1y ago

Portugal says no plans to pay colonial reparations

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Portugal says no plans to pay colonial reparations – DW – 04/28/2024

Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa had called for Lisbon to find ways to compensate its former colonies, including canceling debt. The government says it has not initiated any process to that effect.

Lisbon is not planning to pay reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism, Portugal's government said on Saturday.

The statement comes in response to remarks by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who said Portugal could find ways to compensate its former colonies.

Portugal said in a statement that it seeks to "deepen mutual relations, respect for historical truth and increasingly intense and close cooperation, based on reconciliation of brotherly peoples."

It stressed that it had not launched any "process or program of specific actions" for paying reparations.

73 comments

Sorry but being held responsible for what your ancestors did is bullshit. The very same bullshit as trying to reclaim the land your ancestors had. Both are not mine, it's in the past and I have nothing to do with it.
Also, it is most likely that everyone's ancestors did some bad things. Sad but it is a process in the human history.
- That's why wealth redistribution should be applied as indiscriminately as possible based on wealth, instead of discriminate cash payments based on cherry picked events that occurred more recently. Most people born into the rat race aren't there because of their own failures, but because their lineage were historically screwed by the wealthy stretching back thousands of years, and everyones ancestors contributed to the current state of civilization, so rather than discriminate cash injections which create a new generation of people left behind and continue the imbalance, it should be focused on reducing the deviation from the mean and median both domestically, and internationally.
  Do you really believe that cash injections to developed economies will benefit the people instead of their domestic oligarchs?
  
  Dude, I'm not descendant of slaves and I'm pretty much a slave of the Portuguese state at the moment. If this corrupt cast of politicians wants to pay reparations, I do not oppose to it, but they need to pay it from their own pockets.
  
  I don't disagree. Yes, the effects of what happened are ongoing. You cannot expect to fix a joy of children by paying them money for their father's loss, they won't be ever the same. You can only make their living standards better. What's done is done, no one can revert it. The whole issue is no different than this.
  I wish the world was fair but I don't think it will ever be. We cannot even fix our own countries, own municipals. We can only fix the future by taking an act today, we cannot fix the past.
  The migration of tribes had shaped the world. Is there anything we can do about it? Industrial revolution had shaped the world, the world wars had shaped the world. Even though we have no intention to continue affecting the world negatively, there is no end to that. Sorry but we haven't reached that serenity as homo sapiens. We must work for it but we won't see it in our lives.
  We should learn from our past, however we mustn't try to fix it since we cannot, it's plowing water.
  
  It's not fair that some people have more but the existence of inequality is not enough of a justification to seize property.
- Ancestors?
  By the middle of the 1920s, the whole of Angola was under control. Slavery had officially ended in Portuguese Africa, but the plantations were worked on a system of paid serfdom by African labour composed of the large majority of ethnic Africans who did not have resources to pay Portuguese taxes and were considered unemployed by the authorities. After World War II and the first decolonization events, this system gradually declined, but paid forced labor, including labor contracts with forced relocation of people, continued in many regions of Portuguese Africa until it was finally abolished in 1961.[55]
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Colonial_War
  There are people alive right now who were slaves in Portuguese Africa.
  
  The closest for fairness we can get in this is for the descendants of those who suffered getting compensation and that coming from the money inherited from those who did the deeds.
  Through most of the XX Century, the vast majority of the Portuguese weren't big land owners in the "colonies" (horrible word, by the way, but representative of that mindset), rich trading or industrial burgeoises making money from cheap raw materials, or a descendant of those: they were incredibly poor subsistence farmers who couldn't afford shoes for their kids and put them to work by the age of 12, in a country that even got food help from The Netherlands.
  In this like in every other situation were such a concept is applied, group guilt and group compensation are just going to move the injustices around and create new ones by making mainly those who are blamless and never got a cent from those actions pay for the deeds of those who never get punished - the rich from the Fascist regime and the Monarchy before it - whilst the ones that end up getting compensation are the pointy-elbow middle and upper classes in some african nations rather than the ones who need the help (and very likely deserve it) who are poor, illiterate and would have no clue how to claim the help.
  I think some measure of justice needs to be done here, I just disagree with the whole group guilt approach since it's invariably a way dilute the blame from the old wealth who are generally the one who inherited most of those historically ill gotten gains.
  
