We have had on occasion had to comment before on the opaqueness of official communications emanating from the different organs of Caricom. And as recently as our editorial, ‘Caricom’s pilgrimage,’ on Wednesday, we were moved to ask, “Do the citizens of the region feel persuaded nowadays of the words of their leaders when they speak of their intentions for Caricom?”
The communiqué of the last meeting of the Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR) held in Kingston Jamaica, on May 8-9, is no exception to our longstanding concern that we the people of the region need to be better informed about the consultations made and the decisions taken in our name.
When the six pages of the document are deconstructed, it is found to say nothing more than where and when the meeting was held, which ministers attended and what subjects were discussed, namely the state of Caricom’s various relations with the USA, the EU and the ACP, the Dominican Republic, and Canada; the global financial and economic crisis; Haiti; the community’s interests in multilateral institutions like the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), the Commonwealth, the United Nations; the Organization of American States (OAS) and collaboration with that body on the Advanced Passenger Information System (APIS); candidatures; Belize-Guatemala and Guyana-Venezuela relations; and piracy.
Apart from information to the effect that the region’s foreign ministers will meet with the US Secretary of State at the OAS General Assembly in Honduras next month, that Caricom heads will visit the US President in the second half of 2009 and that a caucus of Caricom heads has been convened by the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago – who, incidentally, is not the Chairman of Caricom – this Sunday in Port of Spain, to discuss the global economic crisis, the uninformed observer is left to read between the lines to try to decipher what exactly was discussed and more importantly, decided at the meeting.
As Secretary General Edwin Carrington put it in his opening remarks to the meeting, the underlying purpose of the COFCOR is “to strive to arrive at collective positions which advance and protect the interests of the Community.” But this is a principle he reminds the council of every year and it still no clearer, to judge by the communiqués issued, what concrete steps are being taken in this regard.
Indeed, one gets the impression that the only decisions taken were those to endorse a proposal coming out of the Fifth Summit of the Americas for a hemispheric development fund for Haiti, which will hopefully be advanced at the OAS General Assembly; to endorse the offer of Barbados to host the Adaptation Fund Board (AFB) to the Kyoto Protocol of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; the candidatures of Justice Duke Pollard of Guyana to the International Criminal Court and Ambassador Albert Ramdin of Suriname for re-election as Assistant Secretary-General of the OAS, and the candidature of Trinidad and Tobago as the site of the Headquarters of the Caricom Accreditation Agency for Education and Training; as well as agreeing to support Canada for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for the period 2011-2012.
As for the rest of the communiqué, there is a proliferation of verbs such as “urged,” “affirmed,” “acknowledged” and “recalled,” which tell us nothing about the substance of the discussions, except perhaps that the ministers talked and talked… and talked.
But talk is a necessary part of a diplomat’s professional life and, in truth, we do not begrudge our ministers and their senior officials the chance to exchange views and strategize on a regular basis in the best interests of the region. If anything and if the results could be measured, we would probably encourage them to talk to each other more often.
Our real problem is with the lack of information and transparency regarding Caricom’s processes. Communiqués such as this one tell us very little of real import and do our elected representatives little justice. For, here we are in the 21st century, living through an information revolution and moving, albeit too slowly, towards more active civil society participation as an essential component of good governance in democratic societies, and the best our premier regional institution can do is feed us platitudes from behind closed doors.
Now we are not asking to be admitted to all the councils and conferences of Caricom, for we recognize that there are some issues that demand confidentiality. We however feel strongly that if our regional integration movement is ever going to develop real momentum, it will need to generate more buy-in by its key stakeholders, the intended beneficiaries of the regional process, the people. There therefore has to be a more serious effort to inform the people about what is being discussed, decided and implemented in their collective interest. Otherwise, the Caricom project will continue to stutter along, subject to the whims and self-interest of individual leaders, reluctant to subject themselves to increased public scrutiny and to subsume their egos to the greater good of the region.
