The hypocritical acquisition of Balliceaux

Political hypocrisy, thy name is Ralph Gonsalves.

That is my take on the decision of the government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) to acquire Balliceaux, the desolate 320-acre Grenadine island where more than 5,000 Garifuna and Kalinago people were rounded up like cattle and forcibly taken following the killing of their Paramount Chief Joseph Chatoyer and their subsequent military defeat in the Second Carib War (1795-1797).

Due to starvation, disease, and sickness from exposure to the elements on that uninhabited island, more than half of the Garifuna people died in concentration camps on Balliceaux. The rest were deported to the then equally desolate island of Roatan off the coast of present-day Honduras, in a process deserving the name “ethnic cleansing”. Their descendants live today as the Garifuna people in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and the United States.

As a sovereign country, SVG is morally and legally obliged to accept and atone for sins like these committed by our colonial forefathers.

Alas, our leaders and their followers continue to refuse to make amends for either this ethnic cleansing of most of the country’s indigenous inhabitants or the importation and enslavement of thousands of Black Africans during the nation’s long slavery era. Instead, they, along with most of our — high and low, rich and poor, Black, Brown, and White — continue to place moral blame and economic responsibility for all our historical wrongs, regardless of whether they were legal or ethical during the time they were committed, on Great Britain the nation with which we eagerly but irresponsibly severed our colonial ties in 1979.

Compare this to two of our northern neighbours — America and Canada — both of which also experienced the conquest and dispossession of their indigenous peoples, along with a lengthy period of slavery, also during the era preceding independence from Great Britain.

In both these now independent state societies there have been demands by many individuals and groups at both the official government and informal grassroots levels for apologies and reparations for the expropriation of land from the original indigenous people and for the enslavement of millions of mainly West African people sold into perpetual bondage upon their forced arrival to the New World.

But none of the demands for restitution in Canada or the United States have been made against Great Britain, the motherland across the sea.

This is because both countries are advanced nations composed of mature people whose leaders fully accept that they have inherited responsibility for the horrors committed by their founding ancestors upon their achievement of political independence, in the United States via revolution and in Canada through peaceful negotiation.

By comparison, the leaders of own pseudo-independent nation, have demonstrated a profound lack of the wisdom, courage, and integrity needed to acknowledge any responsibility for our historical sins and other transgressions, in the process acting as if we are still a backward British colonial possession with no responsibility whatsoever for the sins of the past.

All this is clear from our recent history of dealing with our now entirely mixed-race Garifuna people, still locally called the Caribs of SVG.

The graves and remains of those who died on Balliceaux have never been officially marked or excavated; the island is essentially a graveyard. Due to this sensitive history and the obvious physical challenges such as the absence of beaches or a suitable harbour, the development of the island is unlikely to ever happen.

The privately-owned island was offered for sale in 2023, with an asking price of US$30 million. The Prime Minister announced in parliament on March 6 that the government had acquired Balliceaux due to its historical and cultural significance to the Garifuna people. He stated that the former owners would be given “fair compensation within a reasonable time”, though US$30 million, the advertised asking price, seems outrageous for a rock of no commercial value or potential.

Meanwhile, Dr. Gonsalves has not said a word about the role in all of this of the brothers and sisters of our local Garifuna people, namely the pure and mixed-race people called the Kalinago (or Garinagu) living in Central America and elsewhere.

This is because our prime minister literally disqualified them from any Vincentian recognition in 2015 during a visit to our country of a Garifuna delegation headed by Dr. Wellington Ramos, vice president of the United Garifuna Association, to discuss the promise made by the then leader of the New Democratic Party, Arnhim Eustace, to grant “honorary citizenship” to our exiled founding people should his party gain power in the next election.

Speaking at a press conference on June 2, 2015, Dr. Gonsalves employed fear mongering in his reply to Eustance’s proposal when he said:

“I do not support that [citizenship]. I do not support that …. When you give them honorary citizenship, our Garifuna brothers and sisters, are they coming out from Belize, from Nicaragua, from Honduras from Guatemala, they are coming out of those countries for jobs in St. Vincent? …. They are coming for your houses? … But what are they going to have? Just a piece of people saying, ‘I declare you to be an honorary citizen?’ You giving them a passport? Because for sure, you have more Garifunas who are not Vincentians outside than the people of St. Vincent and the Grenadines as a whole…. Do they want to give honorary citizens the right to vote now? You going give Garifuna the right to vote, but Vincentians who overseas don’t have the right to vote? You going put Garifunas above them who ain’t born in St. Vincent and who are not descended directly?”

