{"id":44539,"date":"2026-04-08T06:58:57","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T06:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/?p=44539"},"modified":"2026-04-08T06:58:57","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T06:58:57","slug":"dont-look-at-who-voted-to-call-the-slave-trade-the-gravest-crime-look-at-who-didnt-kenneth-mohammed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/?p=44539","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t look at who voted to call the slave trade \u2018the gravest crime\u2019, look at who didn\u2019t | Kenneth Mohammed"},"content":{"rendered":"


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The most revealing thing about Ghana\u2019s UN resolution was not that it passed. It was who could not bring themselves to stand with it.<\/p>\n

On 25 March, the UN general assembly adopted the Ghana-led resolution<\/a> by 123 votes to three, with 52 abstentions. It declared that the trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans was \u201cthe gravest crime against humanity\u201d and urged steps including formal apologies, reparatory justice and the return of looted cultural property. The three states that voted no were the US, Israel and Argentina; the UK and all EU member states abstained.<\/p>\n

That voting pattern tells us everything we need to know about the world today. Much of Africa, the Caribbean<\/a> and the global south treated the resolution as a simple moral proposition: the truth about one of history\u2019s greatest engines of human theft, racial capitalism and underdevelopment. Much of the west reacted as if acknowledgment itself were a threat. Not to truth. A threat to their comfort.<\/p>\n

The Ghanian president, John Dramani Mahama<\/a>, understood what was at stake. He called the resolution \u201ca pathway to healing and reparative justice\u201d and \u201ca safeguard against forgetting\u201d. The point was not theatrical outrage but to establish, at the highest level, a crime whose scale, brutality and enduring consequences structure the present.<\/p>\n