Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 01/Aug 04:57

Freedom Project promises legal action if Bahamian ‘Archangel’ not pardoned

The directors of the Caribbean Freedom Project and the Cross Rhodes Campaign will take legal action if Bahamian authorities do not accede to a request to pardon Shervandaze “Michael the Archangel” Smith. In 2021, Smith was arrested for taking a sledgehammer to the Christopher Columbus statue at the Bahamian government house. A past article said this started national debate about colonial monuments in public spaces. He was eventually charged and ordered to pay $7,050 in fines, a 2024 one news article said. He pled guilty to trespassing and causing damage in 2024. There were questions about his mental health but he refuted those. In July, Trinidad and Tobago-led group Cross Rhodes Freedom Project called on the chair of the Bahamian Advisory Committee on the Prerogative of Mercy and Bahamas’ National Security Minister Wayne Munroe to fully pardon Smith. A July 23 Gleaner article quoted Munroe as saying there may be stronger cases for posthumous pardons and he cautioned against historical revisionism. One of the Freedom Project directors Shabaka Kambon shared with Newsday, the July 7 letter which asked the mercy committee to pardon Smith. For Kambon and the group’s other director, Dr Claudius Fergus, this is not an individual case but a matter pertinent to the entire region. This, he said, in a phone interview would foretell the region’s future. Munroe’s response was not unexpected but based on what was sent to the government, Kambon believes they would pardon Smith. “I don’t see them based on what we sent to them, based on the kinds of endorsements we have from important regional luminaries, even some from the Bahamas, and, based on the amount of organisations that have come forward to support this campaign, I cannot see how the Bahamian government is not going to accede to our request. “But if they don’t, as I did with our own PM here (former prime minister Dr Keith Rowley), what we did at some point, we issued something similar to a pre-action protocol letter, demanding something be done or we would take legal action.” Kambon said a new legal framework existed, coming out of the permanent forum for people of African descent, where a number of legal groups across the world that represent African people have set up a structure that will pursue these kinds of matters. That was all he was willing to say on that for now. “This is the 21st century and, if there is injustice in the 21st century, this is not 1970, where we are going to come out in the streets, demonstrate and call on them to do something. “This is the 21st century, we will take legal action. Because, and I am going to make this clear, there are a number of European countries that have laws against the diminishing, minimisation, trivialisation or denial of genocide that carries fines and, even, in some cases, jail time.” Caribbean people deserve to have a public landscape that does not celebrate one of the greatest crimes in human history, he said. Smith’s pardoning could set precedent to end the “celebration of genocide” in the region’s public spaces, Kambon said. He wanted, however, to make it clear to the public that their work was not really about monuments, statues, street names, symbols and signs but rather about the region coming out of colonisation’s “dark night.” Kambon added their work was about the values Caribbean societies were taking into the future. It was important to highlight these matters, Kambon said, as there was still a generation in power today who did not understand the region’s past or its historical moments. However, there were a number of current regional leaders like Barbados’ Mia Mottley, Antigua and Barbuda’s Gaston Browne and former Trinidadian prime minister Rowley who pushed the decolonisation work forward. [caption id="attachment_1169616" align="alignnone" width="883"] Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley are among the regional leaders who have pushd the decolonisation work forward. - Photo by Angelo Marcelle[/caption] “He (Rowley) demonstrated what moral leadership looks like in this new era of historical clarity. Even those leaders, when you look at what it took for them to arrive there, you realise there is a lot of work by civil society that would have gone into helping them to understand this particular historical moment. “The Black Lives Movement and the Rhodes Must Fall Movement coming out of South Africa in 2015, later in 2020, all of those things helped to shape global consciousness in a particular way. “Some leaders got it, some still have not gotten it and our job is to ensure, as civil society, those people who have taken sacrifice to force our countries in the region to confront the truth of their past, to free the future, that they are not persecuted.” Kambon said this was a matter of which all Caribbean citizens should be concerned. “Particularly, in light of that fact, that what this person was involved in was a conscientious objection to the diminishing, minimisation or denial of genocide which is what a Columbus statue does. “They stand in our capital cities to diminish, minimise or deny there was a genocide in this region.” He said the group was leading the global call for reparations from the governments of former colonial powers for the crimes of native genocide, transatlantic slave trade and the racialised system of chattel slavery while Caricom members openly glorified the figures who perpetrated and promoted the wrongs for which they were seeking reparations. The region lives an “egregious contradiction” which leaves it vulnerable to ridicule, Kambon added. The freedom project pooled a list of endorsements from prominent figures in support of its call for Smith to be pardoned. There are 33 individuals and organisations on that list including St Lucian diplomat June Soomer, director of Regional and Pan-African Affairs of the Emancipation Support Committee of TT (ESCTT) Dr Khafra Kambon, vice chair of the UN’s permanent forum on people of African descent Gaynel Curry, chair of the UN’s committee on the elimination of racial discrimination Prof Verne Shepherd and TT-based group Womantra. “So many important Caribbean people have come forward to support this in one week. There is a clear understanding across the region that there is something fundamentally wrong with the critical celebration of colonial monuments," he said. Kambon said the time of Columbus was past and the time when people thought the “discoverers” were heroes, was also past. He added that the entire world "re-examined, reinterpreted and corrected” the hero myth of Columbus in light of new evidence. “All this new information has led to a climate where, even in Spain - the primary beneficiary of Columbus' plunder, people are beginning to see 1492 not as a source of pride but of shame.” The Rowley-led government’s decolonisation process saw the removal of Columbus’ three ships from the Coat of Arms and replaced with the pan as well as the 2022 Cabinet-appointed committee set up to look at statues, monuments and other historical signage. This is work he hopes continues under the Kamla Persad-Bissessar-led administration. Kambon said he recently received a message from the new administration asking him to send documents initially sent to the national committee set up by the previous administration. “I want to believe this administration is looking into this issue to ensure that they would also be part of the change.” He said it was under the previous Kamla Persad-Bissessar-led administration that the region agreed to pursue reparations. “It was right here, in TT, that the historical meeting took place under her leadership.” In 2013, Persad-Bissessar formed a national committee on reparations. He added that the late United National Congress (UNC) founder and leader Basdeo Panday was also the first to point out that TT had a problem in the continued celebration of these figures. Panday pointed out that many of the country’s streets were named after people who abhorred both Afro and Indo-descended people. “Panday really highlighted the issue. So when we started the Freedom Project he received an honorary invitation.” The People’s National Movement (PNM) founder the late Dr Eric Williams also did a lot of work to decolonise public spaces and, if he had lived longer, TT would have been further decolonised, Kambon said. He said post-Williams leadership forgot about that and people began to embrace the “racist colonial monuments" as “history and heritage.” He said in both parties there were decolonising ethos. “I want to believe Persad-Bissessar will continue the work in her own party.” TT will remember those leaders who demonstrate moral courage in the time of historical clarity, Kambon said.   The post Freedom Project promises legal action if Bahamian ‘Archangel’ not pardoned appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.