Caribbean leaders to UK: debt relief and aid are not reparations

Britain wants to talk about slavery and reparations — but only up to a point. Prime minister Andy Burnham said Friday he wants a structured dialogue, and he's open to an apology for centuries of slavery. Cash payouts, though, are off the table. Instead he floated debt resets for smaller Commonwealth nations and £40m ($54m) for critical Caribbean infrastructure over the next three years.

That package isn't landing as reparations in the region. Ralph Gonsalves, the former prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines and a senior figure in the Repair Campaign, told the Guardian that Caribbean countries would likely welcome the offer, but would resist any attempt to treat debt restructuring or development assistance as a form of reparation. Debt relief and aid are discretionary UK gestures, he argued, not justice. The 56-member Commonwealth bloc is meeting in Antigua, with leaders heading into a private retreat.

The region's own blueprint is explicit. The Caribbean Community's reparations commission drew up a 10-point plan that asks for debt cancellation — not restructuring — plus monetary compensation. It argues that former colonies' existing debts are intergenerational and intimately tied to centuries of colonial extraction.

Gonsalves pointed out that schools, hospitals and climate infrastructure all sit inside the 10-point plan, but they also sit inside the UN's 2015 sustainable development goals, which everyone signed. Repair, he said, also means ecology, psychological healing and arranging repatriation for those who want it, including members of the Rastafari faith — a piece that carries its own financial cost and needs a separate carve-out.

Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who chairs the House of Commons all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan Reparations, put the fight in one word: agency. Speaking Tuesday at the launch of a global reparations caravan that will travel between countries to educate and mobilise, she said enslavement stripped people of African descent of their right to decide their own lives. If reparative justice is done to us rather than with us, she said, it is not reparations.

Prof Kingsley Abbott, a human rights lawyer and director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, made the same case at the caravan launch. He said it's for affected communities to say what repair means — it's their story, their lived experience — and that victims of atrocity crimes he has met from Guatemala to Myanmar all asked for the same thing: justice, and to be made whole. A Foreign Office spokesperson said Burnham wants to renew the Commonwealth's relevance by facing the past together, adding that Britain is already committed to working with partners on global debt, the climate crisis and economic development.