Caricom reparations campaign exposes split over development investment and direct cash payouts

Momentum behind slavery reparations is building again across the Caribbean, even as leaders clash over what delivering justice should actually involve. At a recent Caricom Reparation Forum, commission chair Professor Sir Hilary Beckles presented a structured route ahead while recognising that opinions diverge sharply, especially among African American communities.

Beckles said the regional 10-point plan was drafted so groups from Colombia and Brazil to Caricom member states, the United States, and the wider African diaspora could adopt it as a common framework and tailor it to local needs. "We've written the 10-point plan in such a way as to give every community, whether it's Colombia, Brazil, CARICOM, the US, we've given every community in global Africa an opportunity to say the 10-point plan is our framework, but we will domesticate it and apply it to our local situation as needed," he said.

He framed the programme as a reparatory justice strategy centred on social and economic advancement rather than a single financial settlement. "Our 10-point plan is really a reparatory justice strategy built around social and economic development. We want development for our people based on reparatory justice. We want better health care. We want better schools. We want digital transformation. We want to see an investment in our people who have a right to it," Beckles added.

On the other side of the Atlantic, however, another view is gaining ground. Beckles pointed to a widening gap with African American communities, where the legacy of enslavement is often experienced as far more immediate. Many there are pressing for direct monetary compensation. Working out what is owed remains deeply contested, with estimates running into the trillions.

"Then, how would you go about measuring 200 years of free labor from 20 million people. If you want to quantify 200 years of free labor from 20 million people, what figure are you talking about? What are you looking at? And that does not include trauma and the suffering and damages for all of that psychological terror. It is just a labor cost. So, many organizations and institutions have been doing calculations. And these same calculations are in the trillions of pounds," Beckles said.

Figures on that scale, he said, make European governments uneasy. Former colonial powers once mobilised substantial public resources to compensate enslavers, a record Ambassador Dr June Soomer cited to challenge the absence of comparable action today. "Because it took political will. He said it in his presentation. For the British government to give that percentage of their GDP to people who were considered enslavers. The political will ensure that the Jews got compensation for what happened to them. The public will was not the same. Germany was going through reconstruction after the Second World War, but political will said we are going to do it. So, where is the political will when it comes to black people?" she asked.