Caricom’s elusive bipartisan dialogue

Last week, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar chose a rather curious way to raise the issue of broader stakeholder participation in Caricom processes. Since the St Kitts Inter-Sessional, the focus has consequently remained on what she considered to be an example of regional, political marginalisation – the Brent Thomas affair.

However, judicial proceedings involving individuals and agencies of two member states cannot routinely be considered to be the active concern of the Caricom Secretariat beyond keeping tabs from an institutionally detached distance.

This could probably have been among the templates for a Secretariat response. Unresponsiveness should not have been considered an option.

Perhaps the leaders’ retreat in Nevis addressed this matter. I do not know. Closed doors are the preferred path. But this apparently purposeful slur on the institution and its professionals should have been addressed.

I had hoped that this awkward opportunity would have also been used to segue into the critical question of bipartisan and multi-stakeholder involvement in the work of the regional movement.

This would have been one way of stimulating action on something that had actually been addressed years ago.

Perhaps people forgot that despite the collapse of the federation experiment in 1962 and the disappearance of a federal parliament, there continued to be concern about the “democratic legitimacy” of regional decisions.

As a journalist covering such matters since the 1980s and being a part of the Caricom Secretariat team in the mid-90s, I became aware of efforts by the late Barbados Prime Minister Erskine Sandiford and others to promote wider political engagement in regional decision-making.

It might be that people have forgotten that an Assembly of Caribbean Community Parliamentarians (ACCP) emerged in 1996 from such efforts, as a way of ensuring bipartisan/multistakeholder engagement.

The ACCP was developed as a “consultative and deliberative body” and sat in 1996 (Barbados), 1999 (Grenada), and in 2000 (Belize). In fact, the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) proposal was debated at the ACCP in Grenada as were unfolding issues associated with the Caricom Single Market.

I have contended in the past that such a mechanism could have benefited much from the deliberations of the Regional Constituent Assembly (RCA) of the Windward Islands in 1991/92.

But politicians and other decision-makers in T&T at that time had their minds on numerous other things judging from the muted responses to my reportage from Saint Lucia. The wounds of July 27, 1990 remained fresh.

The work of the RCA was instructive since it predated the entry into government of several opposition and other participants such as Dr Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Edison James of Dominica, and Dr Vaughan Lewis - who was not a political delegate but went on to serve as Prime Minister of Saint Lucia.

The ACCP records are also instructive as the sittings spanned the period during which the UNC was in power in T&T. Back then, Caricom blessings were mellifluously extended by late Prime Minister Basdeo Panday.

I know for certain our Caricom ambassador Ralph Maraj, who was in St Kitts with the PM, is intimately aware of the role and functions of the ACCP. But his knowledge of this was clearly not tapped for last week’s remarkable admonition.

It is however true that the ACCP project was left to languish in the absence of political enthusiasm, an eagerness to expand its authority, and the funds to ensure its survival. Suffice it to say enthusiasm for the broadening of the discourse also dissipated when political statuses transitioned from opposition to government.

There has also not been any pronounced effort to encourage expanded discussion and debate on some of the issues that currently persist as contentious.

Many civil society organisations – and I can speak with authority about the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) – have been largely marginalised. And even the participation of parliamentary opposition members at summits has not been symbolically contrived.

In the February 12, 2005 report of a special committee on the ACCP and other issues, chairman Dr Gonsalves, then prime minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, argued that “proposed changes in the functioning of the Assembly will ensure greater popular participation in its deliberations and thus further strengthen the democratic process at the regional level.”

Sounds like an initiative in which his own interest should be renewed in his current role as Opposition Leader. Our own prime minister now claims to share such a view – having crossed the aisle more than once.

The opportunity for broader, bipartisan engagement is not hypothetical. It is historical, documented, and waiting for renewed political commitment.