Debt Relief and Aid Are No Replacement for Slavery Reparations, Caribbean Figures Tell UK

Offers of debt relief and development assistance from the UK cannot be a replacement for reparations for centuries of slavery, leading figures in the Caribbean reparatory justice movement have said.

Their comments follow British prime minister Andy Burnham's announcement on Friday that he wanted to begin a structured dialogue on slavery and reparations and was open to Britain apologising, but ruled out reparations.

Instead, he proposed discussions on debt resets for smaller Commonwealth nations and announced £40m ($54m) for critical infrastructure in the Caribbean over the next three years.

As leaders of the 56-member Commonwealth bloc meet in a private retreat at their summit in Antigua, Ralph Gonsalves, a former prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines and a senior figure in the reparatory justice movement's Repair Campaign, said countries in the region were likely to welcome Burnham's offer, but the Caribbean would resist any attempt to treat debt restructuring or development assistance as a form of reparation.

A 10-point plan drawn up by the Caribbean Community's reparations commission, which outlines the region's vision for reparations, specifically asks for 'debt cancellation' — not debt restructuring — and 'monetary compensation', arguing that former colonies' existing debts are intergenerational and are ultimately and intimately tied to centuries of colonial extraction.

Gonsalves said that when he listened to Andy Burnham and to the king, they were talking about what is helpful not as reparations, but about working on specific things like debt relief, education, health and climate change infrastructure. All of those things are within the 10-point plan, he noted, but they are also within the sustainable development goals of 2015, which everyone signed on to at the United Nations.

He added that the reparatory justice 10-point plan deals with issues including ecology and psychological repair, and that for people such as members of the Rastafari faith, or brothers and sisters who may wish repatriation, that is something to be worked out with African countries. But there are financial implications in that, so there will have to be a separate carve-out on the basis of the 10-point plan.

Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, chair of the House of Commons' all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan Reparations, said the question was fundamentally about 'agency'. She was speaking at an event on Tuesday to launch a global reparations caravan, which will travel across countries to educate and engage people in the reparations movement.

Ribeiro-Addy said that when reparative justice arrangements are being made, they absolutely have to be made with those who were affected, because if it is done to people, it is not reparations. What was taken from people of African descent when they were enslaved was their agency — their right to decide all of these different things about their lives — she said.

Gonsalves said the danger of reducing reparatory justice to development assistance was that such assistance remained discretionary on the UK's part. The discussion was being shaped only within the frame of sustainable development goals, he said, when the specificities of reparatory justice as distinct from general sustainable development goals have to be understood.

Prof Kingsley Abbott, a human rights lawyer and director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, also stressed the importance of harmed communities having a decisive say in what reparations should entail. Speaking at the global reparations caravan launch on Tuesday, he said that victims of serious human rights violations and atrocity crimes — whether in Guatemala, Colombia, Nepal or Myanmar — all had one thing in common: they wanted justice, and they wanted not only justice, but to be made whole again.

A spokesperson for the Foreign Office said the prime minister wants to build stronger relationships to renew the relevance of the Commonwealth in a new era, by facing the past together and focusing on a future where every person living within it has equality, security and hope. The UK is already committed to working with Commonwealth partners on issues including the role of private finance in tackling global debt issues, addressing the climate crisis, and supporting economic development, and will continue to do so, the spokesperson said.