the tweet that payments were still being made up to 2015, did everything to bolster the case. It brought the reparations fight and case right into the current, to today’s scenario. Of course the tweet was hastily withdrawn. The commission has the evidence of the tweet that was seen and absorbed by millions of people.
It said that “millions of you helped to end the slave trade through your taxes. Did you know? In 1833, Britain used Sterling 20 million, 40 percent of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the Empire. The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2025. Which means that living British citizens helped to end the slave trade.”
People like Hilary Brown and Professor Beckles were of course quick to point out that all this meant was that West Indians living in the UK were being victimized all over again. Beckles said that not only were their ancestors forced to work for free under brutal and inhumane conditions, but also that their descendants, long after abolition, were forced to compensate slave owners.
So why shouldn’t Britain, France, the Dutch, Spain, Portugal and Denmark not be made to pay reparations to people living today?
The issue is a key agenda item at the July summit of Caricom leaders to be held in Jamaica. There is little doubt that the tweet has bolstered the regional case and has given new life and fight to the commission and governments which had dared to even establish such a commission.
Caricom has written to all of the major slave trading nations of the past. Portugal is the only one not to reply so far. France and Britain are reported to have sent hardball signals, but that accidental tweet might well put London on the defensive and Caricom at the striker’s end of this proverbial cricket game.

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