In Europe, after WWII, the victors demanded reparations from Germany for all damages to civilians, and their dependants for loses caused by the maltreatment of prisoners of war and for all non-military property destroyed in the war. In 1921, Germany's reparations bill stood at 132 gold marks. After WW II, this claim appreciated to 320 billion. Other items for which these types of claims were made included bodily loss, lost of liberty, loss of property, injury to professional careers, dislocation and forced emigration, time spent in concentration camps because of racial, religious and political persecution. Others were the social cost of war represented by the burden from loss of life, social and institutional disorder. Perhaps the most famous case of reparations this century was paid by Germany to the European Jews for crimes against them in territories controlled by Hitler. In the initial phase, these included $2 billion to make amends to victims of Nazi persecution; $952 million in personal indemnities; $35.70 per month per inmate of concentration camps; pensions for the survivors of victims, $820 million on to the State of Israel to re-settle 50,000 European Jewish emigrants from land formerly controlled by Hitler. As recently as 1992, the World Jewish Congress in New York announced that the newly unified Germany would pay compensation, totalling $63 million for 1993 to 50,000 European Jews that lived in East Germany.

With such precedents of reparations to non-black peoples in four continents, Africans and Rastafari people the world over, who have suffered all of these atrocities and more for longer periods ought not neglect our great responsibility to the present and succeeding generations in articulating this cause to the world's foremost international body, The United Nations.

It should be noted that reparations is not just about money or even mostly about money. In fact, money is not even 1% of what reparations are about. Reparations is mostly about making repairs; self made repairs, on ourselves: mental, psychological, cultural, religious, organizational, social, institutional, technological, economic, political, educational, repairs of every type that we need in order to recreate and sustain Black societies. In the words of our great Black prophet and social activist, Marcus Mosiah Garvey," if we continue as we are, we are heading for extinction". Let us therefore ask ourselves this question: What weakness on our side made the holocaust possible? Weakness of organization, solidarity, identity, mentality, behaviour? Having answered, these basic question, I an I must therefore review, modil~r, and where necessary change our approach in order to end any complicity Africans may have in perpetuating our lamentable condition.

Why the United Nations? In 1963, H.LM Haile Selassie 1 in his address to the UN said and I quote, "The record of the UN during the few short years of its life affords mankind a solid basis for encouragement and hope for the future. The UN continues to serve as the forum where nations whose interest clash may lay their cases before world opinion. It still provides the essential escape valve without which the slow build-up of pressures would result in catastrophic explosions. For this, all men must give thanks".

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