Justice… at last??

Your Eyewitness was quite chuffed that Guyana was so well represented by Ministers Benn and Jacobs at the Fifth Session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. They reaffirmed our country’s ADHERENCE to all the international agreements – including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. We should all know by now that while much has been done, much more remains to implement reparatory justice for the descendants of enslaved Africans in Guyana
And your Eyewitness is particularly interested in the reparations owed by the Countries that participated in enslaving Africans across the Atlantic that had been quantified a couple of years ago!! The amount was US$107 TRILLION!! Imagine that!! That’s US$107,000,000,000,000!! Well, honestly, your Eyewitness can’t even imagine so much money…he gets excited by his $100,000 cash grant!! Just for comparison, the number of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy is just 100 billion!!  This quantification exercise had been organized by the Caricom Reparations Commission (CRC) which was formed back in 2013 by the CariCom heads of government. They’d immediately crafted a concrete 10-point Plan for Reparations and encouraged their fifteen members to launch local Reparations Committees to support the plan.
The then PPP government enthusiastically supported both initiatives – as they showed once again – which would benefit the 31 countries that were affected by African slavery. We organized a local Guyana Reparations Committee (GRC) to represent us. The CRC continued and broadened its efforts to bring justice and relief for the descendants of the victims of that “crime against humanity”. They hired US economists from The Brattle Group – guided by a team of lawyers, historians, and history students – to compile the quantum of damages that can now be taken to a court – since the offending countries such as Britain, France, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal, etc…have steadfastly refused to acknowledge responsibility for the enduring structural conditions – “Transatlantic Chattel Slavery” (TCS) unleashed.
To assess the reparations due, the Brattle group started from the baseline that the injuries or harm suffered by the enslaved Africans were the consequence of wrongful conduct by those who carried out TCS. And that’s what the Brattle Group did, using the methodology used in the Judicial System to calculate damages to persons such as loss of life, uncompensated labour, loss of liberty, personal injury, mental pain and anguish, and the rape – of African women by White slave owners.
Britain, for instance, is required to pay 14 countries $24 trillion – with Jamaica to collect $9.5 trillion. Your Eyewitness hopes the local GRC will find out what’s coming to Guyana. After all, what’s good for African Guyanese is good for all Guyana, innit??
Justice at last!!

…enforced
While most eyed are on the Middle East as we agonise when the (US) blockade of the (Iranian) blockade gonna devolve back into a “kinetic” war, the rest of the world continues turning!! And so, in the theatre where this new era of open hostilities erupted, we shouldn’t be surprised the action continues!! Your Eyewitness is referring, of course, to the condign interdiction of narcotics being shipped from its sources in Bolivia and Columbia to the US of A!!
It’s being handled by the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM)– and their efforts have continued unabated even after they snatched the kingpin Mad Maduro who’d converted his entire upper tier of his government into a cartel!!  They announced on Monday that their forces bombed an alleged drug-running boat in the waters of Latin America, and said that the attack killed at least two people. On Tuesday, they announced an attack on another boat that it said killed four people.
Our newly-formed border patrols must also watch out for narco traffickers!!

…for Watrashes
The capybara -the Dutch call it Waaterhaas – hence our “Watrash”) is the world’s largest rodent!! It’s a gentle giant that some unfeeling souls bunjal as “cutters”.
A group of them were just hit by a plane at Ogle Airport!!