PM Mottley: Reparations not just about money

Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, while supporting the call for the
Caribbean to receive reparations from the United Kingdom and Europe,
is contending that it is not only about financial compensation.

Mottley, who is the Chair of the Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee on
Reparations, made the comments while delivering remarks yesterday
morning during a virtual session hosted by the CARICOM Reparatory
Commission along with UWI TV, under the theme ‘From Apology to Action:
CARICOM’s Call for Reparatory Justice’.

“...For us reparations is not just simply about money, but it is also
about justice and evening the space that allows us to have the policy
flexibility to be able to deal with a lot of what we are dealing
with... The reality is we were not given a development compact that
allowed us to be able to move off. We were given political
independence, we were given the power to make laws,” she said.

She added, “And make laws we did to reverse the legal trappings of
discriminations and bigotry for the most part. But the trappings were
not just legal, the trappings were psychological, the trappings were
sociological in terms of the breaking up of our families.”

Mottley went further, emphasising the need for an apology for the
region, for countries to be able to move forward.

“I don’t know how we can go further unless there is a reckoning first
and foremost that places an apology and an acknowledgement that wrong
was done; and that successive centuries saw the extraction of wealth
and the destruction of people in a way that must never happen to any
society, to any race, in any part of this world again. And for that to
happen, you must first admit that you are wrong,” she contended.

PM Motley said that there has been an “unbelievable failure” by those
countries that engaged in slavery to say that they were wrong and that
they would not do it again and that they must make recompense for what
was done.

“That is the first step to what people want,” she said.

She also spoke of the poor economic state in which Caribbean countries
were left at the time of independence. She explained that the
extraction of wealth from the region over the centuries, which left
the Caribbean with dire socio-economic circumstances and thrust them
into independence without a development plan, was also wrong.
(JRT)