– President tells Rastafarian confab

PRESIDENT David Granger said that public education is essential in order to heighten awareness at the personal, national, regional and international levels with regard to the calls for reparative justice, which he described as a just and necessary cause.
“The world needs to know about, and people need to be conscious of, the crime of enslavement,” he said. The Head of State made these remarks at the National Rastafarian Conference which opened on Friday in collaboration with the Guyana Reparations Committee at the University of Guyana’s Turkeyen Campus.
He explained that awareness and education will allow for greater solidarity which will serve to bolster the region’s collective advocacy at the international level; implant in the public mind, the legal and moral bases of the region’s demand for reparations; indicate the precedents in support of reparative justice and lay the foundation for international advocacy and agitation.
“Reparative justice’ is not a ruse for development finance or international handouts. It is a demand aimed at ensuring recompense for crimes against humanity, enslavement and native genocide, and for the atrocities of indentured immigration. The demand for ‘reparative justice’ must not be confused with developmental assistance,” the President said.

Noting that reparative justice is not an alien concept to Europe and the rest of the world, the President pointed out that Britain compensated sugar planters for the loss of their ‘property’ (slaves) in 1838 as well as the victims of torture during the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya. Further, Germany paid reparations to its allies after the first and second World Wars, and even agreed to pay reparations to Israel for the ‘Holocaust’. However, there has been no recompense for the dispossession and underdevelopment of the Caribbean as a result of slavery, native genocide and indentured immigration.
“The descendants of the colonised peoples of the Caribbean, therefore, are correct in their call for reparative justice to right these wrongs. The victims of these crimes against humanity have been deprived of an apology. They have been deprived of ‘reparative justice’ for the abominable crimes that resulted in the loss of millions of lives, the expropriation of wealth and the legacy of underdevelopment,” President Granger said.
Head of the Guyana Reparations Committee, Mr. Eric Phillips, expressed his appreciation to President Granger for ensuring that the Committee gets an annual budget, which allows its members to meet on a weekly basis. This is the only committee in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) that gets such a budget. The aim of the National Rastafarian Conference is to bring together leaders and members of the Rastafarian community to discuss the issue of repatriation. Mr. Phillips said that his Committee needs the Rastafarian community to host members of other Rastafarian communities in the Caribbean with a view of creating a White Paper on repatriation. (Ministry of the Presidency)