UNITED NATIONS, Mar 25 (AFP): The UN General Assembly will vote Wednesday on a resolution designating the transatlantic African slave trade as "the gravest crime against humanity," in a move advocates say is a step towards healing and justice.
Ghana's President John Mahama, one of the African Union's most vocal supporters of slavery reparations, visited the United Nations headquarters to promote the "historic" gesture.
The resolution, he told the UN on Tuesday, "allows us as a global community to collectively bear witness to the plight of more than 12.5 million men, women and children, whose homes, communities, names, families, hopes, dreams, futures and lives were stolen from them over the course of 400 years."
Calling it "a safeguard against forgetting," Mahama took aim at recent political moves in the United States to ban books on the subject in order to "stop teaching students about the truth of...slavery, segregation and racism."
The draft resolution "declares the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity."
The text also highlights the legacy of slavery via "the persistence of racial discrimination and neo-colonialism" in today's society.
Amma Adomaa Twum-Amoah, the African Union's Commissioner for Health, Humanitarian Affairs and Development, said that "to name these atrocities clearly is to remove the last veils of ambiguity from the historical record."
"It is to say that what was done to Africans was not a tragic accident of history, but the result of deliberate policies whose legacies structure today's inequalities," she continued.
