The most memorable moment of King Charles and Queen Camilla's recent royal tour of Australia and Samoa was Australian indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe's insult to the monarchy. She was escorted out of Canberra's Parliament House after she heckled the King and accused him of genocide. The British media was incensed, calling her “outburst” simply “rude” and “ill-mannered”.
True, Senator Thorpe's behaviour may be unwarranted. However, it ensured that the royal visit was anything but forgettable. A couple of days later, the issue of reparations raised by the former British colonies at the two-day biennial Commonwealth Summit in Samoa was another rough treatment the British royalty received in quick succession.
Set roughly midway between New Zealand and Hawaii, the summit in Samoa last month saw King Charles and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer join leaders from 56 Commonwealth nations. It coincided with the BRICS Summit in Kazan and therefore received little coverage in India. Anyway, the setting may have been remote, but the message on reparations was direct and one that won't be easy to ignore. Good that the leaders of two heavyweight Commonwealth countries, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, were attending the BRICS summit. Their presence would have made things more difficult for the UK government. India was represented at the summit by Union Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, Kiren Rijiju.
Nevertheless, calls for the UK to pay monetary compensation and extend a formal apology over its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade resurfaced with fresh urgency at the summit. The UK, expectedly, had vetoed the proposal to directly address reparations in the summit's final communique. Instead, the document tiptoed around the issue, referencing only the possibility of “future discussions” on “reparatory justice” regarding the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer rejected calls for an apology and reparations, telling delegates that it was futile to have "very........