A 61-year-old billionaire was accused of molesting 35 girls and boys over a period of 13 years. With overwhelming evidence piled up against him he eagerly agreed to the court’s offer of being paid US$65,000,000.00 to stop violating the children. The amount would be paid to him over a span of 10 years. Enraged citizens protested this atrocity. They accused the court of sickening complicity, and demanded that the pedophile be given a life sentence without the possibility of parole. The court refused. Stunned and dismayed, the brokenhearted citizens then asked that the poor 35 victims, who had suffered unspeakable trauma, and whose lives were forever damaged, be given at least US$35,000,000.00 to assist with medical bills, therapeutic care moving forward, and for an apology. The chief judge calmly told them that the children would receive not one cent, and that the public exposure probably created opportunities for some of the children that they would not have had otherwise. And, asked them, an apology for what?
The billionaire? Great Britain. The child victims? African slaves – 20 million African slaves. The court & judge? Successive British governments.
On March 29th 2018, in an article titled “When Will Britain Face Up To Its Crimes Against Humanity?” Kris Manjapra writes in The Guardian, “On 3 August 1835, somewhere in the City of London, two of Europe’s most famous bankers came to an agreement with the chancellor of the exchequer. Two years earlier, the British government had passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which outlawed slavery in most parts of the empire. Now it was taking out one of the largest loans in history, to finance the slave compensation package required by the 1833 Act…The total sum represented 40% of the government’s yearly income in those days, equivalent to some £300 bn today.
You might expect this so-called “slave compensation” to have gone to the freed slaves to redress the injustices they suffered. Instead, the money went exclusively to the owners of slaves, who were being compensated for the loss of what had, until then, been considered their property. Not a single shilling of reparation, nor a single word of apology, has ever been granted by the British state to the people it enslaved, or their descendants.
Today, 1835 feels so long ago; so far away. But if you are a British taxpayer, what happened in that quiet room affects you directly. Your taxes were used to pay off the loan, and the payments only ended in 2015. Generations of Britons have been implicated in a legacy of financial support for one of the world’s most egregious crimes against humanity…The benefits of slave-owner compensation were passed down from generation to generation of Britain’s elite. Among the descendants of the recipients of slave-owner compensation is the former prime minister David Cameron.”
We oppose LGBTQ behaviour just as we oppose adultery and incest. The difference is that nobody is trying to criminalize anyone who speaks out against adultery or incest. But let’s ask why is there such a deep-rooted opposition to homosexual acts in Jamaica? It’s because during slavery’s evil reign Jamaica was a hotbed of slave revolts. To break the back of such defiance slave masters would strip the strongest slaves naked, tie them and compel their children and all the other slaves to watch while the same slave masters brutally raped them. It doesn’t need to be said how these perverted, brutal acts destroyed the victims.
Kris Manjapra wrote about “the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, a British slave owner in Jamaica in the mid-1700s. Thistlewood recorded 3,852 acts of sexual intercourse with 136 enslaved women in his 37 years in Jamaica.” In his 23 July 1756 entry, he described punishing a slave in the following manner: “Gave him a moderate whipping, pickled him well, made Hector sh.. in his mouth, immediately put a gag in it whilst his mouth was full, and made him wear it 4 or 5 hours.”
Our noble UK government stands guilty of refusing to pay one cent in reparations to descendants of slaves for such unspeakable atrocities, refusing to even say, “We are ashamed of the evils our ancestors did to you; of the barbaric and perverted methods by which our nation amassed its wealth, and of the consequential and incalculable loss and suffering you have borne. For all this we are profoundly sorry.” And in the same breath it masquerades as a dignified champion of human rights.
We the people of Anguilla call this what it is – shameless hypocrisy. They defy science, imperil national health, and indoctrinate vulnerable children after knighting gay so-called marriage as a “human right”, while disdainfully trampling fundamental, core human rights. The UK and other European nations that raped (and are still raping) the African continent, India and other nations of their wealth, have no right to lecture us about human rights, and certainly not about gay so-called marriage rights.
If the UK government is so committed to upholding human rights, let it ask forgiveness of the Chagossians for 56 years of gross abuse. Yes – let them return to their island from which they were driven like animals in 1965-67. In the 1960’s the UK signed a deal that allowed the US to build its second largest foreign naval base on Deigo Garcia, the largest of the Chagos Islands archipelago. The natives, who, by the way, were black, refused to leave their homeland. After trinkets and threats the British, on one day, poisoned all their dogs and warned them that they’d be next if they refused to leave. The poor people had no choice. They boarded the British vessels and were packed into the filthy holds of the ship with no fresh air, while the cows and hogs were kept on the deck and higher levels. They were taken to Mauritius where they have lived as exiles ever since.
The Chagossians have been fighting for their right to return to their homeland, but England has disdained them. Andrew Harding wrote in the BBC, January 28, 2021 “The maritime law tribunal of the United Nations has ruled that Britain has no sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. It criticised London for its failure to hand the territory back to Mauritius. The judges’ decision confirms a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and a vote in the UN General Assembly. The Indian Ocean archipelago includes a US military base. The UK has said it will hand the islands back when they’re no longer needed for defence purposes.
In response to the ruling, a spokesperson for the British Foreign Office said: “The UK has no doubt as to our sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), which has been under continuous British sovereignty since 1814. Mauritius has never held sovereignty over the BIOT and the UK does not recognise its claim.”
So here we are being lied to by the UK government that “The European Convention on Human Rights obligates the UK government to force us to make gay marriage compulsory in all participating States and their Dependencies” (there is no such obligation!), while this same UK government boldly defies the ruling of the United Nations about its duty to stop violating the fundamental human rights of thousands of Chagossians.
Let’s look at the UN and UK’s commitment to protecting children from pedophiles. Andrew Macleod on the 13 February 2018, asked in The Independent concerning rampant pedophilia in the United Nations agencies, “What is the United Nations doing in training, prevention, detection and prosecution of these crimes? When one looks at the United Nations’ own website and filters the data to see accusations for child sex crimes that have been investigated by the United Nations, found to be upheld, how many of these people have been reported back to police forces for prosecution? Not a single one – by the UN’s own data on their own data base. Thousands of victims and not one person in jail.”
On 14 February, 2019, Vikram Dodd, police and crime correspondent, wrote in The Guardian, “The number of Britons with a sexual interest in children may be seven times higher than previously thought, the head of the National Crime Agency, Lynne Owens, has said. Some dark web sites require people to prove they have raped a child before they are allowed to enter.” Time Magazine, on July 10, 2014 said, ‘From politicians’ fraudulent expenses to phone hacking, Britain has become surprisingly scandal-strewn in recent years, but the latest reputational cyclone to sweep across its shores is casting an especially dark light: pedophilia in high places.” It is impossible to comprehend how horrific abuse of children happens under successive UK governments that insist on presenting themselves as champions for human rights.
We, the people of Anguilla strongly urge the UK Government to urgently address its flagrant abuses of genuine, human rights and stop lying to us about its international obligation to fake human rights in order to intimidate us into scrambling into the one engine plane. We know the truth and you are not credible anymore. The one engine plane has crashed. Ti mash up.
