King Charles’ Caribbean Tour Overshowed by Calls for Reparations

When King Charles III reaches Antigua this weekend for the final leg of his Caribbean tour, the red carpet will be out, and so will the protesters demanding slavery reparations.The issue is already dogging the King’s tour that began on Tuesday in The Bahamas and is becoming more vocal as it nears its end.“The King will receive a cordial welcome from the Government of Antigua and Barbuda as Head of State, King of Antigua and Barbuda,” the chairman of the Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Support Commission, Dorbrene O’Marde, tells The New York Sun.But in return Mr. O’Marde, whose commission is a government-appointed body, says the King must address reparations. “A royal apology is realistic,” he says. “The British monarchy actively facilitated, financed, legitimized and profited from the trafficking and enslavement of African people and therefore faces a reparatory justice claim independent of that of the British government.”On Thursday the 77-year-old monarch, who is undergoing cancer treatment, will be in Guyana. Guyana’s president, Irfaan Ali, has demanded that Britain pay reparations.He has floated a model built on concessional financing — loans with lower interest rates and longer repayment periods — along with debt relief and targeted investment, rather than direct cash payments.“You can never create a monetary mechanism to address that, but what you can do is to identify the development gaps, the development inequality, the underdevelopment that took place as a result of slavery,” Mr. Ali said in remarks released by his government last week.When the Royal tour opened Tuesday at Clifford Park in The Bahamas, King Charles acknowledged “the great suffering and injustices of the past.” Outside the grounds where he spoke, about a dozen protesters held placards reading “Pay us what you owe us.”The King said some of the most joyful parts of Bahamian culture were “born out of darkness,” and confirmed that slavery’s legacy will be on a summit in Antigua’s capital St John next week.Caribbean leaders say they will raise reparations when the Commonwealth’s 56 member states meet in St. John’s from November 1 to 4.Queen Camilla will join the King for the summit chaired by Prime Minister Gaston Browne. Britain’s prime minister, Andy Burnham, and foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, will also attend. The British government’s position is that the trade in enslaved people was abhorrent but that Britain will not pay reparations for historical acts that were legal at the time.Caribbean leaders have approved a ten-point reparations manifesto that the bloc has vowed to put the issue on the table at the summit. Pressure is also building inside Britain’s governing party.“We will not address 400 years of history in four days. A meaningful result would start with an unequivocal and respectful apology. It would end with a concrete commitment to ongoing dialogue on reparatory justice, with a mandate and a timetable,” a Labour member of Parliament, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, tells the Sun. Meanwhile, Buckingham Palace says the King’s trip will not shy away from “the darkest days of our past,” but that an apology and reparations are matters for the British government, which has ruled out paying. One constitutional scholar reads the remarks as a carefully drawn line.“It’s a clear signal that he won’t address the issue of reparations himself,” a lecturer in law at Royal Holloway, University of London, Craig Prescott, tells the Sun. “However, it’s equally clear that he will address the issue of slavery more generally, like he did when he arrived in The Bahamas.“A formal apology for slavery is not a realistic prospect. The King is bound to follow the advice of the British Government, and their position is clear that they will not apologize for slavery or agree to pay for reparations,” he says.Mr. Prescott suggests there may be room to negotiate on returning colonial-era artifacts held in the British Museum or offering development aid.Regius professor emeritus of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford University, Nigel Biggar, stresses to the Sun, that “to finger the British for reparations is grotesquely unfair.”“British involvement in slavery was not at all extraordinary. What was extraordinary was that Britain was the first major power to abolish slave-trading and slavery throughout its territories, after which it led the world in suppressing them both from Brazil to New Zealand,” Lord Biggar, who sits in the House of Lords, tells the Sun. Jamaica, which is not on the itinerary, has already put that to the test, asking the King to act on its behalf against his own British government. On September 7, Culture Minister Olivia Grange delivered a petition asking the King, as Jamaica’s head of state, to put three questions to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council: whether enslaving Africans was ever lawful under English law, whether it breached international law, and whether Britain owes Jamaica a remedy. On September 22, Ms. Grange told Jamaica’s House of Representatives that the King had referred the case to the Privy Council.“This is major, a really big deal,” Ms. Grange told Jamaica’s House of Representatives.Ms. Ribeiro-Addy says the petition goes after London’s central argument.“One of the government’s main defenses against calls for reparatory justice is the argument that slavery wasn’t illegal at the time. This petition tests that claim in a British court, using a British statute from 1833. If the answer is that it was unlawful, the government’s main defense collapses,” she says.Mr. Prescott is more cautious about where the case leads.“This is a big unknown. It’s a clever use of a rarely used device in the Jamaican and UK constitutions,” he says. “It will be heard by senior judges. However, any decision would not be binding on the British Government.”Even if they win that argument in principle, settling the price would be another fight entirely.“The only meaningful result, for the countries which experienced slavery, would be a promise to pay reparations, or to start a process leading to the payment of reparations,” an emeritus professor of government and the constitution at University College London, Robert Hazell, tells the Sun. “But even if the principle were conceded, it would be very difficult to calculate what the level of reparations should be.”

King Charles’ Caribbean Tour Overshowed by Calls for Reparations

King Charles’ Caribbean Tour Overshowed by Calls for Reparations

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