REGINALD DUMAS

Pt II

WILL OTHER European leaders emulate Mark Rutte? I hope so, but I'm not holding my breath. Look at some pertinent cases.

António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, understandably wrings his hands over the state of the world. But in the several years he was prime minister of Portugal, the vanguard country in the slave-trading business, did he think to offer an apology for his ancestors' racist rapacity? If he did, I follow in Rutte's footsteps: I apologise.

Emmanuel Macron of France (which racially vilifies black footballers, and which one day could well be the fiefdom of Marine Le Pen)? If he does apologise, what, for instance, might be the implications for the reparations of over US$21 billion that former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide claimed France owed his country?

Rishi Sunak of Britain? Now, there's an interesting scenario: a first-generation Briton of Indian origin apologising for the misdeeds of white British ancestors he never had, though it was the white British who later colonised and brutalised his non-white Indian ancestors?

And Germany's Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has just, almost contemptuously, dismissed a Polish request for reparations for Nazi decimation and looting of Poland during World War II.

A Caricom document says that in 2013 the Caricom Heads of Government set up the Caricom Reparations Commission (CRC) 'with a mandate to prepare the case for reparatory justice for the region's indigenous and African descendant communities who are victims of Crimes against Humanity (CAH) in the forms of genocide, slavery, slave-trading and racial apartheid.' (They endorsed a ten-point Action Plan for Reparatory Justice the following year.)

The document also states that the CRC 'asserts that victims and descendants of these CAH have a legal right to reparatory justice, and that those who committed these crimes, and who have been enriched by the proceeds of these crimes, have a reparatory case to answer.'

You can assert whatever you like, but is the CRC's proposal to advance that 'legal right' through the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination the correct path of action? Does the convention, which came into force in 1969, have such retroactive effect, ethical or other?

Another Caricom document lumps European governments together as the principal perpetrators of the CAH, but pointedly notes that the CRC 'operates within the context of persistent objection from European governments to its mandate.'

Such objection must surely have been anticipated. What responses had been formulated to meet it? Yet the CRC merely 'calls upon European governments to participate in the Caricom Reparatory Justice Project with a view to prepare these victims and sufferers for full admission with dignity into the citizenry of the global community.' I admit I don't understand.

As noted above, Caricom has a ten-point plan for the achievement of rep