UNITED NATIONS, CMC—The Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies (The UWI), Sir Hilary Beckles, on Monday, called on the United Nations to support reparatory justice as a development paradigm, saying Caribbean countries know all too well the narrative and tools of terror.
In an address to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) commemorating the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and Transatlantic Slave Trade, Professor Beckles described slavery as “this evil enterprise” by which Europe and their colonial empires “devised a strategy to convert this criminality into capital.
“It is the burden that continues to yolk all black folks who continue to suffer the aftermath of this tsunami of economic marginalization, social and cultural oppression, and political victimization in their struggle for freedom and justice and now the struggle to legitimize the reasons for reparatory justice.”
The UWI Vice-Chancellor said he was also using his address to call 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 noblest exemplars of freedom and celebrating democratic possibilities in Western modernity. Instead, they were punished by the Western world for their audacity of action and demonized rather than deified”.
He said that driven by France and supported by all of Europe and the United States, “they were forced to pay blood money in the form of reparations for having defeated their enslavers.”
Professor Beckles said that the modern world offers endless examples of duplicity and deception in the bid to end man’s inhumanity to man.
“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.
“We know all too well the narrative and the tools of terror. We know these narratives, we know these institutions, and the discussions today are about colonization, racism, genocide, apartheid, infanticide, forced starvation, and the animalization of images of human beings; these are all tools that we see before our very eyes as we gaze upon our televisions.
He added, “These tools and narratives were honed in the cradle of Caribbean history, where the invention of the chattelization of Africans took its first roots.”
Beckles, who also urged the UN to recommit to the decolonization agenda for the remaining Caribbean colonies, said the 21st century will be the century of reparatory justice.
“This century will find and create the most significant political movement for reparatory justice as an approach to inclusive economic development and financial and economic reform. This will turn the world economy around.
“And therefore, we will not, with our silence, allow the old persistent inequalities and the barbarity it has bred to find a new beachhead for the launch of further crimes against humanity.”
Professor Beckles, who is also chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission, said it has a mandate to create a dialogue for the world “on how to perceive and pursue reforms to our financial institutions so that we can have justice not only for historical crimes but we can have a level playing field for the future.
“That is what we ask; that is what we expect,” he said, adding 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 program, to recommit to the decolonization agenda so that this crime against humanity, which began in the Caribbean, can finally end with the end 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 break from historical backwardness and lay the foundation for the dawn of a dignified dispensation for all of humanity.”
Beckles said this is the movement that will finally signal the collective victory of humanity of good over evil.
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