Eustace, calmly replied that some elements of the proposal still had to be fleshed out, but claimed his proposal would not grant overseas Garifunas the right to live and work in SVG or to acquire a Vincentian passport.

Both men seemed to forget that on Sept. 13, 2007, Dr. Gonsalves’ Unity Labour Party government voted to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). While the UNDRIP is not a legally binding instrument under international law, it does hold considerable moral standing as “… a significant tool towards eliminating human rights violations against the planet’s 370 million indigenous people and assisting them in combating discrimination and marginalization.”

By accepting the UNDRIP, SVG was acting as a sovereign nation taking independent responsibility for the welfare, aspirations, and injustices committed against its indigenous people: the Garifuna at home and the forcibly exiled Garinagu abroad.

This responsibility to both cohorts of our aboriginal people is clearly spelt out in Articles 27 and 28:

Article 27.

States [in this case, SVG] shall establish and implement, in conjunction with indigenous peoples concerned, a fair, independent, impartial, open and transparent process, giving due recognition to indigenous peoples’ laws, traditions, customs and land tenure systems, to recognize and adjudicate the rights of indigenous peoples pertaining to their lands, territories and resources, including those that were traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used (my italics). Indigenous peoples shall have the right to participate in this process.

Article 28.

1. Indigenous peoples have the right to redress, by means that can include restitution or, when this is not possible, just, fair and equitable compensation, for the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used, and which have been confiscated, taken, occupied, used or damaged without their free, prior or informed consent(my italics).
2. Unless otherwise freely agreed upon by the peoples concerned, compensation shall take the form of lands, territories and resources equal in quality, size and legal status or of monetary compensation or other appropriate redress.”

When the 5,080 Garifuna were forcibly transferred to Roatan, their lands, some 11,000 acres that were “granted” in a treaty they were forced by the British to sign in 1769 (which saw the loss of over 20,000 acres of their indigenous territory to British sugar planters), was taken from them. The few Garifuna allowed to remain behind in SVG were given 233 acres of land upon which they were prohibited from growing sugarcane.

None of that land remains as a collectively owned reserve.

People like Ralph Gonsalves, want to wash their hands of any current responsibility for the “ethnic cleansing” of our aboriginal population — even after signing the UNDRIP — by claiming in his many slavery and genocide reparation requests that since the British government was in charge when this took place over 200 years ago, we must look to them for any restitution or compensation.

This stance has neither morality nor the law on its side.

In particular, after we struggled so hard for independence, the prime minister is now proclaiming to the world that we are masters in our own house in name only.

The same argument could have been made for similar wrongs committed against their aboriginal peoples by the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, just to name some other British colonial possessions, before they became independent nation-states. Each of these sovereign countries has rightly taken sole responsibility long ago for the viscous historical treatment of their indigenous peoples.

After all, if land has to be returned to the aboriginal people, it can only be returned by these now sovereign nations which alone have the legal constitutional right to grant (if publically owned) or expropriate (if privately held) property to do so.

The prime minister’s 2015 blunt refusal to entertain the benign and symbolic notion of honorary citizenship for the Garinagu, if only as partial restitution for the heinous acts committed against them, is a repudiation of the spirit and intent of the UNDRIP which SVG gladly accepted in 2007.

The harsh tone of his refusal to consider honorary citizenship for the descendants of the exiled Kalinago and his use of ethnic fear-mongering about the loss of jobs and homes to hordes of people invading from foreign lands is also an insult to the many indigenous peoples around the world who have been subjected to the same unspeakable treatment as our founding people and their exiled relatives.

His refusal to even mention the possible return of Balliceaux to its rightful owners is equally repugnant.

Instead, in its latest comment on the Balliceaux acquisition, Gonsalves’ ULP has argued, “Our persistent calls for reparatory justice for the genocide committed against our indigenous people are anchored in the colonial killing of almost 2,500 Garifuna people on Balliceaux.”

“Reparatory justice” — financial and/or territorial reparations — from whom, if not from the so-called sovereign nation of SVG? And why is this island being claimed by a country, SVG, heir to all the British atrocities, but still wallowing in a servile colonial mentality, rather than given as a grant to the Garifuna themselves to memorialise as they see fit, the funds to do so coming from the central government, as is the norm in the other former colonies mentioned above?

What all this shows is that Dr. Gonsalves’ treatment of the Garifuna/Kalinago/Garinago people, including on March 14, a public holiday called National Heroes’ Day, honouring the anniversary of the death Chief Joseph Chatoyer in 1795, and the current expropriation of Balliceaux, are examples of hypocritical and gratuitous virtue signalling; nothing more, nothing less.

C. ben-David

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