THE SUNDAY SUN today brings the final part of CARELESS With CARICOM, an edited version, which started in last week’s edition:
HAVE WE FORGOTTEN the days when as West Indians we were the first to daringly bring the “Non-Aligned Movement” to the Western Hemisphere, when we pioneered rejection of the “two China” policy and recognised the People’s Republic; when, together, we broke the western diplomatic embargo of Cuba; when we forced withdrawal of the Kissinger plan for a “Community of the Western Hemisphere”; when we were in the front rank (both intellectual and diplomatic) of the effort for a New International Economic Order; when from this region, bending iron wills, we gave leadership in the struggle against “apartheid” in Southern Africa; when we inspired the creation of the ACP and kept “reciprocity” at bay for 25 years; when we forced recognition of the vulnerability of “small states”?
In all this, and more, for all our size we stood tall; we commanded respect, if not always endearment.
For what do we stand today, united and respected?
Some of us weaken the region’s standing in the international community when we are seen as clients of Japan’s pursuit of whaling.
We eviscerate any common foreign policy in CARICOM when some of us cohabit with Taiwan. Deserting our African and Pacific partners, we yield to Europe – and take pride in being first to submit.
What do these aberrations do for our honour and standing in the world?
How do they square with our earlier record of small states standing for principles that commanded respect and buttressed self-esteem?
The answers are all negative.
And, inevitably, what they do in due measure is require us to disown each other and display our discordance to the world.
This is where “local control” has led us in the 21st Century. We call it now “sovereignty”.
It is easy, perhaps natural, for us as Caribbean people to shift blame to our Governments; and Governments, of course, are not blameless. But, in our democracies, Governments do what we allow them to do: they say: “we do what our people want us to do”.
And who can deny that that is so, while we accept their excesses with equanimity, certainly in silence – and not infrequently renew their political mandate.
No! The fault is with us. We have each been touched with the glow of “local control”; each moved by the siren song of “sovereignty”; have each allowed the stigma of otherness, even foreignness, to degrade our Caribbean kinship.
Does anyone doubt that whatever we undertake, we do it better when we do it together?
Thirty-five years ago, in 1975, on the shores of Montego Bay as I took leave of Caribbean leaders before assuming new roles at the Commonwealth, my parting message was a plea TO CARE FOR CARICOM.
The burden of my message is that we have become “casual, neglectful, indifferent and undisciplined” in sustaining and advancing Caribbean integration: that we have become careless with CARICOM – and in the process are falling into to a state of disunity which by now we should have made preternatural. It will be a slow and gradual descent; but ineluctably it will be an ending.
* Sir Shridath has held the positions of Commonwealth Secretary-General, Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Chairman of the West Indian Commission and Chief Negotiator in the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery
