Europe Facing Pressure to Pay Reparations for Slavery.

From AFP:

PARIS - Historians and anti-racism campaigners are urging countries that oversaw and profited from the slave trade across the Atlantic and to recognize it as a crime against humanity, paving the way for repairs.

Next week, activists have planned to send a letter to the leaders of Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain asking them to recognize this trade as an historic injustice a century and a half after the end.

They have already convinced France to do so.

Memorial Foundation for the European slave trade will make the call to the French Senate on May 10, supported by the French historian Louis Sala-Molins and John Franklin, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington.

"There are several reasons, including its symbolic value, to restore the memory of this crime against humanity", Karfa Diallo, president of the Foundation, told AFP.

"There is also a question, shall we say, of justice, he said.

The persistent problem of racism in Europe that now has a multiethnic population that could be precisely traced back to 16th and 17th century texts to justify slavery and Coding, he argues.

"Racism and discrimination persists in Europe. Young Caribbean and African descent are victims. And we know, historians have shown, that racism was born in this story. "

Diallo group was founded in the former French slave port of Bordeaux in 1998.

He found allies in other Western European cities which have grown rich on the profits of trade, of Bristol in England to Porto in Portugal.