Wilberne Persaud, Financial Gleaner Columnist

Why am I not at all surprised? Jamaicans are tremendously animated by injustice and un-freedom - recall their responses to 1960s U.K. racial discrimination and 'skinhead' aggression.

They saved the day for West Indians as opposed to behaviours pejoratively dubbed 'Paki-Bashing' - the targeting in UK cities of immigrant Asians for random acts of violent hooligans.

The atrocity of 'New World' slavery raises stirring emotions and questionsto the man in Half-Way Tree Square and in yam fields surrounding Gimme-Mi-Bit.

Of course, this translates into competing views on reparations. I say this based not on speculation but on abnormally active feedback to my last column, and comments in various media on the bicentenary commemoration of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade.

First, an instructive, persuasive digression. Legal historian Professor Eric L. Muller of the University of North Carolina School of Law created a rebuttal brief for third generation Japanese against the ruling of Brooklyn Federal Judge Gleeson in Turkmen v. Ashcroft - a case about prolonged wrongful detention and maltreatment in Guantanamo Bay.

Muslims' lawsuit

Judge Gleeson allowed the Muslims' lawsuit to go forward on claims of unlawful detention but dismissed major elements of their discrimination claims.

Muller, on behalf of descendants of Japanese interned after the attack on Pearl Harbour, argues that Judge Gleeson "overlooks the nearly 20-year-old declaration by the United States Congress and the president of the United States that the racially selective detention of Japanese aliens during World War II was a 'fundamental injustice' warranting an apology and the payment of reparations." [NY Times, April 3, 2007].

Well, well, need any more be said? At issue is the embodiment of racially selective un-freedom, forced unpaid labour, family destruction, cruel, unusual, degrading and inhuman punishments, and death for merely entertaining the notion of liberty.

No one but the unhinged seems, nor should they be, upset when the Holocaust is mentioned or is the subject of prolonged debate.

Parallel acceptance is required of New World slavery.

Happily for humanity, that time is coming. Note carefully, I do not say has come, because the level of discomfort among us is still evident.

Known beggars

A reader comments: "Jamaican politicians are known beggars. Instead of using sophisticated methods to pursue reparations, the whole movement is actinglike uneducated beggars preying on the perceived sympathy (if they have any left) of the British who are now repenting for their role in slavery. A sympathetic-pleading approach combined with requests for pity, is beggarly. Why the movement has not included Spain in their beggarly reparationist request is not explained by Mike Henry or Asamba."

This comment is strident and goes on to discuss the Maroons' role-negatively.

Another asserts: "Our Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller said to the BBC and I quote: 'They were packed into ships like sardines in a sardine can. We will never forget what was done to our fore parents. It was a crime against humanity.'

"In my opinion our Prime Minister is being careful of what she is saying, because she does not want to spoil international interrelation which also comes on par with international funding."

Finally, one comment suggests I was wrong to speak of 'British decorum' in face of European bans on British soccer fans for football hooliganism; 'that slaves were force-fed faeces and black people shouldn't even sit next to white people'.Indeed, as I said in the column, times change and changing times change people. Apology and reparations are now on the cards. Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller did not mention it in her comment to the BBC's Clive Myrie but I am sure she has an inhouse group diligently working on the issue, comparing notes in Caricom, making the required contacts with Africa, merely as a start.

Contrary to my reader's view, this is not a matter for domestic politics. Nor is it one, like the acceptance of the notion of globalization and its imperatives, tariff reduction and the WTO, that we should allow ourselves to be force-fed by notions derived from biased developed country intellectuals, business people and policymakers.

We genuinely owe it to our sacrificed and resilient forbears and our common humanity to treat this issue with the intellectual firepower and care it deserves. That firepower we do have, believe it or not, in relative abundance.

wilbe65@yahoo.com

SOURCE: Financial Gleaner, Thursday, April 5, 2007