Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari (far right) holds on to the CARICOM’s symbol of the reparatory justice movement, the reparations baton, in Castries, Saint Lucia. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, Oct 18 2021 (IPS)

The Rastafarian organizations in the Caribbean are determined that the issue of slavery reparations will emerge from the eclipse of COVID-19.

As the world deals with the impacts of efforts to contain the virus’ spread and regional governments tackle vaccine hesitancy and a wave of misinformation, issues not directly related to COVID-19 have had to be temporarily shelved.

However, members of the Caribbean Rastafari Organization are determined to keep the movement for slavery reparations in the minds of citizens and on the agenda of policymakers.

“From the time of emancipation in 1834, our ancestors have been clamoring for reparations. Some leaders have taken heed to the calling, some have ignored it, but the Rastafari nation from its inception has been appealing for reparations, and up to today, we are on that platform,” chairperson of the Caribbean Rastafari Organization, Burnet Sealy told IPS.

Sealy is known as Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari – part of a move by members of the Rastafarian faith to change the colonial names given at birth and advance the internal healing aspect of the reparations process.

He is a member of the Reparations Committee of Saint Lucia, one of 15 national reparations organizations in the member states of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) bloc.

In 2013, the group of nations established the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC), a body charged with making the ‘moral, ethical and legal’ argument for reparatory justice for organizations of the Caribbean Community.

The CRC is headed by Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies.

“It is the greatest crime ever committed against humanity – a crime whose harm and suffering continue to haunt humanity in this 21st century. A crime that has anchored the 21st century within a legacy of untold human suffering, and there is no carpet in the world that is big enough to brush this under,” Sir Hilary told a Slave Trade Remembrance Day online discussion earlier this year.

The movement for reparations in the Caribbean has risen and waned in the last decade. Changes in administration on some islands, with ensuing shifts in policy directions and budgetary priorities, meant that funding for national committees has also been wavered.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequent limitations on movement and in-person gatherings have added another obstacle to the movement.

However, Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari says that despite the challenges, the Rastafarian movement remains committed to healing from the effects of slavery.

“Reparations Cannot Die,” he told IPS.

“We have been educating the masses on what reparations are all about. People think that reparation is just about money, but we are letting them know that this is not true. Reparations really mean repairing the damage that was done as a result of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery, continuing to colonial rule. The damage was done mentally, physically, spiritually, financially, culturally.”

CARICOM, which is home to about 16 million people, has its reparations battle fought as part of a 10-Point Plan. Signed in 2013, the plan calls for:

• A full, formal apology for slavery by the governments of Europe;
• A repatriation program to resettle descendants of the over 10 million Africans who were forcefully transported to the Caribbean;
• An Indigenous Peoples Development Program to begin healing for genocide on the native Caribbean populations;
• The establishment of cultural institutions like museums and research centers;
• A program to remedy the public health crisis includes the African descended population in the Caribbean, which has the highest incidence of hypertension and type 2 diabetes globally. Regional health experts and historians say this is directly related to the ‘nutritional experience, physical and emotional brutality and overall stress profiles associated with slavery, genocide, and apartheid;
• Programs to eradicate the high levels of illiteracy that stem from slavery;
• The establishment of an African Knowledge Program;
• Psychological rehabilitation programs;
• Technology transfer;
• Debt cancellation.

“The argument has been won that reparatory justice is inevitable. The issue is how best to achieve it. Who should have the authority to conceptualize and structure it and how to ensure that while it has a reparatory function, it is also at the same time creating a greater sense of justice and humanity in the world,” says Beckles.

The road to reparatory justice has been tough to conceptualize in the Caribbean, and in the face of issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, and a global pandemic, slavery reparations often plummet on the list of priorities for governments.

For champions of the cause, however, the commitment is unwavering.

“It is our responsibility to maintain that focus of our ancestors and see to it that we have reparations,” Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari told IPS.

“This is not a quick fix. It is a long journey, but we refuse to give up. We will never give up the fight. Reparations are a must.”

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

One of the mothers from Ayacucho at the “El Ojo que Llora” Memorial, demanding compensation for her lost loved one. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Sep 2 2013 (IPS)

Venisia Ávalos, a 65-year-old indigenous woman from Peru’s highlands region of Ayacucho, looks for her son’s name among a labyrinth formed by thousands of small grey stones.

Each one of the fist-sized stones carries the name of a victim of the country’s armed conflict between government forces and left-wing guerrillas.

