Sir Shridath Ramphal says a reference he made about ethnic cleansing in a speech in Trinidad on June 25th was in relation to a June 17th editorial in the Barbados Nation newspaper and not about Barbados or any other country in the Caribbean.
In a statement yesterday, Sir Shridath said he regretted the misleading information that had wrongly attributed remarks to him about ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Barbados.
“I make it absolutely clear that I never made even an insinuation about this in relation to Barbados, or any other country in the Caribbean.
The only reference I made to the notion of ‘ethnic cleansing’ was in a speech on 25th June to a meeting organized by the Caribbean Court of Justice in Trinidad. In doing so, I was criticizing an editorial in (the) regional newspaper for intimating such a notion and I was making the very specific point that no Caribbean leader would countenance it. My remark was the very antithesis of the connotation that has been put on it.”
Sir Shridath’s remark about ethnic cleansing had been seen in reports in this newspaper and elsewhere as referring to the new immigration rules in Barbados which targeted Caribbean illegals.
Sir Shridath noted that there was a brief remark on ethnic cleansing in a speech lasting over an hour to a conference of the Judiciaries of the Region on the impact of ‘globalization’.
He said “I lamented events which were threatening the cohesion of CARICOM and putting it at risk. Among these was the intimation in the editorial that one of the ‘ravages’ of unmanaged CARICOM migration could be “a disturbance of the existing equilibrium among races’”.
He said he followed this up by saying “It is always a sadness when, however propelled, our societies are caught in a downward spiral of separateness with fellow West Indians cast as outsiders; those times when, as Annalee Davis (the Barbadian Researcher) has described them, we become `locked into nationalist crevices … and exclusivist cultural legitimacy”.
“`We are at such a time, and both policies and practices are deepening Caribbean divides. ‘The knock on the door at night’ is not within our regional culture; still less are intimations of ‘ethnic cleansing’. No Caribbean leader would countenance such departures from our norms and values”.
Sir Shridath contended that the purpose in making the comment was to remind “that the basic premise of our regional lives is that West Indians are one people, and to recall us – as I have done throughout my life – to the vital importance of our integration and cohesion in a highly competitive world which has little regard for small countries – that, as Prime Minister David Thompson of Barbados put it recently, `integration is the last best bet for the Caribbean’”.
Sir Shridath said he definitely did not allude to genocidal practices a la Bosnia which he noted are alien to the region and especially alien to Barbados which he said he had “proclaimed globally to be a standard bearer of human values within our region”. He argued that any ‘slur’ on Barbados was in the Barbados Nation editorial and not his repudiation of it.
