We were reminded last week of the famous declaration by John Donne that no man is an island when foreign ministers dominated the news both here and abroad.
Here, Senator Maxine McClean and her Jamaican counterpart occupied themselves with what started at our airport as a “bush fire” and has been spinning into an “out-of-control full forest fire”.
I refer, of course, to the allegation of a cavity search of a Jamaican national here.
Meanwhile, Mr Moussa Koussa, the foreign minister of Libya, defected Thursday to London, and began talking with British intelligence sources. That same day the British foreign minister laid a report in parliament in which he declared that his country’s foreign policy “will always have support for human rights at its irreducible core”.
These incidents have a connective tissue, for cavity searches, whether legal or not, touch and concern human rights issues as much as the mistreatment of peaceful protestors in any part of the world does.
These news items lay bare another truth, and that is that the image abroad of a country must be a matter of the highest import to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Indeed, the office of foreign minister (or secretary of state in the United States) is one of the top three great offices of the state and appointing political lightweights to these positions does not usually occur. Too much is at stake, including vital economic interests.
So distinguished appointees such as Professor Henry Kissinger, Mrs Hillary Clinton, Professor Condoleezza Rice, of the United States; and Sir James Cameron Tudor and Dame Billie Miller, of Barbados are among the names on this side of the Atlantic familiar to us.
When former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan visited Barbados in 2002 (during Dame Billie’s watch as foreign minister) and stated that Barbados was “punching above its weight”, he was paying a major compliment to Barbados’ image abroad cultivated over the years through the efficient and skilful work of various foreign ministers and their staffs since Independence.
So that putting a damper on a local issue before it spins out of control into an image problem for the country ought to be a piece of cake for our foreign ministry. Further, strong comment on “bush fire” allegations, may be made if one encases the steel fist in a diplomatic velvet glove.
I may be wrong, but the use of words such as “fabrication” suggest to my “undiplomatic” mind, more steel and less velvet. And references by anyone to an official missive as a “piece of correspondence” reminds me that there is more than one way to ‘skin a cat’.
For her entire unprecedented 14-year tenure of that distinguished office, Dame Billie never once failed to prosecute and defend Barbados’ vital interests with the politically correct admixture of diplomatic speak, and during her time, there were big challenges.
For example, the challenge in 2000 to our offshore sector by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was a foreign ministry issue as was the raging maritime dispute between this country and Trinidad and Tobago.
But Dame Billie’s ministry safeguarded our vital interests and in both cases this country’s stances were vindicated without any threat of fracture in our official relationship either with Trinidad or the OECD countries. The ministries of International Business (OECD) and Energy (maritime dispute) were also involved, but the foreign ministry’s role was very important.
Both Margaret Thatcher and Owen Arthur presided over extended periods of economic growth. Is it a coincidence that Mrs Thatcher had top class foreign ministers in Lord Carrington and Sir Geoffrey Howe for nine of her ten years as prime minister? Or that throughout his 14 years in office, Mr Arthur never once found it necessary to shuffle his foreign minister, Dame Billie?
My point is that Barbados faces too many serious issues with a foreign policy perspective for that ministry’s vital energies to be diverted to dealing with “bush fire” issues when the new OECD challenge and the CLICO collapse are, as it were, “major fires under construction”.
Diplomatic fire extinguishers should have been put into earlier use.
Ezra Alleyne is an attorney-at-law and former Deputy Speakeer of t he House of Assembly.
