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C
rime or Tragedy?
Eleni Chalkidou explains why Nazi compensation payments may
time can now be treated as crimes against humanity.
I
nvolve money, and people take the atrocities of the Atlantic Slave Trade much more seriously.
The pressure on richer countries such as Britain and America is steadily increasing to accept the
terminology ‘crime against humanity’ albeit amongst fears that reparations claims might follow.
These countries therefore choose to condemn slavery by opting for the slightly milder wording that
‘slavery and the slave trade are an appalling tragedy in the history of humanity’.
However, the German government and German
companies have agreed to donate around £3.3 billion
to survivors of the Nazi slave-labour camps. That
decision could open up a Pandora box of fresh
compensation claims from other victims of 20th
century state-sponsored crimes. To say that nobody
in the US today has first-hand knowledge and
experience of what it was like to live a life enslaved
would be a lie. So, if German companies can hand
over some portion of the blood stained money
earned by their Third Reich ancestors, why not
America or Britain, Brazil, Holland, France, Portugal
or Spain?
It may be true that time heals all wounds but it can
surely leave some nasty scars. The passing of time
could never diminish the crime but it can add
interest to a large sum in the vaults of banks like
Barclays that directly benefitted from the trade in
African slaves.
If we really want to go into the petty meaning
of words it could legally be argued that the word
‘tragedy’ involves serious foul-play, an unhappy
ending, and the downfall of the protagonist. Who
could the protagonist possibly be? Millions of
African men, women and children were kidnapped
from their homes, and were chained inside ships in
conditions much worse than the modern-day illegal
Chinese immigrants who entered Britain in the back
of a lorry had to endure before they died of
suffocation. The man accused of that ‘crime’,
not ‘tragedy’, was recently imprisoned.
British officials claim that there is no intention to
devalue the enormity of what happened in previous
centuries, but they advance the legal opinion that
slave trading and slavery were not against ‘customary
international law’ during that period.
The American government doesn’t care enough
to give an explanation but goes a step further and
threatens to withdraw all aid to African countries if
the debate on the issue of compensation continues.
Conveniently, this would leave President George
Bush to use valuable ‘reparation money’ on his
atomic shield, or on some other illegal war on a
sovereign nation.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to claims that slavery
was not against ‘customary international law’ at the
time and therefore not considered a crime would be
too easy. But can a definition of the word slavery
bring us any closer to solving the puzzle?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘Slave’
is ‘a person who is the legal property of another and
is forced to obey them.’ Surely murder, manslaughter,
battery, kidnapping, rape, unlawful sex and GBH,
crimes included in the Criminal Act 1997, do not
form any part of this definition of slavery.