  I spoke generally but in this specific topic, Portugal should be fined by European Court of Human Rights for those individuals. Because it's unlikely there are still people alive who caused this incident in the first place. So yes, ancestors, for those who didn't commit these crimes.
- Colonialism is a structure, not a historical event. So it still needs to be dealt with. Just because you’re not to blame doesn’t mean you’re not the only one who can do the right thing as voting citizens. Nations that colonise absorbed wealth of other nations and that advantage can still be seen today in infrastructure that was built, wealth amassed. Museums today hold stolen artefacts and even bodies from lands they colonised.
  Please don’t use ancestors as a smokescreen for what is happening right in front of our eyes.
- It's not about what somebody's ancestor did. It's about what the country as a whole did. Country X had Y policy that oppressed Z group, and has resulted in that group still being impoverished today? Country X is on the hook then. They caused the problem, they need to help clean it up.
  
  so the current citizens of country X should be punished for things that their parents/grandparents/etc did? no that's stupid - and it doesnt work.
  
  I agree. Please produce 16th century Portugal and have them pay money back.
Duh. No country is going to do this, it will do nothing but open up a can of worms. I mean, what about the ancestors of the African tribes that rounded up the slaves and sold them? Shouldn't they pay something? What about the countries who fought for slaves to be free? What about all the families of the union soldiers in the US Civil War, shouldn't they get something? Or, is this whole "reparations" thing only for black Americans whose great, great, great, great grandparents were slaves? It's silly.
- As opposed too "I know you have nothing to do with what happened 100's of years ago, but it's time to pay up."
Pretty sure spain and portugal used to be muslim colonies themselves, shouldn't they get paid first then?
- Many people were fed up with the Spanish king at that point and invited the Muslims to take over. Spain would not be captured so easily if the inhabitants fought for it instead of against their current rulers.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Spain
  "The last Visigoth king, Roderick, was not considered a legitimate ruler by all of the inhabitants of the Spanish Kingdom, and some Visigothic nobles aided the Islamic conquest of Spain. One name frequently mentioned is Count Julian of Ceuta who invited Tariq ibn-Ziyad to invade southern Spain because his daughter had been raped by King Roderick. "
  
  If you just substitute some nouns you get the takeover of Hawaii by the US. I mention this because based on what I am seeing it sounds like some some random local thugs sold out their people to invaders hoping that they would get a better deal for themselves under them vs the king.
  Unless you got multiple opinion polls and voting records showing that the "people" supported it I don't think much of your argument.
- Those Italians dug a lot of gold and silver out of the Iberian peninsula too.
- Spain and Portugal aren't full of disease and poverty despite the fact that they used to be colonies, while their former colonies are full of disease and poverty.
  
  That's largely because of geography. You can't blame europe for mosquitos existing in africa.
  
  Well I can't say Spain and Portugal aren't full of disease and poverty, but that's probably because of the decades of corporatist fascism and Nazi Germany/Italy/the Vatican quashing the socialist/anarchist governments there to install a dictator, and not because of Al-Andalus which actually brought great prosperity to the region
- And I'm pretty sure that the Muslim caliphates didn't participate in a triangular slave trade which still has repercussions across North America and Africa today in terms of inequality and oppression.
- Well, apparently the Mourish Occupation of the Iberian Peninsula was what brought to the Dark Ages Europe advanced irrigation techniques which spread from there increasing agricultural production, the growth of cities and ultimatelly the Renaissance, so we probably would need to pay them, or at least their descendants (mainly Northern African Arabs).
  That said Portugal at least in this is a joke (and I say this as a Portuguese National) - for example some years ago the local politicians came up with a scheme to give the descendants of Jewish Sephardites (a group which was expelled from Portugal in the 15th century) portuguese nationality, which is quite an "interesting" choice of "reparations" taking in account the country's much more recent and way more harmful history of Slavery.
  Anyways, the whole thing is corrupt as fuck, with for example Jewish Organisations in Russia providing wealthy Jewish locals with "proof" of their Sephardite ancestry for the purpose of gaining Portuguese Nationality (which is only worth it because it means EU citizenship), to the point that the present day richest and most well known portuguese national is Roman Abramovich.
  This talk now is in the sequence of that crap (which continues, which for example some Hamas hostages given expedited Portuguese Nationality to try and secure their release as "portuguese"), the sudden rise in the recent elections of the far-right party who are the only nationalists around (so the only who frown upon the whole giving away of citizienship to people who never ever even visited the country) and the Portuguese President (who is basically a powerless figure who loves media attention) having suggested that Portugal and Spain should "compensate" former colonies.
  
  Well, apparently the Mourish Occupation of the Iberian Peninsula was what brought to the Dark Ages Europe advanced irrigation techniques which spread from there increasing agricultural production, the growth of cities and ultimatelly the Renaissance, so we probably would need to pay them, or at least their descendants (mainly Northern African Arabs).
  I see. This means that if any invader improved a property they took over in any sense of the word the takeover was justified. If for example I steal your car but give a good wash. You should thank me for cleaning it and I was right to steal it, since you were neglecting it.
  
