Address to the General Assembly of the United Nations to commemorate the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies (The UWI) and Chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles addressed the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on 25 March 2024. He was the keynote speaker at a commemorative meeting of the General Assembly to mark the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (General Assembly: 64th plenary meeting, 78th session). The following is a copy of his written statement.
Mr President, Ambassador extraordinaire the Honourable Dennis Francis it is a privilege and a joy to address this prestigious body, knowing that you, Sir, also symbolically represent the alumni community of The University of the West Indies, the number one ranked university in the Caribbean, which I have the honour to lead.
Mr President, we are gathered to reflect upon and to project our best thinking into the future, why it is that the United Nations has set aside this day in remembrance of the greatest Crime against Humanity in the modern era — the Transatlantic commerce in the enchained, enslaved, commodified, chattelised, and dehumanised bodies of African people.
This evil enterprise, by which Europeans, and their colonial empires, devised legal and financial strategies to convert criminality into capital accumulation, enabled their governments, banks, insurance companies, trading corporations, families — royal and common — churches, universities, men of the state, and the man on the street, to enjoy a bonansa of benefits then and now.
It has left behind for us to navigate and negotiate a legacy of harm, suffering, and unhealed wounds. It is a burden all of humanity must now carry. It is a burden that yokes all Black folks who tomorrow and into the foreseeable future, will continue to suffer the tsunami of economic marginalisation, cultural oppression and political victimisation. Their struggle for freedom with justice has been historic. Today, it is to secure for these crimes committed a commitment to reparatory justice.
As I speak, Mr President, we are calling for justice for the people of Haiti. This Caribbean nation in our Western world should have been held aloft as the first to end the evil of race-based chattel slavery.
The Haitian nation should have been held aloft as a noble exemplar of popular freedom and celebrated for creating the foundations for democratic citizenship in Western modernity. Instead, Mr President, for their audacity of action beyond hope, they were punished by the West they led, and demonised rather than deified. Driven by France and backed by all of Europe and the United States of America, they were forced to pay a reversed reparation — a financial arrangement by which the victims were bullied into paying cash to their defeated enslavers.
For nearly 100 years from 1825, they paid more than 50% of the national income to France as reparations crippling the process of all efforts for national economic and social development. Such an example of diplomatic duplicity continues to haunt the halls of humanity’s efforts to invest in political integrity.
Today we are called to bear witness once again, to the methods of military mendacity and the ideologies of ethnic hatred as we gaze upon the cruelties unleashed upon the innocent in Gaza.
We all know the narratives and the tools that are being used to justify and legitimise this cruelty. They were born and matured in the cradle of Caribbean slave societies. These instruments of terror were not abandoned and buried when the slave enterprise was discredited and dismantled. Human decency has not been spared. History has released them for duty today.
We must therefore unite once again all people of goodwill, and all institutions that hold in their bosom a passion for humanity, to end the military massacres of powerless masses whose only sin is their hope for freedom. We have seen in our story of struggle how the many are made to pay for the actions of the few; and how the principle of war continues to be that the blood of all is to be spilled to soothe the souls of offended egos.
As a result, Mr President, I come hither to lay this fundamental truth before you. I do so with deep respect to you and the nobility of this enduring institution.
This truth, Mr President is this:
- That until our Western World deploys its considerable wisdom and agrees to pay just reparations to those who have been subject to the African slavery holocaust
- That until men and women of good conscience move together as one to bring closure to the crime of enslavement and native genocide in the form of sincere apologies and development compensation
- That until there is respect for the double burden the people of Africa have carried for the moral conscience of modernity, exemplified in our time in the super-humanity of Martin Luther King Jr, and Nelson “Madiba” Mandela
- That until it is recognised and accepted that only a Reparatory Justice Development Framework can secure sustainable moral and economic development
This 21st century will threaten to take us back to the 16th century when these Crimes against Humanity were conceived and concretised. This Mr President is our fear. But we shall not be crippled by fear because we are more future focussed, now more than ever.
It took humanity all of the 19th century, beginning with Haiti in 1804 and ending with Brazil in 1888, to legally uproot slavery from our hemispheric civilisation.
Then it took us all of the 20th century to institutionalise Emancipation into civil and human rights and citizenship. Therefore, Mr President, this 21st century will be the time of Reparatory Justice for Development, and it will be its greatest political movement.
Only such an approach to the future will provide the framework for inclusive economic and social development; it will secure the equity expected from the reform of our global and regional financial institutions.
