By Hazel Robinson, ContributorPRESIDENT ARISTIDE'S ouster places in stark relief the extreme dangers inherent in Caribbean nations permitting external powers to stoke and intensify whatever political divisions may exist within our small and precious democracies.
Unless we become less trusting of others' efforts to help us 'build democracy', unless we are willing to undertake the hard work and assume full responsibility for ensuring that our nations are indeed stable and that within our borders justice does indeed prevail, we will sooner or later, find ourselves once again, in the words of President Thabo Mbeki, objects of pity, objects of ridicule.
I have long lamented the fact that too many African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) nationals allow 'friends' in the United States, France, Canada and other industrialised nations to encourage us to overthrow our governments, massacre each other, destroy crucial public infrastructure, and bring our countries to a state of total and absolute chaos in order to register our displeasure with our elected officials.
COMPLIANCE
Tragically, we comply never pausing to question why our 'friends' never use the same methods to express their displeasure with their elected officials, no matter how great the provocation. In the United States, for example, Republicans think that President Clinton utterly defiled the presidency. Democrats insist that President Bush, without question, stole the 2000 presidential election. Yet, even the most ruthlessly ambitious Ame-rican politicians always decide, as though it is by now etched onto their DNA, that the place to inflict the ultimate punishment, in their countries, is at the polls.
My most insistent message in the wake of President Aristide's ouster, therefore, has been that in an increasingly hostile, globalised environment, the governments and peoples of the Caribbean absolutely must learn to band together in defence of principles justice, equity, democracy. Failure to do so will leave our individual nations, as well as our Caricom family, woefully ill-equipped to withstand the multifaceted and never-ending subterfuge and machinations of the world's 'leading democracies'.
PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY
The Aristide family will for the next several weeks be residing in Jamaica. In allowing this, our Prime Minister has shown that not only do our nations have a proud, strong tradition of parliamentary democracy, we are also a people whose history has made us concerned about fairness, justice, and human decency.
In the United States, the most ruthless criminals are routinely given 'a new chance at a new life', at taxpayer expense, under the U.S. witness protection programme. How, then, can any American policy-maker with even a smidgen of understanding of, or regard for, Caribbean people, in good conscience, pressure our governments to isolate the first democratically elected, and recently ousted, president of Haiti a nation whose very existence holds such profound psychological significance in our slave-descended hearts?
Consider the irony of France and the United States having arranged the comfortable exile of Haiti's brutal military dictator Jean Claude Duvalier in France, or the United States having arranged for Haiti's ruthless military coup leaders Cedras and Biamby to lead equally comfortable lives in Panama, while France, Canada and the United States now insist that Haiti's twice-elected, and recently ousted, president be proclaimed persona non grata within the Caribbean family.
And the people of the Caribbean are now supposed to close their hearts to the Aristide family?
We are a special people, with a special history. Let us move forward together free of rancour and political opportunism, focused on meeting the practical exigencies of managing small island economies, but ever mindful of the importance of insight, wisdom and integrity to a safe and secure future for us all.
Hazel Robinson (hrr@rosro) is a former foreign policy adviser in the U.S. Congress and president of Ross-Robinson & Associates, a firm of foreign policy consultants. She is an adviser to President Aristide.
