Letter to UN and CARICOM
Please see below, comment your name and country, if you would like your signature added to this letter which I intend to send to these organisations
November 9th, 2023
Headquarters of the United Nations
760 United Nations Plaza, Manhattan,
New York City, New York, USA
CARICOM Secretariat
Turkeyen Georgetown, Guyana
My name is Katie Numi Usher, and I am a 37 year old artist and Black woman from the formerly British colonised nation state Belize. I write as the descendant of Africans who were forcibly removed from their places of origin and trafficked to the Americas and Europe where they were subjected to some of the most heinous human rights violations in the history of humankind. Not only were my ancestors physically displaced, their histories and knowledge of their place of origins, languages and cultural practices were systematically and repeatedly obscured from them and or they were punished for trying to preserve, relay knowledge or practise in secret. We are still reeling from the damages caused by these ancestral wounds, all with no reparations of any kind. I write to you also as a Garifuna woman, whose ancestors were exiled from their homeland Yurumein (now known as the nation state St. Vincent and the Grenadines) because they resisted Spanish, French and British colonisation and threat of subjugation to enslavement at their hands. My ancestors were expelled from their homeland and left on an island Baliceaux, with no food and no clean drinking water to die. By the grace of their God and their own ancestors, my ancestors survived and would later move to Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize and Guatemala.
I write to you as a Black woman born on a territory hotly debated over, for centuries by Belize, Spain, the United Kingdom and Guatemala. This territorial dispute, so deeply interwoven in both our countries’ (Belize and Guatemala) fabric, is, in and of itself, a vestige of British and Spanish colonisation in the Abya Yala, now known as the Americas.
I give that background to demonstrate how deeply all this affects me, because on an ancestral level, I have experienced all this before. I have been watching helplessly for years and to see it all amped up since October 7th, 2023 has been a soul-shattering experience that I can no longer remain quiet about, nor can I have my silence at your failure and inaction be understood as some kind of acquiescence. It is not. I must express my grave concern at what is currently happening to Palestinians in the Palestine, especially the Gaza and the occupied West Bank, as well as to Palestinians in the wider diaspora, who must helplessly look on as a genocide and ethnic cleansing happens in real time, and two, to plainly condemn the inaction and failure of your organisation to demand a ceasefire and to intervene in the interest of preservation of life, dignity, peace and self determination of the Palestinian people.
I take this opportunity to also condemn the Multinational Security Support Mission to Haiti, which was authorised by the United Nations’ Security Council on October 2nd, 2023, and which CARICOM endorsed and supported. This is not what Haiti needs. Haiti needs reparations. Haiti needs France to correct her multiple wrongs and return what she exploited and extracted both during colonisation and immediately after and to this day. All of France’s allies must also correct their multiple wrongs against Haiti and return what they have and continue to deprive Haiti of. I call on you to demand that the humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the Sudan and everywhere else be stopped immediately to prevent any more loss of life and dignity. What we are witnessing at this time is the damaging effects of colonialism and the dangerous threat to humane ways of handling conflict, threat of deprivation of the human right to self-determination, peace and freedom of movement.
I call for immediate release of all overseas and domestic territories and colonies from the bondage of colonisation in this day and age.
Below my signature along with signatures of my colleagues and friends from all over the world who share similar views.
Sincerely,
Katie Numi Usher, Belize Central America
