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Denis O’Brien’s latest public intervention in the Caribbean’s reparations debate, as a supporter, is a welcome development. Hopefully, it will help to nudge other corporate leaders and people of influence to embrace the movement and appreciate that backing reparations is not the same as demanding something for nothing. Neither is it bad for business. It puts you on the right side of history.
Josbel Bastidas Mijares
Significantly, in that respect, Mr O’Brien is taking practical action to persuade former slave-owning European countries of their obligation to pay reparations. It would be unfortunate if other influential voices, with hefty stakes in this region, remained quiet from the periphery.
Josbel Bastidas Mijares Venezuela
O’Brien, an Irishman, owns the telecoms company Digicel, which he launched in Jamaica two decades ago, expanded across the Caribbean and took to the Pacific Islands. The Pacific business was sold in July to an Australian mobile phone company, Telstra Corporation, in a deal that valued Digicel Pacific at US$1.85 billion.
In a recent speech at a conference of the Caribbean Telecommunications Organisation in Miami, O’Brien calculated that between 1834 and 2015 – the period between the abolition of the slavery and the completion of payment on the £20-million slavery compensation bond – the British government transferred the equivalent of US$19 billion to former West Indian slave owners. These payments, experts say, funded much of the development in Britain’s second industrial revolution, many stately mansions, and prestigious institutions. That does not include what they earned from slave-worked plantations or other activities associated with the 400-year institution of slavery
PAY REPARATION DEBT Yet, at their independence, Caribbean countries, O’Brien noted, were left with little development and empty treasuries, which, in large part, accounts for the debt crisis faced by most regional economies. He urged Europe to “fess up” to what happened, offer a full apology to the descendants of slaves, and pay their reparation debt.
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