BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, CMC – Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley says. At the same time, the Caribbean has suffered from the consequences of colonialism because there was no development compact at independence; the ongoing situation in Haiti could also be traced to the racial attitude of the international community at the time.
“Those consequences of colonialism will continue to haunt us as long as we are unable to turn the development wheel to its full spectrum and bring true and full development to our people,” she told an Emancipation Conversation RoundTable Discussion titled “Three Legends, Three Perspective, One Conversation: Reparations and Beyond,” on Thursday night.
The panel includes the former Jamaica prime minister PJ Patterson, St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, and Nigeria’s former president, Olusegun Obasanjo.
Mottley said the situation in Haiti, where efforts are being made to send in an international force to restore peace and stability in the French-speaking Caribbean Community (CARICOM) country, as late as Wednesday, “we had cause to remind the international institutions that the worst form of international racism has come against the people of Haiti.”
Mottley said the notion that even in the 20th century, “far less the beginning of the 21st century there could be something called a wet foot dry foot policy that distinguishes people from two sister nations …even if the policy has been abandoned is a reflection of the lens through which these persons have been seen” in an apparent reference to the United States migration policy regarding Cuba and Haiti.
“The compensation that the Haitians had to be to the French Treasury is now well known, and the reality is that even as we move to stabilize the situation in Haiti, which is seeing the worst of the worst, even as we seek to provide a humanitarian safe corridor to ensure that people could have access to food, pharmaceuticals, and basic supplies…that we also have to work with them…by ensuring that the police service is capable of having control of their country.”
She said such assistance would be given under the United Nations “whether through the Kenyan or Rwandan led forces or whatever mechanism is finally resolved.
“But the point that I want to make is this. The international community must settle no less than a 30-year arrangement for financing social rights in Haiti so that Haiti can begin to see a path forward for doing nothing other than declaring that Black people can be accessible in the Americas.
“I, therefore, hope that we will find it possible, without prejudice to whatever else we may have for ourselves, to recognize that the cause of Haiti is a cause of every Black person in the Americas.
“The cause of Haiti is the cause of every African because it is there that the worse horrors were perpetrated, because even worse than the Middle Passage and even worse than the whip and even worse than the mutilation is the destruction of the belief that the race from which Toussaint Louverture and (Jean-Jacques) Dessalines came from, have it within them to chart their destiny…
“The notion that that was impossible and should remain elusive to the people of Haiti is the greatest crime committed against the Black race,” she said, telling the audience, “All of what we are facing is the concretization of the unequal yoke placed between Black people and others.”
She said she would commend the publication Racial Contract,” written by Charles Mills, in which he made the point that every single time there was a determination to define Black people, it was changed.
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