PARIS (PANA)�The realization that the enslavement of Africans and Africa itself, during the colonial period, was the basis of the continent�s current underdevelopment that has started to generate a heated debate among scholars, both in Africa and beyond.

The debate took a dramatic turn when scholars at a meeting in Accra declared that Europe and the Americas, for starters, owed Africa $777 trillion for slave-trading and colonizing Africans. (See Final Call, Vol. 18 #43).

Though talk of reparations for the slave trade and colonialism has been debated among African intellectuals for sometime now, observers noted this is the first time that a figure has been placed on what they call "a crime against humanity."

UNESCO has even created a special department to look into this aspect of how millions of people from the whole continent could have been subjected to such inhumane and cruel treatment and yet given virtually nothing in return in the form of reparations.

A gathering of young people in Dakar, Senegal, at the "Youth Forum On World Heritage and Slave Trade," sponsored by the local UNESCO office, had a chance to enhance the debate as part of the International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition.

The removal from Africa of its best minds and strongest young people has continued to haunt the continent, by bringing negative consequences which were worsened by colonialism, when pressure to stop slavery gathered momentum, at the turn of the last century.

UNESCO�s assistant director general in the Priority Africa Department, Noureini Tidjani Serpos, said Africa continued to suffer and is being marginalized today as if it made no contribution to the world.

He cited the untold African blood that was spilled during WWII that liberated Europe from German tyranny. The double standard is that "when the war ended, the Americans put up a Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe�including Germany itself�that was economically devastated but when slavery was abolished no Marshall Plan was in the offing for Africa," Mr. Serpos said.

"You cannot for instance take away some 100 million people, the cream of that society, from a continent and expect that that region will not be under-developed," he added.

As Africa commemorated the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition recently, he noted, it reflected on the price for peace and freedom that it paid through the blood of its people during the second world war for Europe to be free.

He said the day should serve to remind the African people of their past history to ensure the memory is preserved, not from hate or animosity, but just like Jews commemorate the Holocaust, to symbolize that never again will humanity fail to acknowledge the dignity of all men and women, including their mutual acceptance and understanding.

According to Mr. Serpos, UNESCO�s "Slave Routes" project aims at retrieving from Western countries, that benefited from the slave trade, archives covering the trade to enable documentation centers to be set up in each African country on the effects of the trade and its past history.

Noting that recognition by France of "slavery as a crime against humanity," was a big step forward, Mr. Serpos stated that UNESCO was exploring possibilities for the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to call on its member states to declare the "slave trade as a crime against humanity" as well. He urged African governments, civil society and the population to mobilize every year on the remembrance day to give prominence to the day.