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Reparations for slavery, a topic that comes and goes, has once again come to the fore of public discourse. This topic's most recent public showing, is due in large part to the Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron's official visit to Jamaica, a former British colony, his address to their government and Portia Simpson, Jamaica's Prime Minister's words to him.
Prof. Sir Hilary Beckles, in his role as the Chairman of the CARICOM Reparation Commission, penned an open letter to the British PM, raising the issue of reparations to him. Just over a year ago, in an address before The House of Commons, Prof. Sir Hilary Beckles spoke on reparations and gave suggestions/proposals of how reparations could work. The letter is posted in full below. The link to the reparations address can be read by clicking here, or the link below the letter.
This is not an opinion post today, but rather one seeking discussion about reparations, and the opinions of people here in Barbados, the Caribbean and the wider world about the topic. What do we think folks, reparations yay or nay? Yay, but different to the proposition in the link?
Open Letter to the Honourable David Cameron, Prime Minister of the UK & Northern Ireland
26th September 2015
Dear Honourable Prime Minister,
I join with the resolute and resilient people of Jamaica and their government in extending to you a warm and glorious welcome to our homeland. We recognise you, Prime Minister, given your family's long and significant relationship to our country, as an internal stakeholder with historically assigned credentials. To us, therefore, you are more than a Prime Minister. You are a grandson of the Jamaican soil who has been privileged and enriched by your forebears' sins of the enslavement of our ancestors.
As we prepare for you a red carpet befitting your formal status we invite you to cast your eyes upon the colours of our national flag that symbolise the history we share. You are, Sir, a prized product of this land and the bonanza benefits reaped by your family and inherited by you continue to bind us together like birds of a feather.
Be assured, Prime Minister, that you will find no more generous people on our planet Earth than those who will greet you with golden hearts and civilised consciousness. I urge that you embrace the sincerity of our salutations. It is born and bred in the cauldron of our enslavement by your family and society. Consider it a golden gift of friendship and not simply the empty expression of protocols relevant to the events you will attend. It is furthermore, an overture to an expectation of a dialogue of reparatory justice that can redefine for us a new intimacy for this long 21st century on which we are embarked.
Your advisers would have informed you that beyond the boundary of the affairs of State, civil society welcomes you without reservation, though with a qualification that bears the burden of our tortured past within the historically textured present. I speak of outstanding and unresolved matters that are relevant to our sense of mutual respect as equal nations dedicated to the cause of furthering humanity's finest imagined destiny.
I speak, Sir, of the legacies of slavery that continue to derail, undermine and haunt our best efforts at sustainable economic development and the psychological and cultural rehabilitation of our people from the ravishes of the crimes against humanity committed by your British State and its citizens in the form of chattel slavery and native genocide.
In this regard I urge you to be aware that the issue of reparatory justice for these crimes is now before our respective nations, and the wider world. It is not an issue that can be further ignored, remain under the rug, or placed on back burners, as your minister who recently visited us so aptly described your agenda for Jamaica and the Caribbean. It will generate the greatest global political movement of our time unless respected and resolved by you, the leader of the State that extracted more wealth from our enslavement than any other.
The Jamaican economy, more than any other, at a critical moment in your nation's economic development, fuelled its sustainable growth. Britain as a result became great and Jamaica has remained the poorer. Jamaica now calls upon Britain to reciprocate, not in the context of crime and compulsion, but in friendly, mutually respected dialogue. It is an offer of opportunity written not in the blood of our enslaved ancestors but in the imagination of their offspring and progeny who have survived the holocaust and are looking to the future for salvation.
As a man, a humane man, with responsibility for the humanity of your nation we call upon you to rise to this moment as you realise and internalise that without the wealth made by your enslaving ancestors, right here in our Jamaica, we would not be enchained together, today, called upon to treat with this shared past.
Successive governments in this land, a place still groaning under the weight of this injustice, have done well during the fifty three years of sovereignty, but the burden of the inherited mess from slavery and colonialism has overwhelmed many of our best efforts. You owe it to us as you return here to communicate a commitment to reparatory justice that will enable your nation to play its part in cleaning up this monumental mess of Empire. We ask not for handouts or any such acts of indecent submission. We merely ask that you acknowledge responsibility for your share of this situation and move to contribute in a joint programme of rehabilitation and renewal. The continuing suffering of our people, Sir, is as much your nation's duty to alleviate as it is ours to resolve in steadfast acts of self-responsibility.
In the four corners of Kingston there are already whispers that your strategy will be to seek a way to weaken Jamaica's commitment to Caribbean reparations in a singular act of gift granting designed to divide and rule and to subvert the regional discourse and movement. You Sir, are a Briton, not a Greek, and we have no reason therefore to fear what you bear. But we do ask that you recall that the Caribbean region was once your nation's unified field for taxation, theatre for warfare, and space for the implementation of trade law and policy. Seeing the region as one is therefore in your diplomatic DNA; and this we urge that you remember.
Finally Sir, I write from the perspective of an academic bred in Britain and reared in the University of the West Indies, an institution your nation planted in Kingston in 1948 with a small but significant grant. It would honour us to show you what we the people have reaped from this single seed. We have created a flourishing federal farm that now cultivates the minds of millions, a symbol of our collective determination to take seriously our self-responsibility and to place our dignity as an emerging nation before any other consideration. From this singular seed we have grown one of the finest universities in the world crafted by our hands and inspired by our dreams.