“Here’s my son, here he is!” she cries, bursting into tears. Her son disappeared 30 years ago, and she never found his remains – not even a garment he was wearing that day, not a single trace. Just this small stone, today.

Ávalos came to Lima from Ayacucho in Peru’s south-central highlands to take part in the activities for the commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the presentation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) report.

The CVR investigated the human rights crimes committed during the government’s 1980-2000 counterinsurgency war against the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) guerrillas.

The CVR estimated that 69,000 civilians – mainly Quechua-speaking indigenous people – were killed by the guerrillas or the state security forces. The Commission held the Maoist Shining Path responsible for just over half of the killings.

Ávalos is not alone here. Dozens of mothers and other relatives of victims from the regions hardest hit by the violence reached the capital on Wednesday Aug 28 to continue to press for two chief demands: comprehensive – in other words, not just monetary – reparations and a thorough search for the remains of the victims of forced disappearance.

These two aspects are enormous debts that the state has so far failed to address in a satisfactory manner, according to a resolution recently published by the Defensoría del Pueblo, or ombudsman’s office.

As of March, the government had paid individual reparations to just 37 percent of the 78,000 people registered to receive compensation, while only 33 percent of the collective or community reparations had been paid, according to official figures.

In the search for the victims of forced disappearance, the work has moved even more slowly. As of April, 2,418 bodies had been recovered from clandestine burial sites, 1,371 of which had been identified and returned to the families.

“Given that not much over 2,000 bodies have been recovered in 10 years, at this pace it would take around 80 years in the best of cases to recover the 16,000 victims that the state estimates are in the burial sites – which is an underestimate,” states the book “Los muertos de Ayacucho” (Ayacucho’s Dead), by the non-governmental Human Rights Commission (COMISEDH).

Ayacucho, one of the poorest and most remote, rural and heavily indigenous parts of the country, accounted for a full 47 percent of the 69,000 victims.

One of the places where the families searching for missing loved ones gathered Wednesday was the “El Ojo que Llora” (The Crying Eye) Memorial, where Ávalos found the stone bearing the name of her son, Rigoberto Huamaní Ávalos.

The memorial has a labyrinth of thousands of smooth stones, each bearing the name, age and year of death of a victim. In the middle of the labyrinth is a sculpture, with a small stone in the form of an eye at the centre, which continuously trickles water, reflecting the grief of the families who want to find out what happened to their loved ones.

“Classmates of my son are now teachers, which he could have been too,” Ávalos told IPS. “They have families, and my son could have had one too.”

Rigoberto was her firstborn. In 1983, the security forces hauled him away from his school along with his teacher and several classmates, says Ávalos, who is furious at what she sees as the pittance she was given in compensation: 10,000 soles (3,600 dollars).

“That’s what my son is worth?” asks the grieving mother, who is a member of the National Association of Families of the Kidnapped, Detained and Disappeared of Peru (ANFASEP), founded 30 years ago in Ayacucho.

The CVR was created in response to demands of the women grouped in ANFASEP.

The families are calling for the government to pay higher individual reparations, of 39,000 soles (13,900 dollars) per victim, instead of 10,000.

Isabel Coral, who was executive secretary of the government’s High-Level Multisectoral Commission (CMAN), told IPS that the higher amount was based on an agreement reached directly with Peruvian President Ollanta Humala, who took office in July 2011.

“I explained to Humala that the violence had been so atrocious for these people, who had been deprived of all possible strategies for getting back on their feet and moving ahead on their own, that integral, effective reparations were urgently needed,” she said.

Coral said she had agreed to draft the chapter on compensation in Humala’s government programme in exchange for his compliance with higher payments to the survivors if he was elected.

But today “there is no political will,” she complained, saying the government had not stuck to its promises and had instead been paying out small amounts of money “in trickles”.

In the massacre of Lucanamarca, in Ayacucho, Ervenciana Huancahuari lost her mother, her husband, and a sister. Some of her other sisters lost their husbands too.

She is 64 years old, and has only received 5,000 soles. In accordance with the law on reparations, she will receive the other half of the money when she turns 65.

The money received by Huancahuari has already been distributed among her five children. But the 1,000 soles (357 dollars) that each received is long gone. And she didn’t keep any for herself.

“My (dead) mother was a cow? Was she a bull, for us to be paid 5,000 soles?” she asks IPS.

