No single event so signified the vulnerability of the small states of the Caribbean as the catastrophe wrought by Hurricane Ivan on the island of Grenada in September 2004. At the same time, however, no other event evinced such spontaneous solidarity and support from its neighbours. In fact, soldiers of the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force who were the first to arrive had not only to provide humanitarian and relief services but also to quell disorder which erupted in the absence of local police who were affected by the disaster.
For a few days, at least, Grenada’s sovereignty was almost meaningless. The stabilization of a chaotic situation, the delivery of supplies and the restoration of services mattered more. That emergency was an excellent example of how effectively mechanisms for mutual support, security and civil defence among the small states could function.
Security
It might have been a mere geographical coincidence that Trinidad and Tobago was the closest country to Grenada and was the first to respond. But, it is also the richest and had the resources to do so. Trinidad and Tobago’s present Prime Minister Patrick Manning who, fortuitously, is lead head of government with responsibility for regional crime and security issues in Caricom, has become the bell-wether of security cooperation in the Eastern Caribbean.
The Trinidad economy bore the expense for hosting several security agencies, including the Implementing Agency on Crime and Security, during last year’s Cricket World Cup competition. By and large, the security arrangements for that event worked well and provided a matrix for an emergent security regime. The inauguration of the Single Domestic Space, for example, albeit among only nine Caribbean Community member states, was a unique invention that accorded Caribbean citizens of any nationality freedom of movement − an unintended consequence of a fundamental feature of the Caricom Single Market and Economy.
The legal infrastructure provided for a raft of facilitation measures for immigration and cooperation in policing. The institutional architecture erected for the competition, comprising agencies for operational planning, communications, and information-sharing, was also effective. Some of the elements of the security plan should now be adopted, upgraded, expanded and placed on a permanent basis as proposed by the security summit in Port of Spain in March this year.
Apart from the potential challenges to international cricket and the existential catastrophe of hurricanes, one of the most egregious examples of the threat to stability was the unprecedented arrest and near assassination of Mr Arthur Robinson, then a Caribbean Prime Minister, during the insurrection of the Jamaat al Muslimeen in July 1990 in Port of Spain. Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community who were meeting in Kingston, Jamaica at that fateful time issued the Kingston Declaration which, among other things, committed Caricom “to the establishment of a regional security mechanism” but did very little to give effect to their decision.
Fears of old threats such as coups d’état, insurrections and armed invasions still linger but new threats have emerged in the forms of criminal violence attributed in part to narcotics-trafficking, gun-running, money-laundering and illegal migration, and the emergence of organised crime and violent posses and gangs. These threats have been aggravated by the deportation from metropolitan countries of convicts who might have no social or familial links with, or in, the small states.
The lessons of the security arrangements for Cricket World Cup were useful despite these threats. The prospects for improving and institutionalizing security cooperation arrangements are now more favourable than they have ever been.
Stability
The spectre of instability has loomed large over the small states since the start of the decolonization process in the 1960s. The successful secession of Anguilla from St Kitts and Nevis in 1967 and the overthrow of Grenada’s elected Prime Minister Eric Gairy by the New Jewel Movement in1979 have understandably made the small states of the Caribbean more concerned with local regime stability and survival than with any grand international strategy.
Their small size, weak economies and limited defence capability have made them vulnerable. These deficiencies may have been exacerbated by weak governance and economic distress arising from the soaring prices of food and fuel and the diminished access of their products to preferential markets in a globalised economy.
In their quest for stability, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States was established as a sub-regional, politico-economic community. This in turn provided the platform for the erection of the Regional Security System with the signing in October 1982 of a Memorandum of Understanding “…to assist one another in national emergencies, prevention of smuggling, search and rescue, immigration control, fishery protection, customs and excise control, maritime policing duties, protection of off-shore installations, pollution control, national and other disasters and threats to national security.”
Although the RSS remained confined to Barbados and the Lesser Antilles, its valuable experience over the past 26 years could be an advantage to the Caribbean states in planning any system of security co-operation.
At the hemispheric level, the USA has a long record of preoccupation with the Caribbean island states and Central America. This is largely because of the strategic importance first of the Panama Canal and, later, of the aerospace facilities at Cape Canaveral and the presumed threat from hostile states. In pursuit of its geopolitical interests in the Caribbean, the USA established its southern command − SOUTHCOM − to contain socialist and potential rogue regimes such as Cuba and Nicaragua.
