Europe’s colonial past carries a trillion-dollar bill Article by Sri Lanka Guardian

The Sri Lanka Guardian has published an article examining European states’ responsibility for the slave trade and colonialism. Caliber.Az presents an excerpt from the article below.

"European countries are increasingly confronting the history and continuing consequences of the transatlantic slave trade, yet formal apologies and meaningful reparations remain rare as governments draw a legal line between acknowledging the past and accepting responsibility for its costs.

When the United Nations General Assembly voted in March to recognise the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans as the greatest crime against humanity and called for reparations for affected countries, every member of the European Union abstained.

The European position was that a crime committed during the colonial era could not automatically create a legal obligation today to provide reparations.

The resolution, sponsored by Ghana and the African Union, nevertheless passed, placing before the international community demands from a continent from which an estimated 12.5 million people were transported to the Americas and subjected to enslavement. Those demands include formal apologies, the return of looted property, compensation for those affected and legal and political reforms.

Over recent years, a growing number of European countries have acknowledged the brutality of the slave trade and its continuing consequences. Yet only the Netherlands, in 2022, and the Catholic Church, in 2026, have issued formal apologies.

Repentance and an apology are not necessarily the same thing, particularly in legal terms. An apology is addressed to victims and acknowledges that a wrong or crime was committed. Ana Lucia Araújo, a historian at Howard University, says the distinction matters when discussing reparations.

Belgium confronted precisely this problem in 2022, when a parliamentary committee examining Belgian colonial rule in Congo failed to agree on whether the state should say it 'regrets' its past or 'apologises' for it. Some lawmakers feared that an official apology could become the first step towards financial claims for reparations. No declaration was ultimately adopted.

Khanya B. Motshabi, a professor of law at the University of the Free State in South Africa, says European states are 'very cautious' about issuing apologies because of fears that they could open the door to legal claims for compensation.

Estimates of the potential cost have reached extraordinary levels. In 1999, one calculation put the figure at $777 trillion. Thomas Craemer, an expert on slavery reparations, later estimated that the cost to the United States alone could range from $5.9 trillion to $14.2 trillion. In 2023, the Brattle Group estimated a global figure of between $100 trillion and $130 trillion.

'These are enormous figures,' Motshabi says. 'The colonising powers would have to pay more than global GDP.'

He rejects the European argument that the passage of time prevents reparations. The consequences of slavery, he argues, remain visible in systemic racial discrimination — a phenomenon prohibited under contemporary international law.

'Prescription is a European concept,' he says. 'But according to African conceptions of law, a debt does not expire.'

At the end of August, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, an independent body of 18 experts, also determined that states are legally obliged to provide reparations for slavery.

European governments have, in some cases, paid compensation for specific colonial abuses. In 2013, Britain paid £19.9 million to 5,228 Kenyans who suffered torture and abuses during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. 

Reparations, however, need not always mean direct financial payments.

Memorials, museums, monuments, changes to public place names and commemorative ceremonies can serve as forms of symbolic repair, Araújo says. They make visible a history that was for generations suppressed or ignored.

The return of cultural objects stolen during colonial rule represents another increasingly important form of restitution.

The African Union has identified restitution as one of its demands. Twenty years ago, Beninese heritage specialist Alan Godonou estimated that 90% of Africa’s cultural heritage was held outside the continent, particularly in major museums.

Yet every restitution can become a battle. Germany, for example, has still not returned the Cameroonian statue of the goddess Ngonnso, taken in 1903, despite agreeing to do so in 2022. The object remains in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum.

For researchers working on restitution, the problem is not simply returning an object. It is recovering the history and meaning attached to it.

France has also changed school curricula, introduced legislation intended to facilitate the return of looted objects.

But major questions remain, including the compensation Haiti was forced to pay France after independence in 1804, persistent inequalities in overseas territories and racism against Black people.

But reparations raise a more difficult question: whether acknowledging an historical crime also creates an obligation to address the inequalities and institutional consequences that survived it.

For much of Europe, that is where the boundary remains. The history can be admitted. The memory can be preserved. Even an apology can be offered.

But when the question becomes what Europe owes for the wealth, power and inequalities produced by slavery, the resistance begins," the article reads.

By Aghakazim Guliyev