BRIDGETOWN: Africans and descendants of Africans have agreed to establish a global organization to help them fight for compensation from nations that participated in the slave trade.

The Pan African Movement was the main outcome of a week-long meeting of more than 500 delegates that concluded on Sunday in Barbados.

Participants said the body would deal with a plethora of issues, from racial profiling to poverty to the need for reparations from Europe and the United States for the trans- Atlantic slave trade that cost an estimated 350 million lives.

The conference was billed as the first major follow-up to last year’s United Nations anti-racism gathering in South Africa that designated slavery as a crime against humanity.

The new organization “is very important to us”, said Muntu Matsimela, a US delegate. “We have to work for the realization of the goal of complete compensation and restitution,” he told the conference to loud applause.

Delegates said the new body is important, because the reparations issue is gathering steam in several regions of the world, including the United States, where attorneys in March filed a class action lawsuit against three companies with ties to the slave trade.

Leaders of the reparations movement argued here that many precedents exist for nations compensating peoples for historical wrongs, such as Germany paying Israel for the horrors of the Holocaust.

“The Durban declaration on race as a crime helped to make reparations a legitimate case and any such case has to be taken seriously now. The rest is for us to do,” said Khafra Kambon, chairman of Trinidad’s emancipation support committee.

The conference decided to proceed with lawsuits in the next year against Britain, Germany, Belgium and France and to launch actions against Portugal, Spain and Holland later.

In the case of Britain, Jamaican attorneys have already started proceedings, serving a writ on Queen Elizabeth when she visited Jamaica in February.

Buckingham Palace has acknowledged the Queen’s receipt of the documents and this week the Jamaican High Court heard pre-trial motions in the case.

Delegates say France is being targeted because it forced Haiti to pay 150 million Francs to declare itself a republic after Haitian slaves defeated French colonial forces in 1804.

Haitian governments were made to pay the money from 1825 to 1922 as compensation for French property destroyed during the slave uprising.

Matsimela said the new body would also help collect and gather information on black issues, including current work by unrelated groups to sue governments and corporations for reparations.

The move to set up the world body was one of the key decisions taken at the meeting, marred only by a majority floor vote on Wednesday to expel all non-Africans from the conference.

Delegates like conference chairperson Jewel Crawford argued that blacks needed their own space to discuss issues and that the expulsion of others was merely the democratic process at work, not a policy decision of organisers.

Angered by the decision and calling it reverse racism, several delegations and parts of others abandoned the meeting on Friday, following hours of failed negotiations to reach a compromise.

Participants from Cuba, some French overseas territories, part of the South African team, and the lone black Colombian and Russian delegates left the meeting.

“Many of the delegates in the room felt that this was an African family meeting and that slavery was too painful to discuss in the presence of others,” said US-born Crawford.

The conference also passed resolutions demanding an end to modern day slavery in Mauritania and Sudan, following a presentation by Bakary Tandai, the lone Mauritanian delegate at the meeting.

Tandai said that at least 900,000 people out of a Mauritanian population of 2.3 million are slaves or live in slave-like conditions.

“The conference condemns all forms of slavery in the two countries and the destruction of black African culture by forced Arabization,” a resolution stated.

Zimbabwe land reform got a sympathetic hearing following an account by delegate Sabelo Sibanda.

“Be it resolved that we recognize President Mugabe and the Government of Zimbabwe as the structure to deal with the land reform programme in Zimbabwe, and we applaud and support the courage and foresight of President Mugabe for embarking upon the land reform programme,” another resolution said.

The meeting also called on African governments to grant full citizenship to Africans living around the world as a result of the slave trade, saying they should be allowed to claim a piece of the motherland.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.