(MENAFN- Caribbean News Now) Dear Sir:
In 1989, United States House of Representatives member John Conyers, Jr., whoretired under a cloudin 2017, introduced legislation to create a commission to develop proposals for reparations to the descendants of Black Africans who were enslaved in America from the country's founding in 1776 to the abolition of Southern bondage with the end of the Civil War in 1865. He continued to introduce a similar Bill H.R. 40 every session for nearly 30 years. Each of his attempts failed.
Conyers was a member of the Democratic Party which historically hadchampioned slavery and post-slavery affliction . But his 'new' Democratic Party has long been rehabilitated. Today, its support for reparations fits nicely into its big government social justice/social welfare effort toengineer equalityof lifestyle outcomes among all Americans regardless of their race, colour, creed, ability, or effort.
The same bill, titled the ' Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act ,' has now been put forward by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat. It seems destined to die again at or near the starting line because neitherthe majority of the American peoplenor the Republican-controlled Senate support it.
A total reset on a different track may be what is needed in a New World race where the United States is far behind several Caribbean ex-slave societies.
The Caribbean Reparations Commission(CRC) is a 12-nation Caribbean Community (CARICOM) sub-committee formed in 2013 to obtain 'reparatory justice' from Great Britain, France, Holland, Spain, and other nations responsible for post-Columbian New World slavery. (The term 'post-Columbian' is deliberately used because slavery existed among the Indigenous peoples in many parts of the Western Hemisphere before 1492.)
The mission of the Commission is to:
'Establish the moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of Reparations by the Governments of all the former colonial powers and the relevant institutions of those countries, to the nations and people of the Caribbean Community for the Crimes against Humanity of Native Genocide, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and a racialized system of Chattel slavery.'
More particularly, CRC's ' ten-point action plan ' calls for: (1) a formal apology for slavery; (2) voluntary repatriation to Africa of those who wish to return to their ancestral homelands; (3) an Indigenous peoples development program to compensate the aboriginal inhabitants of the conquered territories; (4) support for various cultural revival institutions; (5) funds to address a 'public health crisis' said to be rooted in slavery; (6) illiteracy eradication; (7) an African knowledge program; (8) psychological rehabilitation for the lingering effects of slavery; (9) technology transfer to ensure future economic development; and (10) cancellation or payment of the region's huge financial debts.
Taken together, satisfying these demands would add up to tens of billions of dollars, perhaps even matching theUS$ 97 billion in today's money paid to slave-ownersto cover the loss of their legal chattel property following emancipation.
To publicize its mandate, the Commission has hosted many conferences, public meetings, rallies, speeches and other activities.
In 2014, it hired a British human rights legal firm with previous experience in securing reparations, Leigh Day, to forward demand letters to several European governments asking for compensation for the lingering effects of over 200 years of enslavement. Some of these letters were not answered and ' Britain and France were among the most strident in their refusal to cooperate in any meaningful way with the commission .'
On June 10, 2019 it was revealedthat the CRC was in the process of preparing a new round of letters of demand to be presented to additional countries identified as participants in the trafficking of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean: Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, Norway, and the Duchy of Courland (Latvia).
Curiously missing from this list was the United States and Canada both of which actively participated for over two centuries in the infamous and remunerative triangular slave trade between Europe, North America, and the Caribbean.
So far, the movement's only glimmer of hope has been a late 2018 informal promise by the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdomto begin making reparations payments 'in the near future'in the equivalent of $US 255 million for its part in the English slave trade to the Caribbean. Nothing has been heard since about a proposed memorandum of understanding – an agreement with no legal standing — that would govern this process.
Overall, then, though little fruit has been borne, the CRC is well past the starting line in elaborating on and pressing for its demands, the place Bill H. R. 40 has languished since 1989.
None of the five Associate Members of CARICOM — Bermuda, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, and Turks and Caicos Islands — are members of the CRC. These former slave-based territories are also among the richest places in the Caribbean, testimony to the underlying motive of the ' restorative justice ' movement: an effort by cash strapped, highly indebted nations to secure more foreign aid from their previous overlords.
This is also why no reparations are being sought from the various Western and Central African countries that are even more indebted and cash strapped but whoseBlack ancestors facilitated the slave tradeby capturing and transporting millions of people from enemy ethnic groups to European coastal military and trading posts, a process that could be labelled genocide according to the1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide .
CARICOM leadersOutside the narrow sphere of CARICOM, the other Caribbean countries and territories that have not jumped on the reparations bandwagon are Cuba, Puerto Rico, Saint-Barthelemy, Saint-Martin, Sint Maarten, Saba, Sint Eustatius, U.S. Virgin Islands, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Dominican Republic, Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. Most are also among the wealthiest nations in the Western Hemisphere.
Nor have the governments of any of the remaining New World countries and territories where slavery and the conquest of the indigenous peoples thrived and enriched the relevant European powers – principally Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, France, and Holland — during their own colonial era chosen to join the reparations effort. These include Canada, the United States, and Mexico, each of which was composed of one or more European colonies when slaves were first brought to their shores and hence have the same potential moral and legal claims for reparations as the CARICOM petitioners. They also include the Central American countries of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, and the South American countries of Ecuador, French Guiana, Venezuela, Columbia, Brazil, and Bolivia.
In and out of CARICOM, the reparations movement has had little grassroots resonance, understanding, or support and only in CARICOM is there any central government leadership. In the United States, for example, the most influential politicians of the last decade, includingBarack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, have been opposed to slavery reparations , thoughSanders seems to be flip-flopping of late .
In total, only 12 independent countries or territories, or 24 percent of the relevant states and semi-autonomous entities representing less than 2 percent of the population of the affected New World regions, have joined the reparations movement.
Overall, then, the slavery reparations effort, an idea that was actually conceived in the United States at the end of the Civil War in 1865, has gone nowhere in slow motion. Its CARICOM counterpart was created six years ago when the issue was first raised by the Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr Ralph E. Gonsalves, ironically an exemplar of Caribbean white privilegewho is said to be a direct descendant of Portuguese slave traders is doomed to follow the same path. This is because none of the relevant European powers would ever willingly agree to the CARICOM demands.
When then British Prime Minister David Cameron visited Jamaica in 2015he said thatBritain's role in wiping slavery "off the face of our planet" should be remembered. Addressing Jamaica's parliament, he acknowledged that 'slavery was abhorrent in all its forms" but added that 'I do hope that, as friends who have gone through so much together since those darkest of times, we can move on from this painful [slavery] legacy and continue to build for the future."
The only other recourse — asking either the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court, both located in the Hague, to adjudicate the issue – is unlikely to succeed not only on legal grounds but because taking Great Britain and Holland to court could irredeemably alienate European nations that have sent billions of dollars in myriad forms of aid to CARICOM countries since emancipation, a risk none of its members would be willing to take.
In both America and the Caribbean, the issue of reparations for slavery has always been dead on arrival, for monetary and a host of other reasons, as the current House of Representatives effort is destined to prove once again.
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Note:This is an updated version of a piecepreviously published here.
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This is the fourth in a series of essays debunking the CARICOM slavery reparations effort. My other reparations essays are listed below:
Ten reasons Caribbean slavery reparations are a bad idea
The Caribbean slavery reparations gang of twelve
Reparations as mental slavery
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C. ben-David (M.A., Ph.D.) is an anonymous retired social science professor who has been studying Caribbean society and culture since 1969.
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