Colonial State Crimes and the CARICOM Mobilization for Reparation and Justice

Notes

1. The list included the United Kingdom, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

2. For more information, see: http://www.caricom.org/reparations-for-native-genocide-and-slavery.

3. Following Gilroy ( 1993) and Nimako and Willemsen ( 2011), I have chosen to call this violent practice the transatlantic enslaved trade since those who were taken to the Americas as slaves were originally free human beings from Africa who were captured and enslaved, and then sold as slaves.

4. For some reactions, see: http://caricomreparations.org/angela-rye-theres-nothing-un-american-reparations/

5. David Cameron's ancestors were slave-owners and were among the wealthy families that received reparations after the abolition of slavery (Araujo 2017). Additionally, for an in-depth analysis on British slave-ownership, see the work of Professor Catherine Hall and of the Centre for the Study of British Slave-Ownership at UCL: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/.

6. See Beckles’ ( 2013) analysis of the British Royal Family's involvement in slave-ownership.

7. That is, the ethical principle developed by Levinas ( 2012) that emphasized the Other and/or exteriority, and in what is beyond to the ontological dimension.

8. Following Fanon's (2009) understanding of sub-ontology (how power and ontology operates over those considered sub-humans), Maldonado (2007) defined ontological resistance as the violent act of denying the humanity of the subordinated one.

9. For critical approaches to the lack of emphasis on colonial cases within the tradition of transitional justice and for critiques on their perception and definition of justice, see the work of Jung (2009); Balint, Evans and McMillan (2014) and Maddison and Shepherd (2014).

10. An in-depth analysis of dominating rationality is beyond the scope of this article. However, this rationality refers to the dark side of modernity portrayed by the decolonial turn (Mignolo 2005).

11. I will be using Agamben's (1998) approach to biopolitics. Agamben focused not just on the productive dimension of biopower but also on the ways in which power controls and dominates life. In this sense, in the colonial context, biopolitics is not just productive but also entails the redefinition and imagination of oneself.

12. Hira (2014) has defined the effects of colonialism in four dimensions: geographic, economic, social relations and politics.

13. For an approach to this concept, see Atiles (2018).

14. Beckles (2013) and Catherine Hall have shown how Barclays, J.P. Morgan and other banks made their fortune as a result of their involvement with the transatlantic enslaved trade.

15. In a similar move, France passed a law in 1849 to compensate the slave-owners after the abolition of slavery in 1848. The amount compensated by the French government to the owner of 250,000 slaves was 120 million francs (US$16 billion today). Also, the Netherlands and the US paid compensation to the slave-owners and finally, in Puerto Rico, the Spanish Colonial government paid 35,000 million pesetas (US$200,000 today) per slave in compensation after the emancipation in 1876.

16. For more information, please visit http://caricomreparations.org/caricom/caricoms-10-point-reparation-plan/

17. Jung's (2009) analysis of the Canadian use of the transitional justice framework to address the colonial violence implemented against First Nations is useful to understand the similarities between these processes. Particularly, one of the elements raised by Jung is the incompatibility of the definitions and scope of justices and injustice between the indigenous people and the colonial state. In a way we can see a similar manifestation of these divergences in the CARICOM case. For that reason, the concept of decolonial justice is the one that better explains the claims made by CARICOM.

18. On the underdevelopment of the region and its direct relationship to genocide and slavery, see Nunn (2008).

19. However, it should not be overlooked that Leigh Day has been under scrutiny for allegedly unfair and exploitative agreements it has signed with the victims and for taking advantage of the various cases it has brought to international forums. For a detailed analysis, see Khoury and Whyte (2017).

20. Nowadays, there are 14 African countries still forcibly paying France for their independence. For more information, see http://csglobe.com/14-african-countries-still-pay-colonial-tax-france/.

21. For an elaborated exposition of the ten-point action plan, see http://caricomreparations.org/caricom/caricoms-10-point-reparation-plan/.

22. It is important to note that in the historiographic analyses presented by the Commission, it has been identified that in the year 2000, only 30,000 indigenous people survived in the Caribbean.

23. At the end of European colonial rule, particularly at the end of British colonial rule, indigenous and Afro-Caribbean communities were generally in a state of illiteracy. In 1960, for example, about 70 per cent of Afro-Caribbean people in the West Indies were functional illiterates.

24. Programmes such as school exchanges, cultural tours, community programmes for the development of artistic and economic activities, religious commitment and political interaction programmes are necessary to neutralize the void created by the transatlantic trade of Africans.

25. That is, as a result of British colonial policy, the Caribbean states were not technologically, economically or politically prepared to initiate national construction processes in the information age and global economy. In addition, one of the key problems of colonial technology policies is that younger generations have been denied access to education in science and technology.