Georgetown: The International Conference of Reparations held in the United States April 9-12 has yielded much success, Guyana Reparations Committee Chairman, Dr Eric Phillips has said.
Among those successes were the establishment of a Global Reparations Committee and the decision by the United Nations General Assembly to declare 2015-2024 as the Decade for People of African Descent.
Phillips, who was accompanied by Dr James Rose to the event held at the York University, explained that the Conference had over 12 delegations from Caribbean countries. For the first time, the United States has also established a reparations committee, and so have numerous countries around the world.
These include Denmark, Europe, and Martinique, he told this publication in a telephone interview. According to Phillips, the global reparations committee will be utilising the same model being used by the Caribbean Reparations Committee.
The three-day conference, hosted by the Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW), also ended with a call for Caribbean Governments to move ahead with the recommendation that the slave-owning and slave-trading European nations be invited to attend an inter-governmental reparatory justice summit in 2015.
It was also agreed that two global reparations summits be held, the first in 2016 in the Caribbean and another in 2017 in Europe. The objective of the conference is to use reparations payments to deal collectively with pressing economic and educational problems facing the citizens of the Caribbean who trace their origins to the underdevelopment imposed by slavery, slave trading, native genocide, and economic exploitation by the European nations.
The summit featured rousing speeches by, among others, US civil rights leader, the Rev Jesse Jackson; US actor Danny Glover; and Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies and Chairman of the Caribbean Reparations Committee, Sir Hilary Beckles.
According to Phillips, Glover is soon to meet with Brazil’s Former President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, to work around strategies for the establishment of a reparations committee there. Participants have also agreed to consolidate the growing African global reparations movement and to call on all civil society organisations and Governments in countries around the world with Afro-descendant populations to establish national reparations commissions or committees.
The New York summit also recognised US Congressman John Conyers as a champion of the reparations movement and the consistent sponsor of HR40 – the reparations study bill in the US Congress.
It urged the US Congressional Black Caucus, major civil and human rights organisations in the US, and the US labour movement to support the global reparations movement. Additionally, the summit applauded the Government of Brazil for declaring mandatory the study of African history and culture at all levels of the educational system in that country, and called on all countries with African-descended populations to do likewise and to recognise the “validity of traditional African spirituality”.
The summit called on the global reparations movement to develop sustainable funding strategies, urging the international community to work towards a 21st Century new moral order for sustainable development in which reparatory justice was an integral component.
The IBW International Reparations Summit came two years after the 15-nation Caricom group decided unanimously to form a reparations commission and to demand that the former European colonial and slave-trading powers pay the debt owed to African people in the Caribbean region for the enormous wealth made off of their forced and uncompensated labour during the centuries of African enslavement.
In January 2014, Caricom issued a 10-point programme for “Reparatory Justice” that framed their reparations demands as a “development strategy”. The Transatlantic slave trade brought over 10 million captured Africans to work as chattel slaves in sugar and cotton plantations throughout the Caribbean and the Americas. It was the largest forced migration in human history. Today, Caricom nations have a population of 16 million, and the Diaspora in the United States, Canada and Europe is about four to five million people.
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