Slave trafficking and Slavery “gravest Crime against Humanity”

The September 8, 2001, World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance had highlighted the issue of Reparations, although Caribbean and African delegates pushing the issue did not get the lift they were hoping to.

The issue has however, not gone away. Some small gains have been made from institutions that began to examine their involvement in Slavery. Some countries had, even in 2001, refused to apologise for their involvement fearing that to do so would confront them with a variety of claims. The Netherlands in 2022 finally apologised but was not prepared to move beyond that, and to look at the issue of financial reparations. CARICOM’S 10-Point Plan did not focus on financial reparations but raised a number of other options with which they were prepared to work. Reparations were therefore not limited to financial transfers. On March 25, the day set aside in 2007 by the UN for commemorating the Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade, the UN General Assembly voted to recognise the Traffic and Enslavement of Africans as the “gravest crime against Humanity”. The vote was non-binding. Three countries voted against- The US, Argentina and Israel. Fifty-two nations abstained, including most of the European nations. The reaction of the right wing UK Reform Party of Nigel Farage was not surprising. He promised if elected to stop the issuance of Visas to any country demanding reparations from the UK. The Party’s Home Affairs spokesperson declared that the UK was not “an ATM for ethnic grievances of the past”. I hope he was not plagiarising the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Kamla Persad Bissessar who declared that Trinidad was not the ATM for the Caribbean.

The reaction of the Leader of the UK Opposition Party Kemi Badenoch, who was born in England and whose parents are from Nigeria, spent her childhood in Nigeria, a country from which she tries to distance herself, deserves some attention. She was critical of the UK’s abstention from the vote and felt strongly that their position should have been against the Resolution. She argued that Britain should not pay for a historical practice that it “helped to eradicate”. Helping to eradicate it does not erase its involvement in the Transatlantic trade and the brutal system of Slavery. She will be well advised to read Eric William’s book CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY where he makes the point that Britain was faced with the option of Abolition from Above or From Below. The British parliamentarians would have known about the Haitian Revolution and about revolts in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara in 1823, and Jamaica in 1831. During the debate in Parliament information about unrest on the Carib Country estates in St. Vincent was brought to the attention of Parliament.

The Foreign Minister of Ghana, the country that had presented the Resolution with the support of the African Union and Caribbean countries argued that “History does not disappear when ignored, truth does not weaken when delayed, crime does not rot… and justice does not expire with time…”. This was obviously in response to the issue of Historical Remoteness raised in 2001 in South Africa, and has continued. The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres reminded the Assembly that the wealth of many nations was “built on stolen lives and stolen labour”. This is a key point raised in Eric Williams’ CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY. But he noted that “it was not simply forced labour” but reminded them of the “barbaric punishments that maintained control -from shackles and iron collars to flogging and sexual violence”.

The issue of Reparations/Compensation is nothing new. Germany had paid about £60 billion to Jewish victims of the Nazi Regime. This involved payment to Israel. Haitian liberators were forced to pay compensation to the French for their property- chattel slaves who liberated themselves. The British paid £ 20 million compensation for the enslaved-the property of the planters. Vincentian planters got £ 592,509. The UN resolution in describing the Slave Trade and Slavery as the gravest crime against humanity, stressing it’s scale, brutality and lasting consequences. Nothing matches this!

• Dr Adrian Fraser is a social commentator and historian