France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy has been passionate in attacking vulnerable nations, including three in our Caribbean Community, having failed to host a successful G-20 Summit in the tourist city of Cannes.
While international media have focused on what some described as “the disarray” and “failures” of the recent two-day Cannes meeting – in particular initiatives to arrest the spreading financial crisis in Europe – Mr Sarkozy chose to engage in the bullying politics of the rich and “powerful” against small and developing nations, describing them as “tax havens”.
A “tax haven” is defined as a state or territory where corporate entities and entrepreneurs exploit to their advantage low or no taxes. Generally, it connotes an unflattering impression of collusion by governments that offer these “incentives”.
Among President Sarkozy’s list of 11 countries identified are Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, along with with two other nations of the Western Hemisphere: Panama and Uruguay.
Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Panama, lost no time in angry retaliations, varyingly dismissing the Sarkozy’s tax haven “hit list” as false, wholly inappropriate and insulting.
Prime Minister Fruendel Stuart was precise: “We would ask that all countries use insight and accuracy in their characterization of other countries, especially when that characterization has negative connotations . . . .”
Before Stuart, Trinidad’s Minister of Finance Winston Dookeran moved swiftly to seek a clarification from the French Embassy in Port-of-Spain, but at the same time found it necessary to make public his government’s contention that President Sarkozy’s tax haven claim was “premature and perhaps improper . . .”.
However, now that Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados have exercised restraint in their immediate public responses – in contrast to Panama’s public call for an apology from the French president – there needs to be a collective rebuke from the 14 independent member states of the Caribbean Community in defence of Caribbean sovereignty.
Such unanimity in challenging Mr Sarkozy’s questioning of the integrity of governments in CARICOM could well help to ease some of the deep disappointment and political grief by the divisions last month in Paris over the seating of Palestine as a full member of UNESCO.
CARICOM partner states telling Mr Sarkozy together how very wrong he has been in his allegations, and having the statement copied to the other 19 members of G-20, would be more effective than individual responses by affected islands.
