The injustice of "reparations"

[WhiskeyGirl]

PARIS — Historians and anti-racism campaigners are to urge the countries that oversaw and profited from the Atlantic slave trade to recognise it as a crime against humanity, opening the way for reparations.

Next week, activists are to send a letter to the leaders of Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain asking them to recognise the trade as an historic injustice a century and a half after it ended.

They have already convinced France to do so.

"There are several reasons for this, including its symbolic value, to restore the memory of this crime against humanity," Karfa Diallo, chairman of the foundation, told AFP.

"There's also a question, shall we say, of justice," he said.

The folks that committed these crimes are dead.  The victims of these crimes are dead.  And, slavery was a crime that was practiced the world over.

Why aren't they asking African countries for reparations?  Symbolic?

What of the many Europeans that lived as slaves in the Africa and the Middle East?  Slavery in Turkish empire?

"If we accept that it was a crime, then there should be reparations. All crimes deserve compensation for victims and punishment for perpetrators," argued Diallo.

"We'd like to see the creation of an international memorial fund, that would support a School of Memory. A fund managed by the United Nations," he said.

What of the slave in Asia?

"Europe owes a part of its capital to those that suffered," he said. "So far, only the slavers have been compensated. In all the colonies, when slavery was abolished, states decided to compensate.

Europe had varying forms of slavery for thousands of years.  The slaveholders were FEW.  The slaves were many.

Reparations take money from innocent people, people who did not participate in these crimes, hundreds of years ago.

IIRC, until the revolution in Russia, the Russian people lived as serfs.  Freedom wasn't the norm in global history.

"For as long as there are no reparations to the descendants of the victims, we remain in a situation of extraordinary injustice, which is that we paid off the slavers. That's hard to accept in the 21st century."

Reparations extracted/stolen/coerced from modern people, are another injustice.

I can't imagine there is ANYONE, any global citizen today, that does not have slave ancestors.

more here - http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5giy9wRLaMh_XP68x58udZF_nNKcw

just my humble opinion