On Thursday, September 22, the United Nations staged a “high-level meeting” at UN headquarters in New York to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism and the historic Durban Declaration And Programme Of Action (DDPA) that emerged.
Furthermore, a Barbados Government delegation participated in the “high-level meeting”, and Minister of Culture Stephen Lashley used the opportunity to renew the call for “reparations” for Africans and people of African descent that is embedded in the DDPA.
The People’s Empowerment Party (PEP) was extremely pleased to learn of this development.
Many Barbadians may be aware that the PEP is the only political party that dealt with the issue of “reparations” in its 2008 general election manifesto. Indeed, on Page 16 of our manifesto, we pledged to “pursue the quest for reparations for the people of Africa and the African diaspora through the United Nation system”.
But it is not surprising that the issue of reparations – compensation for the damage done to us during the long centuries of slavery – constituted one of the planks of the PEP’s general election platform, since the president of the PEP, the vice-president Mr Bobby Clarke, and many senior members of the party possess long histories of involvement in the issue of reparations.
Indeed, one wonders if Minister Stephen Lashley is aware that the reparations components of the said DDPA that he journeyed all the way to New York to speak so eloquently about, are, to a significant extent, the product of the work of the PEP president.
Mr Lashley and his Democratic Labour Party colleagues need to be reminded that the then Barabados Labour Party (BLP)-led Government played a leading role in the entire process of the UN World Conference Against Racism during the period 1999 to 2001. But the BLP administration was only able to do so because it practised a “politics of inclusion” that enabled it to bring on board such personalities as Dr George Belle, Professor Hilary Beckles and Mr David Comissiong, to lend their knowledge and skills to the Barbados Government delegation at the world conference.
By all reports, Mr Lashley made a strident call at the high-level meeting for what he described as “meaningful and innovative reparations”. This is all well and good, but if Mr Lashley was really serious about the issue of reparations and had taken the time to consult the PEP, he would have learnt that if one is to be successful in pushing the issue of reparations, one has to go beyond making eloquent “calls”, and to get down to the hard work of building a coalition of nations that will take ownership of the issue at the UN.
There are several experienced and knowledgeable pan-Africanists in Barbados who could assist the current Democratic Labour Party (DLP) administration in dealing with the complexities of the DDPA. But the possibility of Government benefiting from such expertise will only become apparent to this DLP administration if and when it opens itself up to the legitimacy and valuableness of a “politics of inclusion”.
One of the reasons Barbados has made so little progress over the past three and a half years is because our newly elected and inexperienced political rulers have been so jealous of their newfound power and positions, that they have excluded or held at a distance all those who do not belong to their little DLP in-group.
This is no way to run a small developing country like Barbados!
