PM David Cameron Needs to Apologize on Behalf of the British Government

Prime Minister David Cameron will be visiting Jamaica next week. His visit is of concern to many Jamaicans. Jamaica was colonized by England and while slave owners were compensated when slavery was abolished, slaves who were the victims of brutality by slave owners were never considered for any form of compensation by the British government. The British government has even failed to acknowledge the inhumane treatment to the slaves. This reaction is similar to the United States government who compensated other groups whose civil rights were violated except for the Black slaves and their descendants. The following was taken from the Jamaica Gleaner publication 9/25/15 on the upcoming visit by David Cameron:

The (National Commission on Reparation (NCR) has written to Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller to urge her to raise the issue of reparation with the British prime minister.

"What Britain has been doing is issuing statements of regret. A statement of regret is not an apology. An apology takes responsibility for the crime against humanity which slavery and the slave trade was. It would commit to repair the damage and it would also commit to non-repetition," Shepherd said.

"It is well-known that Britain was primarily responsible for the forced relocation of millions of Africans from their homelands, via the trans-Atlantic Middle Passage, to Jamaica, and for their brutalization through the system of chattel enslavement under plantation slavery from the 17th to the 19th centuries. The Compensation Records contain firm evidence of the beneficiaries of that system, including the ancestors of David Cameron," the NCR said in a media release yesterday.

Cameron's ancestors were among the wealthy families who received generous reparation payments that would be worth millions of pounds today.

The British government paid out £20 million to compensate some 3,000 families who owned slaves for the loss of their property when slave-ownership was abolished in Britain's colonies after the passing of the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833. A total of £10 million went to slave-owning families in the Caribbean and Africa, while the other half went to absentee owners living in Britain.

The compensation records show that General Sir James Duff, an army officer and MP for Banffshire in Scotland during the late 1700s, was Cameron's cousin and son of one of Cameron's great-uncles, the second Earl of Fife.

He was awarded £4,101, equal to more than £3 million today, to compensate him for the 202 slaves he forfeited on the Grange Sugar Estate in Jamaica.

"If he comes to Jamaica and he does not make an apology and he does not engage in the process of reparatory justice, to me, it would be doing a disrespect to the people of Jamaica".

 riminister