During his two-day visit to Jamaica, Prime Minister David Cameron said the U.K. will help fund a prison on the island nation, but that the country would not be offering any reparations for Britain’s role in the slave trade.

Days before Cameron arrived in Jamaica, Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission, wrote an open letter to the prime minister, in which he called for talks that would begin to address the possibility of reparations.

“I speak, Sir, of the legacies of slavery that continue to derail, undermine and haunt our best efforts at sustainable economic development and the psychological and cultural rehabilitation of our people from the ravishes of the crimes against humanity committed by your British State and its citizens in the form of chattel slavery and native genocide,” Beckles wrote, according to the Jamaican Observer.

The knighted academic continued, “The Jamaican economy, more than any other, at a critical moment in your nation's economic development, fuelled its sustainable growth. Britain, as a result, became great and Jamaica has remained the poorer.

"Jamaica now calls upon Britain to reciprocate, not in the context of crime and compulsion, but in friendly, mutually respected dialogue,” he added.

Back in 2013 Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller called for non-confrontational discussions on the subject before the United Nations.

Acknowledging that the wounds suffered by Britain’s involvement “run very deep," Cameron declined to make any reparations, the BBC reports, and asked that Caribbean countries move past this issue.

"I do hope that, as friends who have gone through so much together since those darkest of times, we can move on from this painful legacy and continue to build for the future," Cameron said.