José Sayán, president of CONAVIP, the national umbrella of organisations of families of victims of the political violence, tells IPS that the 14 organisations he represents are demanding the modification of the decree that set the amount of reparations at 10,000 soles per victim, which was approved by Alan García in his second term (2006-2011).

Coral said that in December 2011 she presented a proposal, approved by 11 cabinet ministries, for the government to modify the decree, in order to officially increase the amount of reparations from 10,000 to 39,000 soles. But the ministry of the economy and finance blocked the initiative, she added.

Sayán and other activists met with lawmakers on Aug. 28 to get them to press for the modification of the decree.

Rocío Paz, a representative of the National Human Rights Coordinator, told IPS that the Humala administration had made progress on paper but not in terms of implementation.

Acting ombudsman Eduardo Vega said there had been a “setback” in the area of justice and reparations.

The president of COMISEDH, Pablo Rojas, was also discouraged. But he said the participation of the families in the 10th anniversary of the CVR report helped underscore the urgent need for public policies addressing their plight.

In response, the executive secretary of CMAN, Adolfo Chávarri, told the government news agency Andina on Aug. 29 that more progress had been made with this administration than with the last one.

He also noted that the support provided was not only economic but included scholarships as well as psychological assistance for the families when the remains of their loved ones are returned to them.

But Dora  Astuñaupa, who lost her father during the conflict, in the central jungle region of Satipo, complained that she hadn’t received any kind of support yet. Her eyes shining with sadness and anger, she said a promise was no longer enough.

The slaves brought to the Caribbean lived in inhumane conditions. Above are examples of slave huts in Bonaire provided by Dutch colonialists. About five feet tall and six feet wide, two to three slaves slept in these after working in near by salt mines. Credit: V.C.Vulto/GNU license

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

As Caribbean countries prepare to observe Emancipation Day on Aug. 1, they are also caught up in an ongoing debate over reparations for slavery.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, who has stated publicly that he will “take no quarter on those issues”, told IPS, “We have in my view a very strong case to put to an appropriate tribunal.”

Last week, as he addressed an audience in Cuba marking the 60th anniversary of the attack on the Moncada Barracks that launched the 1953 Revolution, Gonsalves said the Caribbean is demanding reparations from Europe for native genocide and African slavery.

“The principal reason for underdevelopment in the Caribbean and Latin America is the legacy of native genocide and African slavery, and we do so with the spirit and with the examples, in this new period, of the combatants of Moncada,” he said.

At the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) summit here earlier this month, Gonsalves presented his fellow leaders with three position papers, including one by Professor Hilary Beckles, the pro-vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, who recently published the book “Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations owed the Caribbean for Slavery and Indigenous Genocide”.

Gonsalves is pushing for a common position on reparations and has welcomed the decision to establish a committee under the chairmanship of the Barbados Prime Minister Freundel Stuart to drive the issue.

The committee, which will oversee the work of a CARICOM Reparations Commission, will include Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Haiti, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Suriname, the chairs of national reparations committees, and a representative of the University of the West Indies.

Kafra Kambon, chair of the Emancipation Support Committee in Trinidad and Tobago, told IPS it is important for non-governmental organisations and the Caribbean population in general to support the initiatives of regional governments.

Kambon, whose grouping organises the annual Emancipation Day activities here, said that the support is necessary since he believes “European governments are going to try to corral them [Caribbean leaders] or even pressure them to abandon the idea.

”We have to give the strength to that call for reparations as a principle,” Kambon told IPS, calling the slave trade “massive crimes that go beyond the human imagination”.

“People have been damaged psychologically, we came out of slavery suffering extreme trauma,” he said.

“We were not behind Europe at the time of the contact and some people think of slavery as a rescue mission. It was not,” he said, adding that “slavery represents a generation of people that have been wiped out”.

In the Dutch country of Suriname, the National Reparations Committee said it would seek consensus and awareness for the correct version of history.

“We’re going to bring this dead information about reparations for slavery and about the genocide of our country’s first inhabitants to life,” said the committee’s chair, Armand Zunder, who has applauded the move by CARICOM.

“We thought we would be fighting this fight on our own, but we know now we have full support. We have made big strides,” said Zunder, an economist, who earlier this month filed the first ever petition to The Netherlands for reparations to the descendants of slaves in Suriname.

Zunder said that previously published research results that showed that the Netherlands earned some 125 billion euros from Suriname during slavery.

