Former St Lucian Prime Minister and academic, Professor Vaughan Lewis believes Dominica or other Caricom countries who give their support to the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) see it as just another avenue for obtaining economic aid which is not available in Caricom.
Asked for his opinion on Dominica joining ALBA during a visit to Guyana the week before last, Lewis told Stabroek News he assumed that Dominica’s main objective was getting aid or economic assistance.
Dominica is the only Caricom country which has acceded to ALBA. St Vincent and the Grenadines and Antigua and Barbuda have signed the agreement but are yet to ratify the pact.
Lewis said that in the last few years Dominica had followed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme very rigidly, but the kind of assistance the IMF gave would not suffice in the situation in which Dominica had found itself. The banana industry had gone into decline, he explained, owing to the loss of its preferential markets, and the larger economy had also gone into decline.
In terms of the geo-political consequences that Dominica’s alliance to ALBA would have, Lewis said that the country was in an area where Venezuela had a maritime jurisdiction, that is, Bird Island also known as Aves Island.
He said that he did not think that Dominica had ceded Bird Island to Venezuela, but that Dominica was saying that the matter appeared to be “intractable.” He referred to the maritime delimitation in the Caribbean between Venezuela and the US and France, and that delimitation negated Dominica’s claim.
“Our observation is that based on the delimitation, Aves Island does not belong to Dominica,” he said, adding, however, that there was need to clarify this issue. He could not recall whether the consequence of the settlement made by the United States and France in delimiting boundaries between their territories in the Caribbean and Venezuela had ever been discussed within the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). Neither the US nor Venezuela has acceded to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
He said he would not be surprised if the Dominican government felt that this was an issue that would not be resolved in the near future, and therefore Dominica’s interest in having relations with Venezuela should not be prejudiced by the continuation of the claim.
Guyana-Venezuela border
controversy
Asked whether Dominica’s membership in ALBA would affect support in Caricom on the Guyana/Venezuela border controversy, he said that Venezuela’s territorial claim to much of Guyana did not inhibit Guyana from having normal relations with Venezuela.
Guyana’s approach to the controversy has not been to depend so much on internal Caribbean support, although it was necessary, but to gain support by internationalizing the issue from which it felt it could get support if Venezuela seemed to be acting on the claim.
“Guyana’s strength lies in the maintenance of that international support,” he said, including the United Nations Good Officer Process which is premised on the acceptance by Venezuela not to take any offensive action.
Should something arise, he said, Dominica as a member of Caricom or the United Nations framework would have to decide where it stands. “That is the issue. Dominica would have to make up its mind as to whether the appearance of exchanging the sovereignty of a country for economic gain is something that it could withstand in international circumstances,” he said.
As to whether ALBA was weakening Caricom, Lewis said that he did not see why ALBA should weaken Caricom in principle.
He said he hoped that Dominica and other Caricom countries would first of all indicate “to Caricom their intentions and what they are going there for. I think that in the spirit of Caricom that would be a necessary thing to do. It is not that they would need the assent or approval of Caricom, but that Caricom should be informed of their objectives.”
ALBA is intended to be an economic institution, he said, and even though all institutions may have some ideological bias that has not made Caricom countries do things they should not do. He recalled that during the Maurice Bishop government in Grenada, the United States government had wanted the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) “to accept aid that would exclude Grenada in the dark days of the Cold War. We did not accept.”
During that period Dominica and St Lucia had close relations, but that did not affect the relations when it came to aid that would constitute interference. “They kept their aid and the CDB went about their business.”
One of the questions some countries are asking of Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda and St Vincent and the Grenadines is “Why are you doing XYZ?” he said.
He suspected that the answer would relate to the difficult economic situation in which the countries found themselves. With the high price of oil they had to meet developmental needs for which there were no financial resources because they had to pay for fuel, and ALBA might be an easy way out. “Remember the OECS countries have to buy oil like everybody else. You are spending your money on petroleum with less for development,” he said.
In relation to Dominica’s relationship with ALBA and Caricom’s support for Trinidad and Tobago as the headquarters for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), Lewis said that the FTAA is not an actuality.
“I suspect Dominica would say that we cannot suspend all our discussions with other countries, including Venezuela until the FTAA would come about. I don’t see why acceptance of assistance from Venezuela should prevent Dominica, St Vincent or Antigua from supporting T&T in its claim to want Trinidad and Tobago as the headquarters of the FTAA,” he said.
No one could say today that the FTAA, an initiative of former President Bill Clinton, would ever come into being, he said, adding that this was in keeping with Caricom Heads of Government feelings that the USA had not been paying “any special interest” in the Caribbean.
The US, he said, was concerned with geo-political questions relating to narcotics, which was of immense concern to Caricom as well, and the region had supported this.
Apart from Dominica, he noted that Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago had a common border and were negotiating about that common border. “The result of those negotiations is going to be money for T&T. Everyone in the Caribbean knows that Dominica cannot go to Trinidad and Tobago and say I want some assistance of what you are going to negotiate with Venezuela in the future. So Dominica goes its own way,” he said.
In Caricom there is a general fear that the smaller countries cannot withstand the larger and more aggressive countries, he said.
In addition to this, he said there had been no resolution within Caricom on the rise in oil prices. Whatever discussions had been held with Trinidad and Tobago on this issue had not been fruitful. He said there had also been stalling on the question of what Caricom was going to do in the near future in terms of the financial difficulties that some of these smaller islands found themselves in.
While Barbados took the position of having a common maritime space to benefit the region, even though he felt it certainly would benefit Trinidad and Tobago more, Lewis added that the issue was still not on the Caricom agenda.
