Imagine the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) managing director sitting in an aircraft ready to take off from Barbados, Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago when police officers rush on board and take him off the plane, accusing him of sexual assault.
Would it have happened in the Caribbean?
“I think the police in any Caribbean country would have stopped the plane from taking off, but the bigger question is whether he would have been forced to spend a night in jail before being allowed out on bail,” said a Caribbean judge. “Chances are he wouldn’t have been incarcerated after the authorities realized who he was and the important position he held.”
Do you agree with the judge? His position seems reasonable.
Next scenario. Imagine a prominent an African or a Brazilian public figure from a developing country sitting atop the fund if and when next it becomes vacant after Dominique Straus-Khan resigns as a result of his arrest and jailing in New York on sexual assault charges involving a Manhattan hotel maid from Africa.
“I can assure you it wouldn’t be a person from the Caribbean or Central America,” said a source at one of the international financial institutions in Washington.
A week ago those two ideas would have been considered absurd. But with Straus-Khan, who was tipped to be the next president of France, now at Riker’s Island jail in New York, anything is possible these days.
But coming after Eliot Spitzer, now a CNN television host, was forced out of office as New York’s governor because he had patronized a prostitute, and after Arnold Schwarzenegger, until recently the governor of California, separated from Maria Shriver, his wife of 25 years, after admitting he had fathered a child with a long-time household employee, it’s not so far-fetched.
Interestingly, some of the alleged escapades of a number of Caribbean leaders have found their way into print in the last decade but none led to the kind of disgrace we are witnessing with Straus-Khan and Schwarzenegger. The most widely publicized case involved Dr Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of St Vincent & the Grenadines, who was exonerated after an official inquiry and then went on to win the next general election.
Among Bajans and other West Indians in New York, the IMF chief, who identified three threats to his French presidential aspirations in an interview in April with a French publication as “money, women and my Jewishness,” is seen alternatively as an innocent man who was set up by his political enemies or as a person who may have allowed his very active libido to get ahead of his common sense.
But whether you have an opinion about his guilt or innocence ahead of his trial in New York, this much is clear: the American courts acted properly and didn’t play favourites. For not only was he arrested and jailed after a judge refused him bail, but he was taken down by a black woman, whose charges were considered serious and credible enough to merit quick police action.
Straus-Khan’s plight has opened up a well deserved, albeit slight, opportunity for an experienced and skilled public figure from an emerging economy to become the managing director of the fund, a position which historically has been reserved for a European, while the World Bank’s presidency has always gone to an American.
Even before recent events, there was a determined behind-the-scenes effort to break the cycle of European domination at the fund by having someone from an emerging economy at its helm.
Candidates from Brazil, India, South Africa and Turkey are being mentioned increasingly as possible successors. But don’t bank on it. That’s because the method of choosing a leader is deeply entrenched and wouldn’t be changed overnight.
Secondly, with the fund having lent US$141 billion to Europe to bail out Greece, Ireland and Portugal, the Europeans are already insisting that it would take one of their own to run the financial institution and oversee those loans.
Clearly, it would be a welcome move to see a Brazilian, Indian or South African in the managing director’s chair, a person who would recognize the impact of fund’s policies on poorer Caribbean, African, Latin American and Asian states.