Mr. Secretary:
I have been asked to address the political and security issues resulting from post-September 11, 2001.
The Bridgetown Declaration of Principles of the Summit of CARICOM States and the USA, of 10 May 1997, pledged to strengthen our cooperation in responding to the challenges of the coming millennium, in a spirit of partnership and mutual respect. Well, the millennium has come, and one of its first challenges is how to respond to terrorism. Let us ensure that we adhere to the mandate of our Heads, to respond as a partnership, which requires equality between the parties and a willingness by each partner to listen to and respect the opinions of the others.
The peoples in the underdeveloped countries have been and continue to be the main victims of terrorism, and even the terrorist acts of September 11 directly took the lives of 90 Caribbean citizens and hundreds from other countries of the South, and the resulting situation has severely affected the economies and lives of our countries. It is our problem, our scourge, and we must fight it as a true alliance.
We must be against all forms of terrorism, undertaken by whoever wherever and in whatever form. As your President said in his State of the Union message, “no people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, or aspire to servitude”. The evils of slavery, racism, poverty, inequality and intolerance have caused and continue to cause terror in the affected peoples.
Terrorism practised by occupying States against innocent and helpless peoples is especially egregious, bearing in mind our universal commitment to self-determination. To be credible in our fight against terrorism, we cannot be seen to discriminate between one terrorism and another, or seem to be partial towards some terrorists. ‘”Justice has no favourites; not amongst nations, peoples or faiths”. (Tony Blair)
It is in this context that we urge the early adoption, through the United Nations, of an international Convention against Terrorism, one that will clearly define this evil and set out ways to defeat it.
In order to build and maintain a truly international coalition against terrorism, we must utilise the international mechanisms we have all embraced, particularly the United Nations, and we must abide fairly and without discrimination with the relevant General Assembly and Security Council Resolutions. The swiftness with which we in CARICOM responded to UN Res. 1373 gives you an indication of our seriousness and resolve in this matter.
What we all seek above all is security: national security, yes, but also personal security, economic security. True international security cannot be achieved by might alone. It will be founded on principles of international justice and a joint commitment to the eradication of poverty, disease and ignorance. President Bush said: “we seek a just and peaceful world beyond the war on terror”, and pledged to “stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law; limits on the power of the state; respect for women; private property; free speech; equal justice and religious tolerance.” The rule of law includes international law, and in particular international humanitarian law, and if we are to maintain the moral high ground we must abide scrupulously by the relevant Conventions.
International security goes far beyond military solutions; indeed, indiscriminately strengthening military and intelligence institutions threatens democratic institutions; it also exacerbates tensions between nations, especially neighbours with lingering territorial disputes. We must be careful not to make the cure worse than the disease. We in the Caribbean are particularly affected by the frightening proliferation of guns in our lands. Thousands of our people every year are casualties of this phenomenon.
We addressed this issue at Bridgetown in our Plan of Action, recognising that “the United States has been a significant country of origin for firearms illegally diverted to other nations. Illegal trafficking in firearms facilitates criminal activity including drug trafficking in these countries as it does in the United States”, and we agreed to work towards the early adoption of an international agreement against this evil.
That was in May 1997. We moved quickly, and by November of that year we adopted, in Washington, the Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacture of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition and Other Related Materials. Belize was the first country to sign and ratify that vitally important Convention; the United States has not yet done so. We urge you to ratify and enforce it as a matter of extreme urgency: our people, especially our youth, are dying every day.
This is a matter of death for us: last year’s independent Small Arms Survey records a regional homicide rate for Latin America and the Caribbean which is twice the world’s average, with over 140,000 murders committed annually. We consider it a moral imperative for your government to seek to enact legislation to make it more difficult for people to produce and sell guns in your country, guns that often find their way to ours and kill our people.
Mr. Secretary: development concerns that were not considered a priority before September 11 must surely now be at the top of our agenda. Our fight against terrorism must have as its centrepiece the eradication of poverty and intolerance.
You spoke truly, Mr. Secretary, when you said last Friday, that poverty and hopelessness breed terrorism. There is too much poverty, and a lot of hopelessness, in the world today. At his address to the UN General Assembly in 1999, the President of the United States said that 40 million people die each year from hunger; that is frightening enough; but think of the millions more who barely survive to live in wretchedness and despair.
There is an urgent need for a revision of development strategy towards the less developed world. We have an excellent opportunity to begin this process at the UN Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey next month. A good start would be to make good on the decades-old commitment to set aside 0.7% of GDP for development assistance, and to set in place a democratic process for reforming the Bretton Woods institutions that are an integral part of the machinery that has brought our world to the terrible plight it is in now.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said it well: ‘I believe this is a fight for freedom. And I want to make it a fight for justice too. And I mean: freedom not only in the narrow sense of personal liberty but in the broader sense of each individual having the economic and social freedom to develop their potential to the full. The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of North Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause‘.
Mr. Secretary: you know us in the Caribbean well. Your roots here go deep. We in CARICOM stand ready to work closely with you as equal partners to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to address peace and security issues in our region, our Americas, our world.
