Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, called on the United Nations to support a reparatory justice programme and end colonization within the Caribbean.
Addressing the UN General Assembly on International Day of Remembrance for Victims of Slavery on March 25, Sir Beckles said there are European countries that still have Caribbean colonies.
“The Caribbean remains one of the few places in the world where there are still colonies. Many of the islands of the Caribbean are still colonies. Britain has colonies, France has colonies, and the Dutch have colonies. Why do we have colonies remaining at this time in our history?
“I urge the United Nations therefore, as part of its reparatory justice programme, to recommit—to recommit to the agenda of decolonization so that this crime against humanity which began in the Caribbean can finally come to an end with the ending of colonization.
“The payment of moral and development reparations for the crimes against African people, will at the very beginning represent the formation of a new and more equitable global order that will represent a break from historical backwardness and lay the future for the dawn of a dignified dispensation for all of humanity.”
Vice-Chancellor Beckles said the Transatlantic Slave Trade was also genocidal.
“In my home island of Barbados, the British imported 600,000 enslaved Africans—a small island, 600,000 enslaved Africans over 200 years. At emancipation, there were only 83,000 remaining. How do you reduce 600,000 people to 83,000 over 200 years? Because on that island, slavery was also genocidal.
“…Today, we are called upon to bear witness once again to the methods of military barbarity and the ideologies of ethnic hatred not only in our Americas, not only against the African people but as we gaze upon the cruelty in Gaza.
“So, this is the moment for all good and humane citizens to join the reparatory justice movement, to come together and to heal the historical wounds that fester before our very faces.”
Vice-Chancellor Beckles also called for justice for Haiti which was punished for being the first country to end slavery.
“We are calling for justice for the people of Haiti who should have been held aloft for being the first nation to end the evil of slavery. They should have been held aloft for being the most noble exemplars of freedom and the celebration of democratic possibilities in Western modernity.
“Instead, for their audacity of action they were punished by the Western world and demonized rather than deified. Driven by France and supported by all of Europe and the United States of America, they were forced to pay blood money in the form of reparations for having defeated their enslavers.”
He said the effects of slavery continue today, hence the need for reparatory justice.
“…until the Western world deploys its considerable wisdom and agrees to pay reparatory justly to those who have been enslaved and colonized, to pay reparatory justice for those who continue to suffer the legacies of colonization, apartheid and slavery, to those who have survived this African holocaust, until men and women of good conscience bring to closure the crime of enslavement in the form of apologies and development compensation, until the Western world in which we are all deeply embedded comes to realize and accept that the black people have carried for far too long the moral conscience of modernity, expressed in our terms, expressed in our time, in the superhumanity of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Madiba Mandela, until it is recognised and accepted, that only a reparatory justice framework for development can secure sustainable economic, social, and moral development, that this 21st Century, threatened as we know it is, will take us back to the 16th Century where these crimes against humanity were conceived and concretized.”
The International Day of Remembrance for Victims of Slavery was designated as an international day by the UN in 2007.
March 25 also marks the date in 1807 where the Slave Trade Act was passed by Parliament, outlawing the slave trade in Britain, Ireland and the wider British Empire.
