The most memorable moment of King Charles and Queen Camilla’s recent royal tour of Australia and Samoa was indigenous Australian senator Lidia Thorpe’s insult to the monarchy. She was escorted out of Parliament in Canberra after she booed the king and accused him of genocide. The British media was outraged, calling his “outburst” simply “rude” and “bad manners.”

It is true that Senator Thorpe’s behavior may not be justified. However, it ensured that the royal visit was anything but forgettable. A couple of days later, the issue of reparations raised by former British colonies at the two-day biennial Commonwealth Summit in Samoa was another harsh treatment that British royals received in quick succession.

A direct message in Samoa

Located roughly halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii, leaders from 56 Commonwealth nations were joined at the summit in Samoa last month by King Charles and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. It coincided with the BRICS Summit in Kazan and therefore received little coverage in India. Still, the setting may have been remote, but the message about reparations was direct and won’t be easy to ignore. It is good that the leaders of two heavyweight Commonwealth countries, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, attended the BRICS summit. Their presence would have made things difficult for the UK government. India was represented at the summit by Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju.

However, calls for the UK to pay monetary compensation and offer a formal apology for its role in the transatlantic slave trade resurfaced with new urgency at the summit. Unsurprisingly, the UK had vetoed the proposal to directly address reparations in the summit’s final communiqué. Instead, the document tiptoed around the issue, referring only to the possibility of “future discussions” on “restorative justice” in relation to the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer rejected calls for an apology and reparations, telling delegates it was pointless to have “very long, drawn-out discussions” about the past. Instead, he urged former colonies to focus on present-day issues, such as climate change, where their government could help. Speaking at the summit in Samoa, King Charles was more conciliatory: “None of us can change the past. But we can commit, with all our hearts, to learning its lessons and finding creative ways to correct the inequalities that persist.”

For the leaders of the former colonies, however, this measure probably will not solve the issue in the short term.

Apologies to only a few

Privately, some families who owned thousands of slaves have apologized for their involvement in the slave trade. For example, last year, descendants of the family of 19th-century British Prime Minister William Gladstone visited Barbados, Saint Lucia and other Caribbean islands to acknowledge and apologize for their ancestors’ involvement in slavery. John Gladstone, William’s father, owned slaves on plantations in the Caribbean. William Gladstone, however, was a prominent abolitionist. Caribbean leaders welcomed the apology, calling it a step towards healing and reconciliation.

Like Britain, most European colonial powers have expressed regret for their past sins. But they have not formally apologized for it. The only notable exceptions are the Netherlands and Belgium. They have apologized for both colonial atrocities and their involvement in the slave trade, although no monetary compensation has been promised.

Britain owes former colonies $24 billion

Patrick Robinson, a UN judge, indicated last year that the United Kingdom could owe more than $24 billion in reparations for its role in the transatlantic slave trade. In a report he co-authored and published last year in June, he says he considers this figure a conservative assessment, noting the vast and lasting damage inflicted by the slave trade. The report estimates that, in total, the reparations to be paid by 31 former colonial slave powers (including Spain, the United States and France) amount to 107.8 billion dollars. Expressing astonishment, Robinson commented that certain states involved in slavery seemed to ignore their obligations, stating: “Once a state has committed a wrongful act, it is obliged to pay reparations.”

Robinson, known for presiding over the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, emphasized the principle that reparations are a duty, not an option. He has been a member of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) since 2015 and has been researching reparations as part of his honorary presidency of the American Society of International Law. It is almost obvious that the former colonial powers, which are among the richest countries in the world thanks to their colonial exploits, do not seem to be in the mood to pay compensation packages to nations affected by the slave trade.

“Am I not a man and a brother?”

The exploitative system of the expansionist British Empire was based on three sins against humanity: colonization, the slave trade and indentured labour. The indentured labor was directed more specifically against India.

One of the most enduring symbols of the 19th century abolitionist movement is a drawing of a black man in chains. If you look closer, it shows an enslaved black man, kneeling and chained, with the words “Ain’t I a man and a brother” surrounding him? The image and the plea awaken a deep longing for the freedom and equality of enslaved African and Caribbean men. This emblem challenged the cruelty of slavery and called for justice.

The British Empire has a dark legacy as one of the major forces in the transatlantic slave trade, a tragedy that caused immense suffering and disruption. However, it is fair to recognize from the outset that Britain was also home to a powerful abolitionist movement that united the public at a grassroots level and pushed Parliament to abolish slavery in 1833. The Slavery Abolition Act certainly marked a significant shift in the world economy. fight against slavery. It banned slavery in most of the British Empire.

But the abolition of one sin gave rise to another, equally evil in nature, contract labour, which directly affected India.

Slaves vs coolies

What is worse: the brutal reality of the slave trade or the ruthless routine of the indentured labourers, the so-called “coolies” of the British Raj? Each system wore a different mask, but they all served the same purpose: to sustain the empire at the expense of exploited labor. The slave trade was raw oppression, ripping people from their countries of origin, stripping them of their identity, and treating them like property. Then came contract work, not as blatant, but equally relentless. This “sanitized” slavery trapped workers in harsh conditions with barely a trace of freedom, an acceptable substitute for colonial consciousness.

The British Empire ended the slave trade with the Abolition Act of 1833, but barely missed a beat before instituting indentured labor the following year, in 1834. Records show that private plantation owners actively pressured the Empire to obtaining cheap labor from India, which soon became the backbone of colonial projects in remote corners of the Empire. Hundreds of thousands of Indian workers (mostly poor, illiterate and desperate) were “hired” to work on plantations in Caribbean countries and on railways, especially in East Africa. Many were forced to sign these agreements and often only had to place their fingerprint on a piece of paper they could not read. What they gave up was their freedom, tied to a five-year contract with little hope of escaping abusive conditions. The British National Library has huge archives of documents noting several incidents of workers’ revolt, many of whom were killed or mutilated as punishment.

So which system bears the greatest sin? It’s hard to say. But perhaps the most enduring sin are the claims by some apologists in the West (including some right-wing politicians) that these practices helped famine-stricken Indians improve their lives and that the entire colonial project was part of “civilize” the coolies. .

(Syed Zubair Ahmed is a London-based Indian journalist with three decades of experience in Western media)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.