We will not therefore, with our silence, allow the old, persistent inequalities and the barbarity it has bred to find a new beachhead upon which to launch further crimes against humanity.
We, therefore, celebrate the wisdom of these calls from Caricom and the advocacy of visionary leaders such as the Honourable Ralph Gonsalves and Mia Mottley. This is the moment for all good and humane citizens to join the Reparatory Justice Movement, to come together, and to begin the healing of historic wounds that fester before our very faces.
The persistence of congenital colonialism remains a veritable source of human suffering. The Caribbean which honed the culture of colonial brutality continues to be the home of oppressive colonialism. France, Britain, and The Netherlands seem unwilling to relinquish their colonies in the Caribbean and to allow inhabitants to become citizens of their own nations. Mr President, I urge that the United Nations rekindle its efforts that bore fruit in the mid-20th century to end once and for all the era of colonialism.
The payment of moral and development reparations for the Crimes against Humanity we now wish to adjudicate with consensus will usher in the beginning of a new global order that will represent a break from the pain of the past.
It will signal the dawn of a dignified dispensation for all of humanity. This is the movement Mr President that will constitute the collective human victory of good over evil.
I thank you, Mr President.
WHAT ABOUT the African nations who got rich rounding up their African brothers through war and brutality in order to sell them, via their Afrikan large slave-ports to the new world? Does anyone really think that whites are more guilty than blacks just becasue of skin colour when they all traded in the same commodity?
This is the White Supremacist new response to the crimes againts Black Humanity. They used to acknowledge there crimes but TRUMP has emboldened them to the point that they dont even feign regret any more. They spew old tropes and half truths to justify the greatest and longest evil and crime ever perpertrated against human kind. They conviently forget that their collaborators was largely threatened and coerced into partipating in there crimes againts humanity. When they showed up wwith guns and cannons and told coastal Africans demanded Black Slaves what else could many of these Chiefs do. Those who fought was driven into interiors and homes and busineseses burned to the ground, You get da picture! Frankly old chap its basically lack of respect and barely concealed contempt for Black People that allows them to come into our home and slap us in the face after500 years and counting of raping and plundering Black People. They would NOT dare respond to White Jews in this manner when they demanded compensation and reparations for their Holocaust . The few million Zionist in occupied Palestine has recieved about 1trillion dollars in Aid and Reparations from America and Germany and Private donations and gifts since 1948. They would NOT dare brush of the AshkeNazi Jews by telling them that they could get there reparations and compensation from Jewish collabarators and Jewish Capos who ran the day to to day business of the concentration camps. They would not dare. Even Elon Musk the Richest Racist in the world had to get on his knees and perform an apology tour in Israhell and Europe
a month or so ago because he made some anti-semetic?? remark that was not to there liking ( I dont know how you can be anti-semetic to people who are not semites but that is the White Jesus world we live in- REAL Alice in Wonderland shite) The Boer Boy had to get on his knees and beg forgivness before ZOG took there boots of his RedNeKKK.
This annonymous Demon who wrote this tripe above and dared to insult our intelligence and our ancestors is probably in Grenada laughing and grinning with Black Folks every day. The Leadership and elites of this country will sooner help him/her than me or you. And the band plays on ma people!!
“France, Britain, and The Netherlands seem unwilling to relinquish their colonies in the Caribbean and to allow inhabitants to become citizens of their own nations“
This is frankly just lies, and you’d expect better of the Vice Chancellor of the UWI. Bermuda was given an independence referendum in 1994, and 74% of Bermudans voted against independence. Anguilla was supposed to become independent together with St. Kitts and Nevis, but the Anguillans were so opposed to it they rose in rebellion in order to remain a British territory. The British government have made clear on multiple occasions that all their Caribbean territories will get independence whenever they themselves wish.
Martinique and Guadeloupe have both rejected independence. They rejected further autonomy from France in referenda in 2010 and 2003 respectively. In 2010, 79% of Martiniqueans rejected autonomy, and in 2003 73% of Guadeloupeans did the same.
In 2005 only 5% of Curaçaoans voted for independence from the Netherlands. In 2004, only 0.5% of Boinair citizens voted for independence. Likewise in 2000 independence for Sint Maarten was supported by only 14% of voters.
The UK, Netherlands and France have on multiple occasions given their remaining Caribbean territories the right and ability to gain independence. The only reason they haven’t is because the citizens of these islands do not want it.