Good morning, my name is Bernadette Atushene and I'm a Ghanian American law professor based in
Chicago and I'd like to thank Gay McDoughall for the invitation to this wonderful conference.
Now we can't talk about the economic exclusion of minorities without thinking seriously about how to
provide compensation for minorities how have benn unjustly dispossessed from their lands and there are
numerous examples of this as we have been hearing all day. Whites displaced native populations from
the Americas to Australia. During the Rwandan genocide radical Hutus massacred thousnads of Tutsi
and purposively displaced thousands more from their lands. Prior to the NATO bombings in 1999,
thousands of Kosovo Albanians were forced to flee hastily and leave their property behind due to
Serbian led ethnic cleansing campaign. The Columbian government as we've heard has failed to protect
it's citizens of African descent from massive land displacement during its ongoing civil war. Nomdaic
communities such as the Bedouins, Karamoja and Masai have been displaced from their lands is well,
that they've traditionally occupied. And lastly there's been several instances where minorities have been
displaced from their lands as a result of industrialisation and natural resource extraction.
My comments today will focus on how governments should compensate minorities for lands unjustly lost.
I'm an expert in the confiscation and restitution of property because I'm a property law professor with a
law degree from Yale and a masters in development from Harvard who has published several articles on
the topic and as a consultant for the South African Land Restitution Commission. I've conducted over a
hundred and fifty interviews of people who the apartheid government displaced from their land and the
post-apartheid regime compensated and I'm currently writing a book that explores the economic
physcological and social impacts of the compensation provided by the post-aparthied government.
What I want to emphasise today is that under certain circumstances displacement involves more than just
the confiscation of the individual communities' property. Sometime the act of dsiplacement is part of a
larger strategy of dehumanisation that's intended to remove minorities from the social compact causing
what I call "property induced invisibility". The displacement of minorities in Rwanda or Kosovo which
occurred as a consequence of genocide and ethnic cleansing are important examples of this
phenomenon. If the displacement involved more than just the confiscation of property then the mere
return of property will not be a sufficient remedy.When dehumanisation and exclusion are central to the
displacement process of providing compensation must include, must seek to include, the displace, in,
back into the democractic project. Rebuilding their relationship to society, affirming their humanity and
making them once again visibile, and you may ask me how in the world do we do this, Professor
Atuahene?
Well my arguement is that by moving from a focus on reparations to a commitment to what I call
restoration.What's the difference? Reparations deals exclusively with providing compensation while in
contrast resotration focuses on rebuilding the relationship to society by giving displaced individuals and
communities a choice as to how they are compensated so they can decide the terms of their inclusion
into the polity. If minorities has been displaced from their lands then compensation for this property rights
violation can include for instance free higher education for two generations, subsidied credit, a cash
award, the actual land that was unjustly taken or alternative land if it's, if the original land is not available.
Restoration allows minorities to choose from an array of compensation options rather than not
compensating them at all or only giving them the option of returning them to their land even if for various
reasons they no longer want to return. Again in conclusion we cannot talk about addressign the
economic exclusion of minorities without thining seriously about how to provide compensation for
minorities who've been unjustly displaced form their lands. I want to sugges that restoration with its focus