African Americans aren’t the only ones deserving of reparations for the past slave trade.
According to The Guardian, heads of state of 15 Caribbean nations will meet in St. Vincent on March 17 to unveil a plan demanding reparations from Europe for the lasting suffering inflicted by the Atlantic slave trade.
Sir Hilary Beckles, who chairs the reparations task force, said the Caribbean nations are not seeking to extract vast sums of money from Europe, but rather to open-up a dialogue and pursue social justice.The European states targeted are Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.
Among the demands made on the former European slave trading nations are that they:
- provide diplomatic help to persuade countries such as Ghana and Ethiopia to offer citizenship to the children of people from the Caribbean who “return” to Africa. Some 30,000 have made such a journey to Africa and have been offered generous settlement packages, but lack of citizenship rights for their children is causing difficulties
- devise a development strategy to help improve the lives of poor communities in the Caribbean still devastated by the after-effects of slavery
- support cultural exchanges between the Caribbean and west Africa to help Caribbean people of African descent rebuild their sense of history and identity
- back literacy drives designed to improve education levels that are still dire in many Caribbean communities
- provide medical assistance to the region that is struggling from high levels of chronic diseases, such as hypertension and type 2 diabetes, that the Caricom (the economic and political body for the Caribbean community) reparations commission links to the fallout from slavery.
“Undoubtedly, Britain faces more claims than anyone else because it was the primary slave power and colonial power in the Caribbean,” Martyn Day, the British lawyer advising the Caribbean nations, said in an interview. “Britain will be very much at the forefront.”