What do we in the Caribbean Community want from the United States at this time? Over the last two years, we have seen a major meeting, in 2007, between Caricom Heads of Government and the United States President, in which extensive consultations seem to have been had. And since the various changes of government in the Bahamas, Barbados and Jamaica, and the change in leadership of the existing government in St Lucia, we have seen a special invitation extended to the leaderships of those countries to consult with President Bush. Of these latter Prime Minister Golding was unable to attend; it may be that, in the tradition of Jamaican leaders, he may, for domestic prestige reasons, be seeking a separate audience with the President.
It was indeed the last Jamaica Labour Party leader in government, Mr Edward Seaga who, on taking the leadership of Jamaica from Michael Manley in 1980, assumed a special role for Jamaica vis-à-vis the United States in pleading for a new relationship with the Caribbean through what became the Caribbean Basin Initiative. In this, he was successful, in addition to getting in the following years, substantial financial support and support in the IMF and the World Bank, towards the stabilization and reorganization of the Jamaican economy after the years of Manley’s socialism, which had become anathema to the Americans.
But those were the days of the Cold War, when the American Administration was anxious to consolidate its position in the Caribbean and Central America. With the intervention in Grenada supported by Jamaica and Eastern Caribbean governments, those latter countries succeeded in obtaining substantial help from the US.
Certainly those days are no more. And there is no doubt that the “terrorism diplomacy” of the Bush administration has not, by and large, attracted any great sympathy and support from Caricom states. This situation was exacerbated by difficulties on the Haiti issue. and where the administration has been aggressive in seeking support for its anti-narcotics policies, Caricom countries have simply followed, not having previously worked out any collective strategy of their own to cope with what was accepted as a dread danger to the stability and autonomy of their countries.
In fact, when the Heads of Government met President Bush in June of 2007, their emphasis in terms of security was not so much the narcotics-money laundering aspect. They had certainly demonstrated, in terms of the security arrangements for World Cup Cricket in 2006, that the community was fully capable of implementing the appropriate measures when this was demanded.
But at the same time, they had had to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the US and the OECD countries for linking their efforts at off-shore financial services activities with money laundering and tax evasion.
Instead , the main concern of Caricom Heads was the deportees issue, in which they had made little headway in their protests to the US when they insisted that it was the influx of deportees from the United States which was becoming a major threat to their countries security and domestic stability.
But the United States has never agreed with this position, as demonstrated once again in a statement by the United States Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago within the last two months. In any case, the US has insisted that the deportees issue is a matter of the implementation of American law, and not an issue subject to the political discretion of the Administration, nor to diplomatic negotiation. And it will be recalled that when the Government of Guyana hesitated to facilitate the entry of the deportees into the country, the US made it clear that this constituted a hostile act, and threatened to withdraw the US visas of senior public and political officials of the state.
It is noticeable that this issue was, again, in the forefront of the matters discussed by the leaders of Barbados, Jamaica and St Lucia when they visited the President. And the only, and just recent, concession that the US has been prepared to make has been to provide assistance to Caricom governments to facilitate the re-integration of the deported persons into the receiving societies.
The other main American security emphasis in Caricom-US relations is the issue of the movement of narcotics. In the period of President Clinton’s administration, the US Government sought to persuade Caricom governments to adhere to the so-called Shiprider Agreement, so as to facilitate cooperation in the effort to staunch the increasing flow of narcotics from Colombia through the Caribbean and on to the US mainland. After some hesitation, all Caricom countries agreed, with Guyana being the last, though the issue threatened for a short time to split Caricom harmony on the issue of security.
Indeed the Caribbean itself had hesitated to deal organizationally with this in terms of a collective approach to regional security (as distinct from individual approaches to individual country security). This was so in spite of the attempted coup in Trinidad in 1990, and indications from that event that the issue of gun-running (alleged importations by the Muslimeen of weapons from Libya via Miami) was becoming a critical one; and the Americans’ view that narcotics and the movement of sophisticated weaponry were becoming critical for the Caribbean area.
After 9/11, Caricom has become more sympathetic to the American view, though the flip-side to that sympathy has been a concern that the American, and wider OECD, view of a linkage between narcotics trading and money laundering and tax-evasion, and the increasing participation of the Caribbean in offshore financial services, was harming Caribbean interests. An extensive diplomacy has served, in some measure, to ameliorate the matter.
The deportees, narcotics and financial services issues have been periodically interpreted in the Caribbean as examples of the unbalanced relationship between a huge power and small states, and a perception that the US is insufficiently understanding of the diplomatic implications of this inevitable dynamic.
The main issue on the Caricom-US economic agenda in recent times has been the implications of the ending of the CBI/Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act (CBTPA) in the context of new US initiatives on trade relations in the Hemisphere. The stalemate of the FTAA negotiations, and the American decision to proceed with a series of bilateral free trade agreements has placed the Caricom states in a predicament. The Central American states, part of the CBI arrangement, were offered, and accepted, a free trade agreement. The Dominican Republic, a member of our Cariforum arrangement with the EU, decided to jump on the bandwagon, and persuaded the US to accept it as part of the Central American agreement.
It is noticeable that part of the Dominican Republic diplomacy in persuading the US was a decision by its government to offer 100 troops as part of the “Coalition of the Willing” in President Bush’s invasion of Iraq – an act of realpolitik which no Caricom country would have felt it possible to do.
In the wake of the conclusion of the Cariforum-EU negotiations for an Economic Partnership Agreement, proceedings have started in the American Congress for a follow-up agreement to the CBI-CBTPA. Initiatives had been taken by Heads of Government to familiarize sympathetic Congressmen (including Congressman Charles Rangel, the Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee) with Caricom objectives in that regard; and officials of the Caricom Secretariat, and private sector representatives have been giving evidence.
This is a significant issue, perhaps the most significant one in Caribbean-US relations at this time. In the FTAA discussions Caricom failed to obtain any sympathy for the position that as small states we should be recipients of “special and differential treatment ” in our relations with the trade giants of the Hemisphere; and that assistance for restructuring of our economies to cope with the liberalized regime of free trade should be more than what is referred to as “trade-related capacity building” .
In addition, a neat question arises as to whether, with the Dominican Republic, a member of the Cariforum having also joined the US-DR-CAFTA agreement, a template for an agreement with the Caricom states has already been established, and that we would find it difficult to do much amendment to it.
Have our Ministers of the Caricom Council on Trade and Economic Development (COTED), and our Prime Ministers, collectively engaged in setting the parameters for the officials in these evolving discussions? Has there been sufficient engagement with the relevant stakeholders? Should our Heads of Government not be talking to the public about what we want on this issue? We should have some answers on these questions, especially in the context of the discussions now going on about the EPA.
