The Tribune

By KEILE CAMPBELL

Tribune Staff Reporter

kcampbell@tribunemedia.net

A FORMER chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent urged Caribbean governments to intensify their push for reparatory justice on Friday, arguing that sustainable development cannot occur without confronting the legacies of slavery and colonialism.

Dr June Soomer made the remarks during the launch of the United Nations’ Second Decade for People of African Descent at the University of The Bahamas’ Performing Arts Centre at the Keva M Bethel Building on the Oakes Field campus. The event included a symposium on Haitian restitution and reparatory justice.

Dr Soomer, Saint Lucia’s former ambassador to CARICOM and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, said the Caribbean has played a leading role in advancing the global reparations movement and that the regional push dates back decades.

“Reparatory justice is not a recent movement,” Dr Soomer said. “Reparatory justice is something that started on the African coast when we were enslaved and put into dungeons before we were shipped across and trafficked to the Americas.”

She said the Caribbean’s reparations agenda gained renewed momentum in 2013 when CARICOM leaders agreed to pursue reparatory justice for Indigenous peoples and people of African descent. The CARICOM Reparations Commission, she said, first acknowledged the genocide of Indigenous peoples before addressing crimes committed against Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas.

“It is important that we never forget what the Indigenous people went through first,” she said. “Genocide and ethnic cleansing have made them invisible in plain sight.”

Dr Soomer said the movement also seeks to challenge how slavery is described.

“We were not slaves,” she said. “We were human beings who were enslaved.”

She continued: "We were not born slaves. We were human beings. We were lawyers, doctors, teachers. They make you think that we were only people running around in the fields. No, we were learned people."

She rejected the notion that Africans passively accepted enslavement.

“Not only did we resist in Africa, we fought many colonial wars so that we would not be shipped across,” Dr Soomer said.

“There are collaborators everywhere there is oppression because it is a question of survival,” she said.

Dr Soomer said the second UN decade must move beyond symbolic recognition and focus on structural change, including education reform and legal review in Caribbean nations. She urged governments to expand the scope of reparatory justice to include environmental injustice, climate change and technological bias.

She said Caribbean communities remain disproportionately vulnerable to environmental damage despite contributing little to the global emissions driving climate change.

“All of the greenhouse gases are now coming back and affecting us,” she said.

“It is a double reparations we want because they left us to live on marginalised lands, on the slopes of mountains or on river banks, or in places where the sea can come and wipe out a whole island,” she said, pointing to Hurricane Dorian as an example of the region’s exposure to climate impacts.

Dr Soomer also called for a review of laws and constitutions inherited from colonial rule.

“We cannot continue to depend on colonial legislation that does not represent us,” she said. “We have to call for review of all of our constitutions and legislation that not only continues to dehumanise us within the criminal justice system as a group, but continues to discriminate against us as women of African descent.”

She said the legal structure of slavery placed particular burdens on enslaved women, noting that the status of children born into slavery was determined through the mother.

“We think that when we talk about labour we are only talking about work in the field,” she said. “We are also talking about labour and the forced impregnation of women of African descent.”

“Capitalism was built on the wounds of black women,” Dr Soomer said.

She said the second UN decade must also address collective rights.

“We have to fight for something called collective rights,” she said.

“We were collectively stolen. We were collectively criminalised. We were collectively beaten. And now we do not have collective rights.”

“Independence did not mean decolonisation,” Dr Soomer said.

Dr Soomer called for stronger engagement between governments and civil society groups involved in the reparations movement.

“How is the Caribbean mobilising civil society to support the work that we are doing?” she asked.

She warned that without wider public participation, the movement risks losing momentum.

“We will be running globally with reparatory justice at a governmental level and we will not find our people running behind us because they do not know what we are running behind,” she said. “We must break the back of systemic racism.”