HEADS AGREE ON REPARATIONS FOLLOW-UP ACTION
(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), on the final day of their Thirty-Fourth Regular Meeting agreed on follow-up action on the matter of reparations for native genocide and slavery.
The Meeting agreed to the establishment of a National Reparations Committee in each Member State with the Chair of each Committee sitting on a CARICOM Reparations Commission. The Heads of Government of Barbados (Chair), St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Haiti, Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago will provide political oversight.
The decisions were taken followed presentations by Member States, led by St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and their unanimous support of the road map.
Chair of the Community, the Hon. Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, at an end-of-Meeting Press Conference at the Hilton Hotel, described progress on the subject as a very positive outcome.
Earlier in the day, during his contribution to the discussions, Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer said he conceptualized the call for reparations as an integral element of the Community’s development strategy. The legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean severely impaired the Region’s development options.
“We know that our constant search and struggle for development resources is linked directly to the historical inability of our nations to accumulate wealth from the efforts of our peoples during slavery and colonialism. These nations that have been the major producers of wealth for the European slave-owning economies during the enslavement and colonial periods entered Independence with dependency straddling their economic, cultural, social and even political lives”, Prime Minister Spencer said.
Reparations, he added, had to be directed toward repairing the damage inflicted by slavery and racism.
“We, as political leaders, must encourage our various reparation agencies to continue the education of our Caribbean people and our Diaspora, and enhance their awareness of the reparations issue. It is important that there is solid people and multi-party support for our efforts and we must impress on our colleagues in both Government and Opposition that this is not an issue we should use as party-politics fodder. Our various reparation organizations must see the forging of bi-partisan political support and civil society consensus for reparations as one of their main objectives,” the Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister added.
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STATEMENT BY THE HON BALDWIN SPENCER, PRIME MINISTER OF ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA TO 34TH REGULAR MEETING OF THE CONFERENCE OF HEADS OF GOVERNMENT OF THE CARIBBEAN COMMUNITY, JULY 2013 - ON THE ISSUE OF REPARATIONS FOR NATIVE GENOCIDE AND SLAVERY
In 2007, the year designated by the United Nations for the commemoration of the Two-hundredth Anniversary of the Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Parliament of Antigua and Barbuda passed a resolution that:
Reaffirmed its recognition of August 1st as Emancipation Day and seeks to institutionalize ceremonies and programmes in annual national commemoration of the parliamentary end to British enslavement of Africans, August 1st 1834.
Endorsed a regional approach to the demand of a full apology for the slave trade and slavery, and appropriate reparations from those nations that were involved in those crimes against Africans and their descendants in the Diaspora.
The Government appointed a Reparations Support Commission mandating it inter alia ‘to organize activities to include education and awareness programmes concerning reparations for the enslavement of our ancestors and establish links with organizations with similar mandates and further to foster deeper ideological, social and economic connections with people of African descent in the Diaspora and continental Africa. That Commission has embarked on an intensive public awareness and education programme about the legacy of enslavement, the impact of colonialism and the international moral and legal imperative for reparations.
Antigua and Barbuda has also applauded the decision of the African Union to include the Diaspora as its sixth region and to date we have achieved Observer Status with that organization – to which we have appointed an ambassador in our attempts to deepen social and economic ties with continental Africa.
In my address to the United Nations General Assembly in 2011 Antigua and Barbuda called upon ‘the former slave States to begin the reconciliation process by issuing formal apologies for the crimes committed by the nations or their citizens over the 400 years of the African slave trade’. Antigua and Barbuda also called on those very States ‘to back up their apologies with new commitments to the economic development of the nations that have suffered from this human tragedy.’
Critically Antigua and Barbuda conceptualizes the call for reparations as an integral element of our development strategy. We argue to this Heads of Government Conference that the legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean has severely impaired our development options. We know that our constant search and struggle for development resources is linked directly to the historical inability our nations to accumulate wealth from the efforts of our peoples during slavery and colonialism. These nations that have been the major producers of wealth for the European slave owning economies during the enslavement and colonial periods entered Independence with dependency straddling their economic, cultural, social and even political lives.
We assert that reparations must be directed toward repairing the damage inflicted by slavery and racism. We agree with the presenter, Dr. Hilary Beckles that the reparations movement is ‘a moral, legal and political response to the crimes against humanity committed during’ what he calls ‘the imperial project’.
We further support the recommendations of Prime Minister (Ralph) Gonsalves and the Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Support Commission that we establish a CARICOM Commission on Reparations appropriately staffed by a competent body of experts to prepare the reparations case. We echo PM Gonsalves’ call for a regional conference on reparations to be held urgently where the shape and form of the Commission is decided.
We as political leaders must encourage our various reparation agencies to continue the education of our Caribbean people and our Diaspora, and enhance their awareness of the reparations issue. It is important that there is solid people and multi-party support for our efforts and we must impress on our colleagues in both Government and Opposition that this is not an issue we should use as party-politics fodder. Our various reparation organizations must see the forging of bi-partisan political support and civil society consensus for reparations as one of their main objectives.
I like quoting the saying that wise people are at times called upon to plant trees in whose shade they may never sit. History will remember us as wise men and women when we make the important decisions we are called upon by history to make.
