A cruel trick to play on hurricane victims

“Hurricane Melissa a ‘real-time case study’ of colonialism’s legacies”, writes Natricia Duncan for the Guardian. The subheading is “Destruction in Jamaica shows why climate justice cannot be separated from reparatory justice, campaigners say”.

The article starts with a sympathetic couple of paragraphs about the history of Gurney’s Mount Baptist Church, a church whose roof was ripped off by the hurricane.

The names of past members are still etched into its walls and the “freedom stone”, built into its structure to commemorate the end of slavery on 1 August 1838, is still there.

As church and faith groups play a significant role in Jamaica’s recovery, the loss of the building and parts of the adjacent school are a huge blow to the community, Rev O’Neil Bowen told the Guardian.

I find that sad, and I hope this community gets some help to rebuild after the hurricane. Though I have a low opinion of the long-term efficacy of taxpayer-funded foreign aid, and think it is actively harmful when it encourages a dependency economy, if we must have it, let the money be spent on helping victims of natural disasters like this one. I think a lot of people feel the same way.

But may God preserve Rev. Bowen from some of the people who want to help him.

At the ongoing UN Cop30 climate change conference in Brazil, campaigners say that devastated regions such as Hanover as well as others across Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti, are stark examples of how African descendants are disproportionately affected by centuries of environmental degradation.

Speaking from Cop30, Jamaican economist Mariama Williams said historical injustices must be confronted and addressed.

“The research shows that wherever Afro descendants are located, they are most vulnerable to climate and environmental impact and have been suffering from historical environmental injustice and climate injustice,” she said. “Climate justice cannot be separated from reparatory justice. The same systems that enriched the north created today’s vulnerabilities.”

The Global Afrodescendant Climate Justice Collaborative, where Williams is a senior adviser, is among hundreds of human rights groups and environmentalists that urged Cop30 to put reparations on the agenda.

In their open letter they argue that “global warming began with the Industrial Revolutions that were made possible by the resources provided by imperialism, colonialism and enslavement, [and] that colonialism and enslavement skewed the global economy in favour of the material and financial interests in the global north”.

You know what will happen? The people from governmental, inter-governmental and so-called Third Sector aid organisations that victims of natural disasters in the Caribbean deal with most often talk like Mariama Williams and her white counterparts. They, the victims, will pick up the idea from the Climate Justice people that talking like this this is the way to get financial aid these days:

“We’re not begging these countries. This is a debt that is owed. And I think this needs to be made clear. And this is why there is very deep connection between calls for climate reparations and reparations for slavery, because they’re both connected through these longer histories, these colonial legacies,” he [Arley Gill, a member of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) Reparations Commission] said.

In 2020, two thirds of Britons supported cutting the foreign aid budget. I doubt the British people have warmed to it since then. But if giving taxpayer-funded aid to poor countries is unpopular now, wait till you see how unpopular it will be if it is packaged as punishing ordinary British people for a small fraction of their distant ancestors having owned slaves. I predict that even private donations will become more scarce the more often reparations are mentioned. Oh, and they’ll never get the reparations.