“Reparations: Taking Forward the Caribbean’s Case”

by Hilary Beckles

Reparations discourse within the Caribbean context has reached political maturity. The assertion that the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, the genocide of the indigenous population, and chattel enslavement of Africans constitute Crimes Against Humanity is now impatient of debate. International law and multiple political conventions have acknowledged as much, yet European States under whose colonial projects such crimes were perpetrated continue to oppose the call for reparations as provided for under international law. In this presentation we will hear why Europe has maintained this posture, and the counter arguments from a Caribbean perspective. It is argued that the historical and legal evidence for reparations are compelling, both in terms of legal principle and as a moral right of the descendants of the enslaved. It is shown that effective opposition to reparation is situated within the sphere of political power in the Euro-American complex where post-imperial states continue to determine in significant ways the parameters of global moral and ideological discourse. The call is for Caricom States to move beyond rhetoric to engagement with the establishment of a Regional Reparations Task Force to compile the historical and legal basis of the claim, and the creation of a Caricom Reparations Agency, based on the Jewish post-Nuremburg model, to serve as plaintiff in moving the case into the legal realm.