The USA was able to marshal soldiers and policemen into an ad hoc ‘Caribbean Peacekeeping Force’ to participate in the military operations in Grenada (1983), and as a ‘Caribbean Battalion’ in Haiti (1994). US bilateral military co-operation with Caribbean states wove a web of agreements, collaboration, equipment transfers, training courses and manoeuvres. Now, however, as the USA has become preoccupied with fighting wars on two fronts far away in Afghanistan and Iraq, its responsiveness to hemispheric developments in South America has been restrained.
This has afforded Brazil the opportunity to play a stabilizing role in South America and the Caribbean. Brazil is positioned in the continent’s most strategic location having borders with all but two states. Its armed forces are the strongest on the continent and its stable economy has permitted it to increase military expenditure. It is in this new role that Brazil’s Minister of Defence Nelson Azevedo Jobim earlier this year visited Caracas, Georgetown, Paramaribo and other capitals to canvass support for the formation of the South American Defence Council. The proposed council is meant to develop a defence policy, resolve international disputes on this continent without resort to extra-continental mediators, act collectively on peacekeeping missions, and combat organised crime.
This is a reassuring development for the states such as Guyana on the continent’s northern littoral. Smaller states can also look to Brazil to exercise a moderating influence on Venezuela which possesses the longest Caribbean coastline of 2,718 km and has longstanding geopolitical ambitions in the region. Venezuela’s claim to Bird Rock and to nearly one-third of the Caribbean Sea are potentially a disturbing factor in inter-state relations in the region, the attractiveness of the provisions of the Petrocaribe Energy Agreement and the Alternativa Bolivariana por las Americas (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) notwithstanding.
Sovereignty
In such a scenario, do statehood and sovereignty hold any significance for small states? The Carib-bean has been characterized as a vulnerable, and sometimes volatile, archipelagic space which has “historically been a zone of transshipment for contraband, illegal drugs and ammunition and, more recently, illegal trafficking in humans.” Bestriding the major sea lanes of commerce and communication between the North and South American continents, the Caribbean has been one of the most Balkanised regions on earth, comprising a variety of distinct jurisdictions with asymmetrical relationships, ever since the arrival of Europeans over 500 years ago.
The rich states − France, the Netherlands, UK and USA − still hold onto their tiny territorial possessions and project their military power. The ‘middle’ powers of the circum-Caribbean − Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela − influence regional relations more moderately. The minnows in the sea are the small states which exert little or no influence on international affairs. Geographically scattered, economically weak, environmentally challenged, and prone to natural disaster, many small states are not only vulnerable to threats to their security but are also incapable of independently and individually responding to them decisively.
These factors have severely restricted their sovereignty, even as a collective. This was evident in the Caribbean Community’s incapacity to respond realistically to a security threat to a member state in February 2004 when the United Nations Security Council authorised the deployment of a Multinational Interim Force to Haiti within hours of the inexplicable termination of the presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
That action wrecked several months of Caricom’s painstaking diplomatic effort to resolve the dispute without resort to force.
The military intervention led by France and the United States of America in Haiti (although authorized by the Security Council) was an example of how powerful states could resort to force in a volatile domestic situation in a small, sovereign state affiliated to the community. Indeed, one writer pointed to the paramountcy of the security concerns of the USA (and certain European states such as France, The Netherlands and the UK) in the region and the fact that the sovereignty of the small states was only “conditional.”
The USA’s position has always been that the small states had the potential to pose problems in the Caribbean basin. With the disintegration of the USSR, would-be socialist regimes lost support and the USA lost interest, paying less attention to purely strategic issues. The change in US strategy was elucidated in summit meetings between Caribbean Community leaders and President Bill Clinton in 1997 and next with George Bush in 2006. Thenceforth, USA-Caricom collaboration shifted to combating organised transnational crime, narco-trafficking, gun-running, alien-smuggling and money-laundering, among other things.
Security system
The decision of Caricom Heads of Government last year to recognise ‘security ‘as the fourth pillar of the Caribbean Community, therefore, comes at a propitious time. The heads have agreed on a Strategy and Plan of Action to stem the rising tide of violent criminality by building on the legacy of the successful security co-operation arrangements put in place for the Cricket World Cup. They must now go further by deciding quickly to establish a permanent mechanism for mutual support. Without a new regional security system, the stability of the small states could be impaired further by the constant threats of environmental catastrophe and the emergent threats of economic decline and domination.
