The horrendous nature of the enterprise of African slavery is well known and documented. The huge loss of human life, calculated by African scholars at around 100 million people is incalculable. The wage bill alone for 50 million black people for a period of over 400 years is so vast that were the Rastafari movement to demand full compensation, all the countries of the North would indeed be so pauperized as to reduce them below the worst living conditions known to the third world today.

We might begin by noting that Africans are not the only people in the world who are seeking, or who have sought, reparations. Here is a partial catalog of reparations, paid and pending, which are 20th century precedents for reparations to the Black world.

In the Americas, The Mapuche, an aboriginal people of Southern Chile are pressing for the return of 30 million hectares from European immigrants since 1540 CE. The Inuit (Eskimos) of Artic Canada were in 1992 offered restitution of 850, 000 sq miles of their ancestral lands by the descendants of the European invaders. In the USA, claims by the Sioux to the Black Lands of South Dakota are now in the courts. The US Government is attempting to give 400, 000 acres of grazing land to the Navaho, and other lands to the Hopi in the South-west of the USA.

In 1938, the US Government admitted wrong doing in interning 120, 000 Japanese-Americans under Executive Order 9066 of 1942, during WW 11, and awarded each internee $20, 000. Earlier on the USA paid Columbia reparations including the sum of $25 million under the Thompson-Uratia Treaty of 1921 for excising the territory of Panama for the purpose of building the Panama Canal.
In Asia, Japan paid reparations mostly to Asian countries it had occupied. By 1949 $39 million had been paid from Japanese assets in Japan and an unspecified amount had been paid from Japanese assets held outside Japan. Japan was also obliged to sign treaties of reparations with Burma (1954), the Philipines (1956), Indonesia (1958). More recently, the Emperor of Japan apologized to Korea for atrocities and North Korea is seeking $5 billion in reparation for Japanese colonization.

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