Portugal must “pay the costs” of slavery and colonial crimes, says Marcelo | Colonialism

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa says that Portugal is responsible for the crimes committed during transatlantic slavery and the colonial era, and admitted that there is a need for compensation. In a conversation with foreign correspondents, the President of the Republic declared that Portugal “assumes full responsibility” for the mistakes of the past and that these crimes, including colonial massacres, had “costs”. “We have to pay the costs,” he added in statements cited by Reuters.

“Are there actions that were not punished and those responsible were not arrested? Are there assets that were looted and were not returned? Let’s see how we can repair this.”

The idea of ​​paying reparations or making other historic reparations for transatlantic slavery has been gaining traction around the world, including efforts to establish a special court to review the cases.

Marcelo had already stated, in 2023, that Portugal should apologize for transatlantic slavery and colonialism, but he stopped short of making a formal apology. At the event with the foreign press, the Portuguese President also defended that “recognizing the past and taking responsibility for it was more important than apologizing”.

Portugal was the largest trafficker in the transatlantic slave trade — more than half of the estimated 12 million globally.

Historical reparations have been on the agenda in recent years, and the reactions of world governments to these demands are diverse. The Dutch government, in 2022, announced the creation of a fund of 200 million euros for initiatives, especially in the field of education, to combat the legacy of slave labor in its former colonies. In Canada, after years of protests and legal battles, the Government moved forward, in 2023, with compensation to local indigenous communities worth 600 million dollars.

But these cases are the exceptions: in the USA, for example, the door to compensation related to slavery was never opened. And there are many indigenous communities, like in Brazil, that continue to demand reparations.

The restitution of assets is another topic that has been to roll lots of paint. OThe cases in which cultural heritage has been restituted are a drop in the ocean compared to the extent of the treasures displayed in museums, essentially European, that were removed from multiple countries during the colonial period.