The CARICOM Reparation Commission (CRC) met in Barbados March 28-29 for its 26th Meeting and 2nd Special Conference, where the now-controversial Royal Visits to the Caribbean were discussed.
Other Reparations-related matters were also discussed including past and upcoming events from the African Union-CARICOM Summits last September to plans for Reparations summits in 2022 and beyond, as well as the issue of Reparations for the region’s First People for Native Genocide, as well as qualification of descendants of deceptive East Indian Indentureship for inclusion in the calls and cause for Reparations from Britain and the European Union (EU) member-states that participated in and benefitted from the Slave Trade.
Interviewed by The VOICE, Chairman of the Saint Lucia National Reparations Committee (NRC) Earl Bousquet, who is the island’s commissioner on the CRC, said: “The meeting discussed the Royal Visits in the context of the Reparations-related responses from Belize, The Bahamas and Jamaica after being visited by Prince William and his wife Kate.”
He added, “The visits being in the context of observance and celebration of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, the responses have so far been a wake-up call to the Royal Family that in the age of Independence and Republicanism, Caribbean citizens no longer see the Queen and the Royals like they were taught to during centuries of colonialism.”
According to Bousquet, “The visits were supposed to have been a royal charm offensive, but instead they put the Caribbean’s Reparations Demand on the Royal agenda in a way never planned, which is a boon for the CRC and the CARICOM governments that appointed them.”
The NRC Chair pointed out however, “The Commission did not take a position on the issue, instead leaving it to National Committees to decide how best they see fit to welcome the Royals in the respective nations to be visited.”
Bousquet noted that “At least one member-entity represented on the Saint Lucia NRC, the Caribbean Rastafari Organization (CRO), has called on Saint Lucians to welcome the Royals, not with disrespect, but in ways that will peacefully but strongly demonstrate Saint Lucians support of the CARICOM Reparations demand.”
The Chair said with the CRC’s position now taken to allow national entities to decide, “The NRC will now discuss the issue online over this weekend and hopefully arrive at a consensus by next week, ahead of the upcoming royal visit later this month.”
Bousquet said he also reported to and updated the CRC on the related state of affairs in Saint Lucia and “We are also looking forward to the 2022 Emancipation Day and related observances and implementation of plans to be undertaken by the NRC for the rest of this year, and over the next five years, hopefully with a governmental budget allocation.”
He recalled that “No administration has given the NRC a subvention since it was appointed in 2013 and we sincerely hope this third administration will be the first in that regard, as the responsibilities of the NRC, like at the CRC where successive governments have consistently paid Saint Lucia’s annual dues, now has to operate in an enhanced environment with budgetary constraints and requirements, like the annual Reparations lecture series for local and Caribbean schools started in 2020 and continued in 2021.”
Bousquet said the CRC and CARICOM are now operating “in an environment where the work started in 2013 has mushroomed regionally and internationally, with the Reparations movements having been revived everywhere since then, including the USA and UK, Africa and Europe, India and the remaining European colonies in the Caribbean, as well as preparations for upcoming Reparations summits involving Africa and India.”
Bousquet said the CRC meeting “also called for NRCs to do more to observe the second half of the United Nations decade for People of African Descent, with Saint Lucia’s Ambassador June Soomer as CARICOM’s representative on the UN’s permanent body for the observances, we also look forward to working with her, with the CRC and with CARICOM and the Saint Lucia Government, as well as with the Center for Reparations Research (CRR) and the University of the West indies (UWI), on the issue of Saint Lucia’s participation in the rest of the decade.”
Another event on the CRC and NRC’s agenda for 2022, Bousquet said, is the second AU-CARICOM Summit on September 7.
The CRC chair noted that the Barbados meeting had been planned before the Royal Visits began “and were not an original agenda item, but had to be added in light of their taking place while the Caribbean’s reparations representatives met in Bridgetown, where Prince Charles last November said he was sorry for slavery.”
He concluded, “The overall responses to the three Royal Visits so far have underlined the advances made across the region in people’s understanding and support for the CARICOM call for Reparations; and if there’s anything that can be agreed upon by all after the current visits will have ended, is that no future Royal Visits to the Caribbean will ever be the same again. Guaranteed.”
I have been and still feel your pain after so long a just fight, for reparation due to the slave trade when our ancestors were made to suffer for hundreds of years, without representation; sadly today this is happening at a time when COVID-19 have and is still taking a toll on the worlds’ economy; but we have been for a tong time, pre COVID and at present making our voices heard, and now at a most inappropriate time, just as the world was getting its acts together with this epidemic, a tragic war started. It seems that the whole world is undergoing one crisis after another. Whereas this war is pretty well localized, but the real damage is global; first we have the refuge situation, then the complex matter of neighbouring nations well armed with Nuclear weapons, and we pray that no mistakes happen. I wish this delegation with our own Rep: Earl Bousquet all the blessings, hoping something positive comes their way.