Editorial

Amidst a flurry of critical press and other comment on Caricom’s fortunes before their Inter-Sessional Meeting in Grenada on the 25th and 26th of last month, our heads of government have once again said relatively nothing about the critical issues which concern the progress of regional integration in our area.

The incident may have passed without injury to anyone; it would, however, be foolhardy to make light of the stoning of the West Indies team bus by irate Bangladeshi fans after their team had been humiliatingly beaten by the Caribbean side in last Friday’s Cricket World Cup 2011 encounter.

When Mr Sharief Khan passed away on February 22 he bequeathed a corpus of work that very few journalists here can match in terms of the variety media and capacities he functioned in and years of service.

This must be the most extraordinary campaign season ever in this country. 

The ripple effect of the ‘Arab awakening’ has now spread to a much wider area than any informed observer could have guessed at just six weeks ago.

The United Nations has warned of an impending humanitarian disaster in Libya as tens of thousands flee the bloody attempts of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime to repress the popular uprising against his despotic rule.

By this time next week, International Women’s Day (IWD) would have come and gone.

There is no doubt that the Western, or all the NATO, powers have been intensely surprised by the turn of events in the Middle East and North Africa.

Cote d’Ivoire (the Ivory Coast) is a West African state with a population of around 20 million.

Noting the billions that have been spent on drainage since the 2005 Great Flood, Thursday’s editorial questioned whether it couldn’t have funded a couple of extra pumps for areas inundated after last Monday’s torrential rains.

Today holds particular significance in the context of the Year of Peoples of African Descent; it is the anniversary of the outbreak of the great uprising of 1763, which also fell on a Sunday.

Some of the most resonant lines of political commentary penned in the twentieth century can be found in Gil Scott-Heron’s poem ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.’

Fidel Castro in Cuba, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua have all enjoyed close ties with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, seemingly bound together by a common revolutionary fervour and their distrust of the United States of America.

It seems there will never be an end to the blatant abuse of the citizens of this country.

This week’s 25th Inter-Sessional Meeting of Caricom Heads of Government has been preceded by much commentary on the extent to which the community has been particularly timely in meeting the agenda which it has set for itself since the 1989 Grande Anse Declaration and the formal establishment of the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME).

The tumultuous events currently unfolding in the Middle East continue to dominate the reportage of the major news providers around the globe.

At his most recent press conference, President Jagdeo sought to disarm critics of his One Laptop Per Family (OLPF) initiative by resorting to the most disingenuous of arguments to wit that they wanted to deprive poor children of the opportunity to learn.

Guyana is a secular state. It has to be, because this is a multi-faith society whose constitution guarantees freedom of worship for all religions and where the state cannot be seen to be favouring any one of them.

The British Prime Minister’s recent comments on the failure of “state multiculturalism” and his call for “muscular liberalism,” have revived debates about assimilation and minority rights that extend at least as far back as the 1988 ban on Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses.

All across Caricom, within the physical confines of its geopolitical space and beyond, in the diaspora and the broader sphere of cyberspace, tough, painful questions are being asked of those charged with the region’s collective welfare.