Our UN photo album

The General Debate (GD) of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA 81) ended Monday and did not always disappoint when it came to the efficient delivery of photo-ops, headlines, soundbites, and high drama.

Correspondingly, there must have been a separate cargo flight to transport signed, soon-to-be-forgotten memoranda of understanding, agreements, and other documents that made it through the prolific press release mill back to home territories, including ours.

Don’t get me wrong, bilateral diplomacy matters – however ad hoc, opportunistic, or gratuitously amplified via public communication channels. The term “speed-dating” has been used more than once to describe such interactions.

A leader attending a high-profile meeting, energetically delivering a speech or stomping in and out of the hall may generate media coverage. But a 15-minute private exchange and a handshake in a corridor has the potential to meaningfully change things. So, I am not dismissing its possible importance.

If, for example, the Persad-Bissessar/ Rodríguez speed date resulted in genuine infatuation and open declarations of love, that is not an easily dismissible outcome, however temporal. Click!

In fact, that meeting lived up to and even exceeded its billing as a decisive, made-for-media encounter minus mention of the contentious “res non grata” (to coin my own idiom employing the Latin ‘res’ for “thing”) Venezuela-plus-Essequibo brooch worn by Rodríguez).

What is important now is what gets consummated at the second and third and fourth dates.

Last week I drew attention to the fact that UNGA 81 included several “High-Level” meetings on what, in this neck of the woods, must be considered of great priority – even more than main stage grandiloquence and posturing.

Second Floor Flag Hall (United Nations)

From the reports, T&T was present for some of these; however unremarkable our contributions. Saint Lucia, currently holding the Caricom chair, was listed to address collective regional concerns at the High-Level Meeting on Climate Action and the Just Transition last Wednesday.

Barbados represented the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) – a group of developing countries deemed to be highly vulnerable to climate change. Jamaica and St Vincent and the Grenadines were also there in their own right and addressed the meeting.

On the margins that day, with climate concerns in mind, the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) and Caricom “formalised their partnership through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).” Click!

The fact is UNGA 81 was, outside of the main hall, the setting for substantive conversations on issues that go directly to our collective and individual interests - climate finance, adaptation, energy transition, resilience, information integrity and, critically, sea-level rise.

For T&T, these are not obscure UN issues or needless burdens founded on demonic assertions of a climate crisis. They involve issues of sovereignty, maritime space, coastal communities, infrastructure, fisheries, tourism, water security, and development finance.

I may have missed it but have not received anything to suggest that consideration of such issues was newsworthy enough to make it through our official communication infrastructure or had in fact been rigorously explored.

The climate-finance discussions, for example, got down to nitty-gritty examination of lingering questions regarding the cost of capital to address low carbon transition issues, the expansion of concessional finance, debt, and the conversion of national adaptation plans into financeable programmes.

I am aware we were present at the High-Level Meeting on Sea-Level Rise and raised some key points about full capitalisation of the Loss and Damage Fund. But where were the photos? The press releases?

Perhaps the PM’s comment on the matter was not meant to be overshadowed when she declared at the GD: “Trinidad and Tobago brings a distinctive perspective as we understand that climate resilience, energy security, affordability and economic development must advance together.”

At COP30 in Belém last November, T&T was also among those calling for predictable, accessible, and adequate climate finance to bridge the gap between ambition and implementation. Click!

Yet, as currently applies, citizens should not have to reconstruct the substance of our international engagement last week from UN transcripts and other obscure documents.

Admittedly, there was little local journalism on this, and neither the propagandists nor usual trolls are typically interested in such boring details.

Even so, a photograph tells us who met whom. A signing ceremony tells us that something was signed. But serious public diplomacy should also tell citizens what was negotiated, what was sought, what was committed, what was obtained and what happens next.

On mutually assured survival

(First published in the T&T Guardian on September 28, 2022)

It may well have been the case that Caricom leaders had strategised to weave a vast multitude of questions into the chaotic underside of the Caribbean embroidery at the UN General Assembly debate which closed on Monday.

However, the knots and ragged snips and dissonant entanglements required to produce at the frontside, a partial, yet seductively healthful view of the whole remained on full display.

To be certain, both our hemispheric neighbours, and those beyond, too frequently lease a homogeneous Caribbean visage of their own design. Initially, as cover for brutalities of the past, and latterly as deception to escape complicity and responsibility.

It could not be, we once thought, that even those who shared major hurts of our disturbed past could now be seated at the table, two elbows away, and be despising us.

It is the stuff of diplomatic routine to negotiate such multi-polarities. Ambivalence bred by both self-interest and the prospects for mutually assured survival in the face of undeniable interdependence.

In what ways are the stories of Venezuela and Nicaragua and Cuba not our own, was the gist of Ralph Gonsalves’ retort. To what degree are Russian depravities at its borders irrelevant to Gaston Browne’s admonitions regarding the increasingly anachronistic Security Council?

In what ways, as Dickon Mitchell urged, do we harness the value of youth and the rich harvest they may bring.

T&T’s Amery Browne notably cited the scourge of transnational, organised crime without, as was required I must say, substantially dissecting the hemispheric dynamics that facilitate it.

Instead, like almost everyone else, he went for the scattershot, knowing full well that officially appointed dissent would ritualistically fall short of anything resembling a competent response or rebuttal.

It may have been that the joint regional brief was to cast a wide fine-mesh net to signal a vast terrain of limitless priorities. But, as with the fisherfolk out at sea, we are not always best served by the resulting catch. In too many ways a hierarchy of needs is assured disorder especially when everything, as is the current case, is proposed as a priority.

Ironically, we have also been undecided, at the height of the pandemic for example, whether we, as a regional community, should ride the waves or crash against the same heavy seas on different vessels.

Successive collective bubbles either popped or contracted to the size of smaller spaces. There are even those who would have preferred smaller capsules – in the process leading the charge of destructive denialism and applauding tragic failure.

Of course, to those who pursue other destinies, none of this really matters. We can tell by the way you grasp that passport or how you frame partisan desire. We got to know you well – deformed shadows in the face of approaching light. Laughing emojis at the sight of tragedy and pain.

All this as an unapologetic response to those who picked up on the prospects for hope this page has attempted to offer in recent weeks. Complete repudiation of the notions of a “lost generation” and of a “failed race.”

So it is with our embrace of the world, self-validation is needed in consort with far greater self-confidence. The UNGA presents an opportunity to say what about the challenges is new and unique and to explain why the disparate vessels of change may collide and be lost at sea.

This, to me, requires far more diligent management of all the processes involved when it comes to our Caribbean future. The banal challenges fed by fear and an absence of fraternity are not among the least important of the assignment.

Here in Kingston, where I am briefly, the battle cries persist despite the recent, gratuitously displayed full mast of white flags. In Georgetown, a single flag, not all, is soaking in the rich mud these days.

What has been uttered in New York is but a faint spectre of what pierces our silence here at home. There remain many who believe that we sink or swim on our solitary own. Changing all of this can make the difference between sad conclusions and our mutually assured survival.