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EDITORIAL:
Caricom just as deserving, Mr PM
PRIME MINISTER Patrick Manning must have expected
that when he announced his government’s decision to waive passport
requirements for tourists from the United States, questions would have been
asked about similar treatment for Caricom nationals.
It is not, of course, that enquiring citizens are necessarily opposed to
favourable treatment to Americans, given the contribution that they can make to
the tourist industry, particularly to the Tobago end of it which has had its
share of troubles both prior to and following the terrorist attack on the World
Trade Center.
But Caricom nationals are also frequent visitors to the country and for Mr
Manning to declare, even as he made his disclosure in favour of the Americans,
that he was not up to date on the issue of hassle-free travel within the
Caribbean was, at best, impolitic and, at worse, dissembling.
He, after all, was the same Prime Minister who very recently announced his
intention to seek deeper political and economic integration with St Vincent and
Grenada, a move that surely would have to envisage greater, if not absolute,
freedom of movement among the three countries.
Indeed, it is not even as if Mr Manning was coming blind to the integration
table. The freedom of movement issue has been high on the agenda of Caribbean
integrationists among whom, by his own announcement, Mr Manning is the latest
public member. The Trinidad and Tobago Government is one of the Caricom
governments that, a decade ago, agreed in principle to freedom of movement, the
only caveat being that it was to proceed in gradual stages, beginning with those
Caricom nationals skilled enough so as not to be a burden on the receiving
countries.
The participating governments, with the notable exception of Barbados, has paid
scant attention to this commitment. Indeed, in the notable cases of Trinidad and
Tobago and Antigua, they have been hostile to it in the case of media workers
who have had the temerity to believe that they would be free in the receiving
countries to practise the independence that is the very foundation of their
profession.
Ironically, even as Caricom governments have backed away from their word, the
West Indian people “have integrated in their own informal but highly effective
way. Indeed, through culture and sport and non-governmental activity of every
kind, they have been steadily building structures of unity of their own”.
The above quote is from “Time for Action”, the report of the West Indian
Commission set up to help chart a course for the West Indian future, and the
reality that the commissioners saw on the Caribbean ground continues today to be
at variance with the timorous, if not backward, behaviour of the leaders on
high. In this sense, at least, the people of the Caribbean have not been getting
the governments that they deserve--most, if not all of them, having proven to be
woefully inept at the task of leading their populations not only on the domestic
front but on the regional and international as well. Unhappily, nothing in Mr
Manning’s latest shenanigans leads us to believe that in him we have the
exception to their insular rule.
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