Caribbean leaders press for slavery reparations
A group of Caribbean leaders met with senior clergy from the Church of England on Tuesday as the push for slavery reparations intensifies, with activists also calling for the independence of British, French, Dutch, and US territories in the region.
The reparations commission from Caricom, a Caribbean trade bloc, was scheduled to also meet with British parliamentarians as part of a four-day official trip to the United Kingdom to seek reparations, the second such trip since November.
The meetings in London come after Caribbean leaders bristled at the recent suggestion by a UK lawmaker that Britain’s former colonies should repay it for its historic investment in them.
‘Gravest crime’
David Comissiong, Barbados’ ambassador to Caricom, stressed that the first step of reparations must be the recovery of national sovereignty and self-determination.
Comissiong and others criticized the United Kingdom for abstaining from a UN resolution passed in March that called for reparations and declared the trafficking of enslaved Africans “the gravest crime against humanity.”
All 27 members of the European Union also abstained, while Argentina, Israel, and the United States voted against the resolution.
Comissiong noted that some European governments have offered apologies, memorials, museums, and the preservation of slavery infrastructure on Africa’s west coast.
“These are some preliminary gestures that we appreciate,” he said. “But those gestures are not negotiations … The damage that was done and that still exists today was so consequential, so deeply rooted, that it goes way beyond, way beyond gestures of memorialization.”
An estimated 12 million Africans were forcefully taken by European nations from the 16th to the 19th century, and those who survived the trip across the Atlantic Ocean were enslaved on plantations in the Caribbean and elsewhere under brutal conditions.
