UWI Vice-Chancellor urges UN to support reparatory justice

The Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies (The UWI) Sir Hilary Beckles Monday called on the United Nations to support reparatory justice as a development paradigm.

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, he described slavery as “this evil enterprise” by which Europe and their colonial empires “devised a strategy to convert this criminality into capital.

Sir Hilary, who is also chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission, said that body 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 programme, to recommit to the agenda of decolonisation so that this crime against humanity which began in the Caribbean can finally come to an end with the ending of colonisation.

“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.”

Sir Hilary declared that the 21st century will be the century of reparatory justice.

“It’s this century that will find and create the greatest political movement – that is, the movement for reparatory justice as an approach to inclusive economic development, financial and economic reform that will turn the world economy the right way up,” he said.

The UWI Vice-Chancellor also used 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 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 demonised rather than deified,” he added.

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 such examples of duplicity and mendacity in the modern world are endless 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 colonisation, racism, genocide, apartheid, infanticide, forced starvation, the animalisation of images of human beings; these are all tools that we see before our very eyes as we gaze upon our televisions. These tools and narratives were honed in the cradle of Caribbean history, where the invention of the chattelisation of Africans took its first roots,” he added.

(CMC/BT)