Sir,
Marcus Rutherford’s excellent analysis – https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/a-case-for-slavery-reparations-perhaps-not/ – of the question concerning the alleged right of certain unfortunate peoples to receive reparations encourages one to think not so much of those who clamour for them, but those who do not. As we all know (mostly thanks to the wonderful Oxford English Dictionary), the word ‘slave’ is derived from ‘Slav’, the Slavonic people(s) having been “reduced to a servile state by conquest in the 9th century.” Yet you never hear Vladimir Putin or Volodymyr Zelenskyy or even Donald Tusk asserting that they have a right to be compensated for the wrongs done to their forebears by the Latins and the Saxons and the Turks. The name of the whole race became a byword for the deplorable institution of which the ubiquity until as late as the nineteenth century serves as the most illuminating comment upon all humanity as a species – but Slavic composure remains. So when a select group of Africans and Asians contends that Africans and Asians alone are the past victims of ‘Africanery’ or ‘Asianery’ who cannot be expected to stand upon their own feet (anew) without making the most extraordinary claims upon the coffers of their erstwhile ‘oppressors’, it is nothing short of the most regrettable confirmation that honour and self-respect are not virtues that can ever come from without. There are some things without which you must always live if yours was not the good fortune to have been born with them.
That it may not be too late even now for me to be proven wrong shall nevertheless remain the prayer of
Your obedient servant,
Bilal Haider Junejo, LLB LLM (Lond) CertHE (Oxon) AdvDip (Cantab).
