CARICOM in OAS/FTAA trade-off politics
By Rickey Singh
Guyana Chronicle
October 5, 2003
LAST WEDNESDAY, while President George W. Bush was having his breakfast meeting with four CARICOM leaders at the famous Waldorf Astoria Hotel, another `working breakfast' was quietly taking place in New York, away from the spotlight of media publicity.
It had to do with a diplomatic offensive underway by Costa Rica to win CARICOM's support for its declared candidature for the top spot at the Organisation of American States (OAS) in June next year when Secretary General Cesar Gaviria's second term ends.
Aware that the OAS Secretary General post may be out of its reach at present, CARICOM is reported to be strategising to regain the number two spot in the currently seated 34-member hemispheric organisation.
No one is yet ready to officially signal CARICOM's strategy, but it seems to link support for the new OAS Secretary General with the wider objective of securing Port-of-Spain as the secretariat headquarter of the emerging Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
It is a very challenging task for CARICOM's proposed trade-off on the FTAA's headquarter location with unanimous backing for a united Central American candidate for the post of OAS Secretary General, as well as ensuring support for the Community's common candidate - still to be identified - as Deputy Secretary General in 2005.
Latest information I managed to obtain on Friday is that Suriname may be ready to officially inform CARICOM this week of its interest in the candidature for Deputy OAS Secretary General. Previous CARICOM holders of this post were Barbados' Val McComie and Trinidad and Tobago's Christopher Thomas.
CARICOM had unanimously committed itself to backing Trinidad and Tobago as the headquarter location for the FTAA Secretariat while aware of the intensive lobbying already taking place in the USA for Miami to be chosen instead.
An influential hand in corporate America's bid for Miami as the FTAA headquarter is Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida and brother of President George Bush. For presidential election year 2004 securing Miami as the FTAA's secretariat headquarter is a sensitive issue on America's political agenda.
Largest bloc
In the OAS, where Cuba remains suspended after four decades of sustained US hostility, CARICOM commands the single largest bloc of votes - at least 14 of the seated 34 member states.
CARICOM'S message, not just to Costa Rica but other Central American states seeking support for their potential candidates to succeed Gaviria, is quite straightforward:
Get your acts together in uniting behind a single candidate and be assured of the Community's unanimous support, but be ready to back CARICOM in its bid for the FTAA headquarter in Port-of-Spain.
Costa Rica is so anxious to secure the seat now held by the outgoing Gaviria, that it has decided to abandon its bid for a Costa Rican national to succeed Jamaica-born Norman Girvan as Secretary General of the 25-member Association of Caribbean States (ACS) to concentrate its campaign to have ex-President Angel Rodrigues as the new OAS Secretary General.
Ultimately, of course, CARICOM and the Central American bloc of countries would have to contend with the enormous political leverage at the disposal of Washington, in the campaign to have the FTAA Secretariat in Miami and its own strategy for which candidate to back for the OAS top post.
Other countries that have unofficially signalled an interest in taking the OAS Secretary General post are Chile, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.
Trinidad and Tobago's Foreign Minister, Senator Knowlson Gift, very much involved at the coordinating centre to secure support for the FTAA Secretariat in Port-of-Spain, had alerted the July CARICOM Summit in Montego Bay about the necessity to mount a vigorous and sustained lobby for a national of the Community for the number two post at the OAS.
Less papers, more action
While we await the unfolding of CARICOM's strategy to link support for the election of a new OAS Secretary General with the FTAA's headquarter in Port-of-Spain, plus having a Caribbean Community national as Deputy OAS Secretary General, some critical questions are being raised about the relevance of a forthcoming conference being organised for Mona later this month.
It is the three-day `Conference on Regional Governance and Integrated Development' being organised for October 17-19 as an academic activity of the University of the West Indies to mark CARICOM's 30th anniversary.
My first reaction on learning about the conference was: Surely, the organisers are capable of a more creative activity, especially when it is considered in the context of a range of reports and analyses already done and available in two major publications by the UWI, and also activities/initiatives related to a prime ministerial working group.
Those publications were, `Contending with Destiny - The Caribbean In The 21st Century', resulting from a path-breaking conference at Mona in September 1999, edited by Professors Kenneth Hall and Denis Benn; and subsequently, `The Caribbean Community - Beyond Survival', in 2001, edited by Professor Kenneth Hall that could be considered a companion contribution.
Now comes the promise of publication of yet another collection of papers to flow from the coming UWI-sponsored October 17-19 conference on `Governance and Integrated Development'. The publication could coincide with either the next CARICOM Inter-Sessional Meeting in February/March, or the regular annual Heads of Government Conference in July.
Rather than more conferencing with themes and presenters of no significant variance, there are those who rightly think there is merit in some critical evaluation of what's being done, or not done, on the ideas and implications of the body of works already available, a lot of them in publications as `Contending with Destiny - The Caribbean in the 21st Century', and `The Caribbean Community - Beyond Survival'.
Instead of another conference to produce more papers for publication, it may be relevant for the UWI to have had, for instance, an activity for CARICOM's 30th anniversary more focused on a critical evaluation on what progress there has been, or needs to be, since the 1992 Report of The West Indian Commission and beyond the event in 1999 that produced `Contending with Destiny - The Caribbean in the 21st Century'.
Do not expect the principal movers and shakers for the October 17-19 conference to agree. But that does not mean there is no merit in an independent critical assessment of such academic events at this period when the emphasis must surely be on sustained implementation of important decisions of regional significance.