St Vincent and the Grenadines hosts Regional Conference on Reparations

(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) Representatives of Governments, civil society, academia and individuals fighting the cause of reparations for native genocide and slavery, will meet in St Vincent and the Grenadines this weekend for a Regional Conference on Reparations.
The conference, hosted by Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr. the Hon. Ralph Gonsalves, will be held from 15-17 September, and is the first major event on reparations following the Thirty-fourth Conference of the Heads of Government of CARICOM in Trinidad and Tobago in July.
At the Summit, Heads of Government agreed to the establishment of a National Reparations Committee in each Member State with the Chair of each Committee sitting on a CARICOM Reparations Commission. The Heads of Government of Barbados (Chair), St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Haiti, Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago were identified to provide political oversight.
The Community’s approach would be to hold a development conversation and to use all reasonable avenues to reach an amicable solution on reparations.
The three-day Conference includes a meeting of the CARICOM Reparations Commission on 17 September.
Prime Minster Gonsalves raised the matter of the Conference during a brief interaction with staff members of the CARICOM Secretariat on Monday 9 September when he visited Georgetown, and stressed that “we have to repair the legacy of colonialism and neo-colonialism”.