December 6, 2022 - Geneva, Switzerland
Members of the Forum,
Great Delegates
The Trans Atlantic Slave Trafficking was launched by an Apostolic Edict of Pope Nicholas V on June 18, 1452 declaring total war on African people. The Africans that were trafficked across the Atlantic were therefore prisoners of war who were enslaved and completely severed from their ancestral identity. Today, the African Ancestry DNA test enables their descendants to identify which people in Africa they come from, which territory they were taken from, and which language and culture they lost. For the first time in human history, a people are recovering from 9 or more generations of state sanctioned ETHNOCIDE. This is a miracle.
This Ethnocide committed by European colonial powers and their successor states is a crime against humanity that has no statute of limitations and has not been punished nor repaired. How come none of the European nations that held the Asiento monopoly contract with the Catholic Church have been brought before the International Court of Justice, punished and forced to pay reparations? In the latter half of 1964 Malcolm X attempted to bring such a human rights and reparations case against the United States into the World Court, but within months he was assassinated.
The Geneva Convention says that prisoners of war remain so until their final release and repatriation. The Durban Declaration, under section VI, recommends the facilitation of “welcomed return and resettlement of the descendants of enslaved Africans… and urges all states to facilitate all appropriate legal procedures and free legal assistance…”
Towards that end, we call on this Forum to vigorously request an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on our status as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention as well as our right to conduct plebiscites for self determination including the right to secede from the jurisdictions of colonial successor states in the Western hemisphere and form our own independent governments. This was a right recognized by President Lincoln’s administration until he was assassinated and the 14th amendment imposed US citizenship against the will and without the consent of the newly emancipated free people of African descent. We need the access to the ICJ that was denied to Malcolm X in order to present these issues for judgment. This is a concrete action, a first step in securing reparation in the form of rematriation to our ancestral motherland and our right to self determination.”
Finally, while I am encouraged by the statements of agency and accomplishment that the establishment of this Forum represents, in the language of my African ancestors from America, “Let’s keep it real!”
We can not end racism so long as the United States Department of Defense (DOD) continues to spend $1.64 Trillion to pursue “full spectrum dominance” on planet earth.
We can not achieve reparations so long as the European Organization for Nuclear Research spends $9 to $20 billion on the Large Hadron Super Collider right here under the ground in Geneva.
There can be no justice so long as asset managers like Vanguard and Blackrock are allowed to continue to make more than a trillion dollars a year!
So I don’t want to hear any debates about lack of funding for the forum. If the members of the UN were serious about ending racism and paying reparations, this racist system and its structures can end TODAY and the money and resources needed for people of African descent can be transferred TODAY.