Last week we made some comments on Prime Minister Kamal Persad Bissessar’s initial response to requests for assistance first from St Vincent and the Grenadines, and then from St Lucia in the face of Hurricane Tomas’ onslaught. Various interpretations of her motives have been advanced, but pursuing that course is likely to be unproductive since politicians are known to have multiple motivations for any single act. In addition, the most prominent motive attributed to the Prime Minister has been a desire to distance herself from the policies and style in regional politics, of her predecessor Patrick Manning. Manning is alleged to have been over-generous to the smaller states of Caricom, though Trinidadians are probably unaware that citizens of the OECS, in addition those in Guyana and Barbados, are silently smarting over their predicaments concerning the Clico and British American collapses, and might well be asking themselves who is the beneficiary and who is the victim.
Whatever the motivations of the Prime Minister, however, there can be little doubt about two consequences that her remarks must have brought well to the fore. First they have probably reinforced the cynicism of the Caricom’s man-in-the-street about their leaders’ perspectives on the future of Caricom, and made them even more numb about future plans which heads of government promise on the regional front. Few Caricom citizens will have been able to understand the rationale for a situation recently adverted to by Sir Shridath Ramphal and some senior Caricom citizens, all recipients of the Order of the Caribbean Community. This was the case of Trinidad’s Basdeo Panday, during his tenure as Prime Minister, going all over the Caribbean and successfully persuading governments that his country should be chosen to host the Caribbean Court of Justice(CCJ), only to hear the same Panday proclaim as loudly as ever some years later, that his party, now in opposition, would not support the CCJ. Whose word, many in the region must be asking, can be taken as valid for more than a few weeks?
Secondly, while it may be the case that Prime Minister Bissessar’s onslaught is being rationalized as designed to influence Trinidad and Tobago voters, and therefore not be taken at face value, this view does not take into account that even if we in Caricom have been now well-trained not to take our leaders’ regionalism seriously when they make their contradictory, or easily controverted, proclamations, this is hardly the view that is likely to be taken outside of the region. Indeed, the odds are that governments of countries outside of the Caribbean, which we have to take seriously, are likely to take such pronouncements as more indications of an increasingly prevalent view, namely that Caribbean leaders are incapable of sustaining a position for too long, or for implementing any reasonably complex decision which they have taken. The European Union’s attitude to some of our governments’ protestations about the course which the EPA negotiations took, strongly suggest this. And the scant regard which the British government (Labour or Conservative) has paid to our protestations regarding the Airport Passenger Duty (the APD tax), now to be also applied by Germany, no doubt suggests that we will talk for a little but have no option but to accept the tax.
All of this speaks, whether we like it or not, to the issue of the perceptions which the outside world has developed about Caricom over the last decade or so, both as individual entities and as a collective. In particular, what assessment do we have that we have been able to impress our major trading partners that we have decided not only that we have elaborated a course of action capable of taking us through this era of new globalization, and latterly, through globalisation’s first major recession pre-eminently affecting them. To what extent are they convinced that we, nearly twenty years after 1992, are committed to a renewal of our regional implementation machinery that can take us through these courses?
The European Union, for one, must wonder why, if they have felt it necessary to go through the torturous course of agreeing and implementing a new Treaty of Union, we feel that we can take the first step and then forget about the second, as appears to be the case with the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas and its related decisions about new governance machinery. And the Americans must wonder why the Central Americans and the Dominican Republic have been able to come to agreement with them on the establishment of a Free Trade Agreement which, as would be the case with us, had to have the support of their parliaments (and in some cases their people, by referendum), but we in Caricom feel that we can dither on these issues at our own pace. Little wonder that only a month-and-a-half ago, columnist, Mr David Jessop, Director of the United Kingdom’s Caribbean Council concerned pre-eminently with Caribbean trade and development matters, writing in the Sunday Stabroek, and therefore in the face of the seat of the Caricom, felt it perhaps obligatory to refer to Caricom as a “moribund institution.” In that column too, Jessop observed that in respect of the CCJ, “Mrs Persad Bissessar, when recently given the chance to make a definitive statement to the contrary” on whether Trinidad would instead establish its own final Court of Appeal, “offered no official position.”
As we have reported, Mrs Bissessar is off to the United States and is slated, according to her spokesperson to be holding discussions with the President, Secretary of State and others on a variety of issues including the security arrangements which her predecessor, Patrick Manning, agreed with the rest of the Caricom states, to which Trinidad has made a major commitment, as has the US through both the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defence. Will they feel that they have to ask her to give a renewed commitment to this arrangement? And will she defer and answer until she asks the rest of the Caricom, especially its smaller states, whether they can keep up with their contributions? Will she feel that she can talk for Caricom states in the US, and against Caricom states in the Caribbean, and that the quarrelsomeness induced by the latter will not be noticed outside?
Whether we like it or not, they are watching our antics. And they will get tired of the variety of explanations that we want to give for every controversy and deficiency in action that occurs in our region.