Garfield Ekon
Staff Member
The millions of African who suffered under the brutal regime of slavery, must be honoured through reparatory justice, according to Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), António Guterres.
In his message to commemorate the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, on Monday, he said many of those who organised and ran the slave trade, amassed huge fortunes, and the enslaved were deprived of education, healthcare, opportunity, and prosperity.
“We call for reparatory justice frameworks, to help overcome generations of exclusion and discrimination. We appeal for the space and necessary conditions for healing, repair, and justice. And above all, we resolve to work for a world free from racism, discrimination, bigotry, and hate. Together, as we remember the victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, let us unite for human rights, dignity, and opportunity for all,” he said.
Adding that the lives of the victims were ruled by terror, as they endured rape, floggings, lynchings and other atrocities and humiliations, he noted that it laid the foundations for a violent discrimination system based on white supremacy that still echoes today, and descendants of enslaved Africans and people of African descent are still fighting for equal rights and freedoms around the world.
The commemoration was held under the theme: “Celebrating Global Freedom: Countering Racism with Justice in Societies and Among Nations,” and delivering the keynote address, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, who is the Chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Commission on Reparation and Social Justice, urged the world body to back a reparatory justice programme ,and end colonisation within the Caribbean.
““I urge the United Nations therefore, as part of its reparatory justice programme, to recommit to recommit to the agenda of decolonisation so that this crime against humanity which began in the Caribbean can finally come to an end with the ending of colonisation,” he said.
For over 400 years, more than 15 million men, women and children were the victims of the tragic transatlantic slave trade, one of the darkest chapters in human history.
Professor Beckles stressed that the payment of moral and development reparations for the crimes against African people, will at the very beginning represent the formation of a “new and more equitable” global order that will represent a break from historical backwardness and lay the future for the dawn of a “dignified dispensation for all of humanity,” he told his audience.
A partnership has been forged between ta 55-member African Union and the Caribbean Community (Caricom) of 20 countries with an aim to intensify pressure on former slave-owning nations to engage with the reparation’s movement.
