Reparations Now!

For Immediate Release
What: Response to February 2003 Essence magazine article, “Does America Owe Us”
Who: International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement
Contact: 1245 18th Avenue South, St. Petersburg, Florida 33705
(727) 502-0575 / inpdum_international [at] hotmail.com / inpdum.com

The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, believes that the two opinions expressed in the February, 2003, article, “Does America Owe Us”, both miss the point.

From our viewpoint reparations is owed to African people all over the world by different white, colonial powers including the U.S. Both opinions expressed don’t even address the fact that an international meeting of organizations and member states of the United Nations has declared the enslavement of African people and our continued colonization a crime against humanity. This groundbreaking declaration came at the 2001, World Conference Against Racism, where hundreds of nations and organizations came together to discuss issues of “racism, zenophobia and related intolerances”. The United States walked out of the conference on the second day pretending to be upset about statements that were made about the white, settler colonial state of Israel. The U.S. consternation was really about finding itself in a situation where for the first time in an international arena they would have had to defend it’s brutality against and exploitation of the African and the near decimation of the so called Indian population and the theft of Indian land.

The demand for reparations is for more than hundreds of years of stolen Black Labor. Reparations are equally due to African people for kidnapping our ancestors, bringing them by force to be literally worked to death. Then being forced to exist under the system of colonialism in the U.S., which is maintained with a reign of terror through lynchings, beatings, and rape to name a few. Then U.S. colonialism changes it’s tactics and “frees” the Africans to live in terror during the era of “reconstruction” and subsequent “jim crow”. Unlike Mr. Shipp, the majority of Africans will not just “get over” being colonized. The system of white power has always employed Black apologists for it’s crimes against African People.
Mr. Shipp and Professor Ogletree fail to recognize that slavery and colonialism was an attack on Africa, the national homeland of every African. Contrary to the opinion of Mr. Shipp, African people have never been and never will be Americans. As a matter of fact for more than 400 years we have been the victims of America.

Our understanding of the question of reparations and colonialism, has prompted us to convene the “12th World Tribunal On Reparations For African People”. This trial will continue to gather more evidence to the volumes already in existence, that proves the case for reparations for African people. The first”World Tribunal On Reparations to African People in the U.S.”, was sponsored by the African People’s Socialist Party and utilized a panel of international judges to hear the case, made under international law, against the U.S. Government in November 1982. The distinquished panel of judges heard two days of testimony from expert witnesses and ordinary victims of U.S. colonial terror alike. The judges rendered a unanimous verdict of guilty against the U.S. government for numerous violations of international law and conventions concerning the treatment of African people.
On November 15th and 16th , 2003 in the city of Philadelphia, known for it’s brutality and police terror against Africans, the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement will convene the 12th World Tribunal on Reparations to African People”. An international panel of judges will hear further evidence of our case for reparations against the Colonial powers.

Once the African population of the world grips the concept of reparations, then the world will be changed to the advantage of the oppressed people forever.
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