  Many of the former Euro colonies started with stone tools and a nomadic lifestyle and where drug into the modern age (for the time of course) If Europe should repay the descendants of slavers, conquerors, and rapists for the advancements they brought, then by your own logic the colonies owe Europe reparations. Congrats your colonial policy is French!
  
  Do you apply the same logic to all other developments too? That descendants of american slaves now live in the US instead of having to run from lions and hippos, or all the western science and technology spread all around the world by european colonizers? That's a pretty shit argument dude.
  Rest of your statements seems logically sound though.
For a country that both established the transatlantic slave trade and was one of the last to continue reaping its profits – it was still using de-facto slave labour in its colonies in the 1960s – Portugal has been slow to reckon with its past.
The national school curriculum, museums and tourism infrastructure all amount to a grandiose rendering of the country’s 15th to 17th-century “discoveries” in Africa, Asia and the Americas, and a selective recollection of its 20th-century colonial exploits in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé & Principe, Goa, Macau and East Timor.
There are monuments and statues up and down the country dedicated to navigators, missionary priests responsible for the conversion of Africans and Indigenous people to Catholicism, or soldiers who fought against African independence in the colonial wars. Meanwhile, it is often said that “Portugal is not a racist country”, despite enormous structural inequalities and decades of documented discrimination. “There has been a silencing here of centuries of violence and trauma,” says Kia Henda.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/3/10/how-portugal-silenced-centuries-of-violence-and-trauma
- The Fascists were the ones who loved and spread all over all that iconography celebrating The Discoveries, to make up for a country which was incredibly poor except for a handful of selected Families. It was pretty standard Fascist ultra-nationalism in the same style as Moussulini's Italy.
  A lot of those ill-gotten gains were blown up centuries ago, and whatever was left never actually made its way down from the Old Wealth to most people.
  Real compensation should go to the ones that were being exploited much more recent in the "colonies" before the Revolution that brought Democracy to Portugal and should be coming from the ones doing the exploitation, many of whom are still alive, got given a whole lot of benefits as "Returnees" following the Revolution and many who whom are still today in the top political parties.
  It should also be done in a way that it ends up with the most in need, not in the hands of the rich and crooked of places like Angola.
  As I said elsewhere, group blame is how the wealthy who benefited from such abuses get to diffuse the blame through entire etnicities/nationalities so that they don't have to loose a significant chunk of their wealth for compensation. Curiously, the President Of Portugal who started with all this talk is the son of a Minister of the old Fascist Dictator - Salazar - and got to go study in France at a time were most of the country was way too poor to even dream of going for a week all expenses paid to Lisbon, much less a couple of years to Paris.
- It was also the first country in the entire world to abolish slavery (European Portugal, that is)
  
  If you're going to separate out mainland Portugal and its overseas territories like that, then technically slavery was never legal in England.
  
  As the article says, they were benefiting from slave labor in their colonies until the second half of the 20th century.
Should the french also pay reparations to Portugal for all the rape and murder that occured during the french invasions? What about the Romans? Should Italy also pay reparations to most European countries? Should the Scandinavians pay reparations to UK for the viking invasions?
Portugal would actually have to possess spare cash, for them to pay any of their former colonies so much as a penny in reparations
Shame, I was hoping for that stolen gold...
Canada looks disappointed.
- Canada is an interesting demonstration, we've actually been going hard into funding reservation services and returning land that the government controls. I think the transparency of the government w.r.t. truth and reconciliation has also been helpful... but legitimate reparations? Canada can't afford to make right the damage that's been done - the scars we've left on some communities is difficult to fully grasp. So what's the solution? It's a fucking hard problem.
  
  Heh, I was referring to the fact that chunks of what is now Canada used to be Portuguese colonies.
  
  solution
  Not that difficult, you just move on. Use money from rich areas to build out poor areas and the elimination of inequality will solve the creation of it
  The difficulty is getting people to sign onto eliminating inequality when they benefit from it
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The statement comes in response to remarks by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who said Portugal could find ways to compensate its former colonies.
Portugal said in a statement that it seeks to "deepen mutual relations, respect for historical truth and increasingly intense and close cooperation, based on reconciliation of brotherly peoples."
Portugal's colonial era lasted more than five centuries, with the decolonization of some African countries happening as late as 1974 after the fall of the authoritarian Estado Novo regime.
Portugal's president called on Lisbon to initiate a reparations process in comments made to reporters on Saturday, saying that the issue could not be swept "under the carpet."
He suggested that Portugal could pay reparations by canceling the debt of former colonies, developing special cooperation programs or providing financing.
The election was called after former Prime Minister Antonio Costa of the center-left Socialist Party stepped down over corruption allegations.
The original article contains 286 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
España, nos pagan la deuda?

73 comments