This story, Sir, can guide your reflection as to who we are and what we expect of you. We urge you then, in this light, to indicate your nation's willingness to work towards a reparatory justice programme for the Caribbean, with a view to allowing us to come together in order to come to closure, put this terrible past behind us, and to leave it to us to continue the making of our future.
Recently I have seen a New York Times article making rounds on my Facebook timeline. The article is about sex slaves and the exploitation and abuse of women and girls in certain territories of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. "ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape"* is the title of the article and it delves into the newly codified rules of sex slavery in these territories and how they are being used as tools of recruitment. The author, Rukmini Callimachi, uses the testimony of 21 girls and women, as well as official Islamic State documents, research by Amnesty International and other watchdog groups, and other sources, to get the information, and evidence to craft this article.
Flag of the Islamic State
The article begins, "In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin." setting a tone that stays for the remainder of the piece. Age is of little consequence; of the 21 females interviewed, the only ones not raped were those post-menopausal and those prepubescent. These rapes were not sinful, as we shall soon see. How is it, that a religious group can, not just condone, but encourage this type of behaviour from its adherents when such acts are considered heinous globally, and even within the teachings of their religion? Well, simply, the girls and women being raped are Yazidi, and the newly codified sex slave laws, with the claimed backing of the Qu'ran, allow for the soldiers of the Islamic State to rape these women and girls. In fact, it is not even considered rape, but, in the words of the man who raped the 12 year old we are first introduced to, it is ibadah or worship**. He prayed before the rape, and after the rape.Guidelines for slavery, and, of course, rape, were all contained in material put out by the Islamic State's Research and Fatwa Department - seriously.
Callimachi goes on to describe the ways in which these women and girls come into these circumstances. They are rounded up and put into buses once used to facilitate the Hajj, but now with curtains covering the windows. We are hearing the tales of survival and escape, but there are still more in captivity, being abused and being raped, and there are yet still more entering into captivity and sex slavery.
This long post (I apologise), however, is not about the Islamic State, nor the the horrible actions it now officially sanctions and the crimes it has committed against humanity and, especially, humanity's women and girls. This is actually about us. Westerners (Caribbean included -woot,woot!). This is about how we reacted to this article and our 'speck in the eye' attitude to the Islamic State's 'log in the eye' behaviour.
Our disgust - well founded for sure - does not quite match up with our local (western) attitudes towards women or rape. Maybe it is the whole ISIS-ness of it, and the official-ness and the Research and Fatwa Department-ness and the Islam-ness of it all that creates our deeper disgust. A 15 year old Yazidi girl recounting her rape(s), and the fact that it so closely correlates to that of a 12 year old girl, and several other women and girls is heart wrenching. We, without reservation or interest in the story of the rapist, believe her; believe them. Yet when six and a half dozen women accuse Bill Cosby of drugging and raping them, it takes months for some of us to start to believe them - and this is only now in the months after Hannibal Buress brought it up during a comedy routine. With this most recent surfacing of the Cosby rape allegations, the media went about asking industry insiders and other comedians about it; "Oh, yeh it has been said." or "It was known" were not uncommon responses. It was as if it was just another celebrity quirk. Mariah Carey likes white M&Ms, Lil Wayne likes a spliff and some purp, and Bill Cosby likes a bit of drug and rape; every now and again he may go for some statutory rape. WTF folks.
Bill Cosby meme collage.
Rick Ross, clearly from the Cosby School of Getting Laid, said, "Put molly all in her champagne, she ain't even know it. I took her home and enjoyed that, she ain't even know it" Now I'm not saying that Rick Ross is a rapist, he makes claims about many things in his music that he has never done or seen - hell, every rapper alive is the best rapper alive, but it speaks to our general attitude about such things when the lyrics main criticisms come in the form of internet memes, and it still enjoys regular club and radio play.
Buju Banton -"Gal mi serious, me haffi get you tonight, haffi get your body even by gun point."
"...haffi get your body even by stick up."
Burning Flames advises forced entry:
"...I know just what to do when a woman batten down she house,
and mek up she mind to keep you out.
...so the solution, to get inside,
'cus she lock down she house so tight.
...kick in she back door!"
All over a background sound effect of a screaming woman balling "murder, murder", and "call the police."
Let us not forget the Caribbean social meme of the school girl and the minibus. Glamour Gal Sue was liming in the van stand waiting for her man, "The Original Article Ruffneck Dan.***" When Vybz Kartel has to ask you not to "fuck inna de school bus****" we have a problem. Moreover, it is usually a relationship between a school girl and a bus driver, but most popularly, the bus conductor.
Beyond this, rape is not just a too common occurrence in prisons, but an expected part of the incarceration experience. It is common in almost all pop culture references to prison - "don't drop the soap" Further to the point, most consider rape in prison an extension of justice and not a violation of a person and that person's rights and body. We have convinced ourselves that there is nothing wrong with this, much in the same way the Islamic State's soldiers are convinced that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing. The Islamic State has made legal their mistreatment of women and girls and their attitudes towards rape, we in the west maintain such behaviours as abhorrent and illegal, but our actions, our culture, our prison systems say otherwise.
The Islamic State's treatment of women and girls, their creation and perpetuation of sex slavery via methodological sex conquests, and their religious and, now, legal justification for all of this is horrible. The west - and us here in the Caribbean - are really not too, too far off in our treatment of women, exploitation of women and attitudes to rape. We may think of ourselves as more sophisticated, and we might well be, but, "It is not rape, it is worship." is not much different to, "It is not rape, it is justice." or "It is not rape, it is just a good time."
Last question, can husbands rape their wives, or nah?
