The Vice-Chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC), Ambassador Dorbrene O’Marde, says the organisation is in line to receive financial support from the chairman of Digicel, Dennis O’Brien.
The CRC, which is led by Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies, was created to establish a moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of reparations by the governments of all the former colonial powers, and the relevant institutions of those countries, to the nations and people of the Caribbean Community for Crimes Against Humanity of Native Genocide, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and a racialised system of Chattel Slavery.
Ambassador O’Marde, who chairs the Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Support Commission (ABRSC), said O’Brien, who founded Digicel in 2001 and has served as Chairman of the Board since the company’s inception, has agreed to donate £5 million from his personal resources to support the work of the CRC.
“The light gets brighter every day. In terms of a trajectory, we are at a point where we have never been.
“Within the last four to five weeks, we have had a number of activities pointing to the brightness of this light,” Ambassador O’Marde told Pointe FM’s Pointe On De Streetz recently.
“The Chairman of Digicel, Dennis O’Brien, in his persona, gifted £5 million pounds of his money and says [it is] to the reparatory justice cause, ‘I would like to assist’ – not as Digicel, although a lot of this sort of support work is coming out of the Digicel organisation, but with his personal money.”
According to O’Marde, the CRC, which was established by CARICOM in July 2013, will use O’Brien’s donation to finance its 10-point development plan for the region.
The 10-point plan will be used to determine the amount and form its reparations claim should be.
“We sort of decided a couple of things; one is to help us to cost what the reparations claim should be.
“Now what we have done is that the CARICOM Reparations Commission, the heads of government, on the advice of the CARICOM’s Reparations Commission, we have posited what we called a 10-point plan,” the ambassador explained.
“That 10-point plan is essentially a development plan for the region.”
Ambassador O’Marde said work has already started in CARICOM member states to establish exactly how much money will be required to execute and complete its development plan.
A preliminary report will be presented to regional leaders at the 44th Regular Meeting of CARICOM Heads of Government in The Bahamas from 15th to 17th February, 2023.
“About three weeks ago, they teamed with the University of the West Indies. The team of development, academics, our economists, our sociologists et cetera, came to Antigua, and they have probably visited, I think by now, all the various countries, collecting all the data to see what the development over the next 10, 15 years for each individual country will look like,” Ambassador O’Marde said.
“I think that when we get those figures, then we can sum the total and say that our reparations claim for the development programme that we have designed in our 10-point plan will cost X amount of dollars over the next how many years, and so that is our reparations claim.
“So, that work is ongoing. I think they are ready to deliver a preliminary report to the heads of government or the Intersessional meeting of the (CARICOM) heads of government in The Bahamas later this month.”
