Patterson urges court action to compel reparations

Former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson has called for the CARICOM Reparations Committee to take the former slave-holding European nations to court in order to exact “liability and damages we are entitled to receive” from their participation in trans-Atlantic chattel slavery.

The comments from Patterson, statesman-in-residence of the Africa Caribbean Institute for Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, were made as the Caribbean intensifies its thrust towards reparative justice for the hundreds of years of black chattel slavery by the major European powers, through a conversation series on ‘Reparations and Beyond’, instituted by Barbados.

“We ask no more and we will accept no less than the right to obtain the same redress that was obtained by the Jews for the ethnic atrocities of Hitler’s gas chambers,” Patterson said.

He observed that there was a compelling case for reparations which “is gradually gaining universal acceptance”.

The former Jamaican prime minister noted that, so far, “Belgium and the Netherlands have offered apologies – but no money. He said the government of the United Kingdom, who he labelled the primary progenitors of the slave trade and rulers of the Empire, “persist in a stubborn denial, despite what the intellectual research of their most venerable universities has revealed”.

According to Patterson, “Reparation is overdue to redress the wrong we have suffered. International law recognises that nations or individuals who have wronged other nations or individuals should render reparation to wipe out all the consequences of the illegal act and restore the situation which would, in all probability, have existed if the act had not been committed”.

UNITY OF PURPOSE

He said both the common law and the civil law dictate that “wherever there is a wrong, there must be a remedy”.

Patterson pointed out that “to obtain reparative justice in full, we cannot rely on prayers alone or expressions of piety”.

He added: “Unity of purpose and the execution of a single pursuit by Africa and Caribbean nations to eradicate the inequities and imbalances in every available forum and institution to which we belong is the only way forward.

“We, the Caribbean nations, expect that Mother Africa, which also suffered tremendous loss of human capital, will join us to create one single phalanx, in the campaign to secure redress and monetary compensation for this heinous crime against humanity.

PLAN OF ATTACK

“The British found the money to pay the perpetrators of the atrocities by such a substantial loan, then that the last payment for it was not made until 2018 – but not a penny for the slaves, who had to work in the apprenticeship systems for years as their forced contribution to obtain their eventual liberty.

“We dare not forget that their illicit retention of the estate lands by the plantocracy has left a huge handicap in our efforts to establish an equitable system of land distribution for the shelter and productive use of our people.”

He recommended that the first plan of attack “and most compelling is a total reform of the existing global architecture, which was designed at the end of World War II by the victorious allies when we were all still colonies”.

“The 68 sovereign nations of Africa and the Caribbean, constituting one-third of the membership of the United Nations, must insist on the rights of Africa to obtain a permanent seat.”

Second, he said, with the decline of the non-aligned, “we must initiate alliances, commencing with the Group of Latin America and the Caribbean – with a special engagement with Brazil, particularly as it is the country in this hemisphere with the largest population of persons from African descent”.

The third recommendation is the recalibration of the Bretton Woods institution, where “we intensify the lobby for the international financial institutions to restructure the criteria which eliminate middle-income countries from concessional loans and exclude them from debt relief immediately, and mobilise universal support for the Barbados Initiative proposed by Prime Minister [Mia] Mottley [of Barbados].”