Meanwhile, the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE) has written a lengthy letter to Caribbean leaders warning that their “top down approach” will “end up not achieving the reparations aspirations of the masses of Afrikan descendants and indigenous citizens in the Caribbean.”

PARCOE co-vice chairs Esther Stanford-Xosei and Kofi Mawuli Klu wrote that the Caribbean should seek to avoid “the same errors that were made with the former Organisation of African Unity’s (OAU) Group of Eminent Persons (GEP) in failing to effectively consult on reparations strategies, be informed by and act in the best interests of the various Afrikan countries respective citizenries”.

They cited the work of the U.S. activist and law professor, Mari Matsuda, who argues that approaches to reparations incorporate a more grassroots, “bottom-up” approach.

“By ‘bottom’, Matsuda refers to the lived experience of those individuals and groups who are alleging the violation of rights rather than those who have traditionally defined the scope of legal redress such as judges, lawyers associations and other groups who are part of upholding the existing social, legal and economic status quo,” they wrote.

PARCOE is also urging Caribbean countries not to be taken in by the recent “historic victory for the Mau Mau survivors of British colonial era torture and abuses in detention committed between 1952 and 1963 during Britain’s suppression of the Mau Mau war of liberation”.

PARCOE said the “the financial compensation aspect of the settlement represents a paltry sum and is not commensurate with the torture and suffering of Mau Mau patriots considering that the British Government paid out £20 million, the modern equivalent of around £16.5 billion, to compensate some 3,000 slaveholding families for the loss of their ‘property’ when slavery was purportedly abolished in Britain’s colonies in 1833.”

Britain has agreed to compensate Kenyans tortured during the Mau Mau uprising against colonial rule in the 1950s, Foreign Secretary William Hague said Thursday.

Hague expressed “sincere regret” that the abuses had taken place and told parliament the government would pay a total of 30.8 million dollar to 5,228 clients represented by a British law firm.

A lawyer for the victims said on Wednesday the settlement had been agreed without disclosing the sum.

“(The negotiations) have included everybody with sufficient evidence of torture. And that number is about 5,200,” Kenyan lawyer Paul Muite said.

Negotiations began after a London court ruled in October that three elderly Kenyans, who suffered castration, rape and beatings while in detention during a crackdown by British forces and their Kenyan allies in the 1950s, could sue Britain.

The torture took place during the so-called Kenyan Emergency of 1952-1960, when fighters from the Mau Mau movement attacked British targets, causing panic among white settlers.

Al Jazeera’s Peter Greste, reporting from the Kenyan capital Nairobi, said Britain would also pay for a special memorial to be erected at the site where the abuses took place.

He said that since the case was settled out of court, it would not set a legal precedent for future claims of compensation for abuses during colonial rule. But he added that it could set a “moral precedent” for other victims to step up.

‘Pain and grievance’

The 30.8 million dollars in compensation would work out at 5,891 dollars per claimant in a country where average national income per capita is 821 dollars.

The foreign office said in last month’s statement that “there should be a debate about the past”.

“It is an enduring feature of our democracy that we are willing to learn from our history,” the statement said.

“We understand the pain and grievance felt by those, on all sides, who were involved in the divisive and bloody events of the Emergency period in Kenya.”

In a test case, claimants Paulo Muoka Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara last year told Britain’s High Court how they were subjected to torture and sexual mutilation.

Lawyers said that Nzili was castrated, Nyingi severely beaten and Mara subjected to appalling sexual abuse in detention camps during the Mau Mau rebellion.

A fourth claimant, Susan Ngondi, has died since legal proceedings began.

The Mau Mau nationalist movement originated in the 1950s among the Kikuyu people of Kenya. Its loyalists advocated violent resistance to British domination of the country.

The Kenya Human Rights Commission has estimated 90,000 Kenyans were killed or maimed and 160,000 detained during the uprising.

‘Triumph’

London tried for three years to block the Mau Mau veterans’ legal action in the courts, drawing condemnation from the elderly torture victims who accused Kenya’s former colonial master of using legal technicalities to fight the case.

Caroline Elkins, a Harvard history professor who acted as an expert witness in the case launched in 2009, said the settlement would be the first of its kind for the former British Empire.

“(It) should be seen as a triumph,” Elkins told Reuters during a visit to Nairobi for the British announcement.

Elkins wrote the book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya which served as the basis for the Mau Mau case.

Britain had first said that responsibility for events during the Mau Mau uprising passed to Kenya upon its independence in 1963, an argument which London courts rejected.

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.