GOVERNMENT OF BARBADOS
ADDRESS BY THE RT. HON. OWEN ARTHUR
PRIME MINISTER
BARBADOS
ON THE OCCASION OF
THE INAUGURAL SESSION OF
THE 32ND GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF
THE ORGANISATION OF AMERICAN STATES
ILARO COURT
ST. MICHAEL
BARBADOS
JUNE 02, 2002
Mr. President
Madam Chairman
Heads of Delegation
Mr. Secretary General
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen:
Barbados is greatly honored that the people of the Americas have chosen our
nation as the place to hold this most important assembly at such a vital stage
in the development of our Hemisphere.
I therefore take great pride and pleasure in welcoming all of you to Barbados on
the occasion of the Thirty-Second Regular Session of the General Assembly of the
Organisation of American States.
I regret only that I cannot offer you the keys to the city of Bridgetown. We
have no municipal form of Government in Barbados. Such keys as they are to our
capital city are therefore firmly in the grasp of its elected Member of
Parliament; the Deputy Prime Minister of Barbados and Minister of Foreign
Affairs and Foreign Trade, Ms. Billie Miller, who will be your Chairperson at
this meeting. She stands ready to extend to you every comfort and delight that
Bridgetown has to offer to make this meeting held under her Chairmanship, and in
her constituency, one of the most memorable in the history of this Organisation.
This General Assembly is being convened in furtherance of one of nature's and
history's great causes.
Long before the statesmen of this hemisphere began fashioning instruments for
unifying the Americas, the people took practical steps to do so. Barbadians and
Jamaicans, for example, went to work in Panama, Cuba, Brazil and Central
America. The equivalence of forty percent of the male population of Barbados
left to help build the Panama Canal. I note in passing that the project was
finished six months ahead of schedule and under budget. I leave you to draw the
appropriate conclusions.
Today, you will find much of the same. Workers from Mexico, Central America and
the Caribbean are making indispensable contributions to the US economy, sadly,
in anxious conditions as illegal immigrants.
I could go on and on, but I am sure that the point is already made. The unity of
this hemisphere from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego would be far more advanced now
if it were simply up to our peoples. They, with their practical and mundane
concerns, are far ahead of their governments, in perceiving the obvious
advantages of a Pan-American Community.
If I may be permitted to paraphrase a great Caribbean personality and man of
letters, C.L.R. James, "Nobody knows what the American peoples are capable
of; nobody has attempted to find out".
The idea of a Pan-American community of nations is old. It is as old as the
genius of Simon Bolivar, and much older than that of a European community.
Indeed, it is a cruel historical irony that our former colonisers, who created
the conditions that divide us, and fought wars to keep it so, have themselves
chosen the path of integration, with remarkable and striking success.
The reasons for the success of European integration are easily discernible. The
people of the European community of nations have refused to allow the concept
and the practice of their cooperation to be shackled by hackneyed doctrines of
territorial sovereignty, and have allowed dynamic instruments of governance to
provide the energy for their regional transformation. It is therefore a sad
commentary that the oldest and most venerable of regional organisations –the
OAS -which predates the founding of the concept of a European Community, cannot
yet speak of the creation of a Pan-American Community of nations as one of its
accomplishments.
And it is not for lack of vision. We have had numerous inter American
conferences and conventions that embody the spirit of Hemispheric community that
the people of the Americas, in their defiance of borders and the perils of the
elements, so obviously desire most of all.
That vision has been re-affirmed and given a clear focus by three Summits of the
Americas. It is a vision to forge a Pan-American Community of the Americas, that
acknowledges and respects the rich diversity and the stark disparities of the
Americas, and replaces a culture of fragmentation with a culture of unity.
Through three impressive Declarations of Principles and Statements of Plans of
Actions, first at Miami, next at Santiago, and recently at Quebec, the leaders
of the Hemisphere have conceived of and have set out to achieve a Pan-American
Community, built on a common base of democratic values, drawn together by the
free and fair exchange of goods, services and capital, committed to the
protection of our common environment, and dedicated to the creation of a just
society through the eradication of poverty and want and discrimination.
If successful, it would give rise to the largest and most powerful economic
community known to man; a community that could call upon a mosaic of cultures
drawn from native America, Europe, Africa and Asia in varying proportions to
create what surely would be the most perfect microcosm of the global society.
The creation of such a community of purpose and nations is not only the most
ambitious and far-reaching enterprise in the history of our Hemisphere, but also
perhaps in the entire history of mankind.
That its accomplishment is still very much in the nature of "a Holy Grail
shining on the edge of a distance too far away to matter for the time
being" is due in large measure to one essential factor: the systems of
hemispheric governance to support a new Pan-American Community have not been
evolved.
There is a need especially to endow the OAS and the IADB with the resources and
the institutional capacity to carry out the enlarged mandates required of these
Organisations arising from the Plan of Action of the Summit of the Americas.
Indeed, it is something of a tragedy that the resources made available to the
regular fund of the OAS have been in decline for the past 20 years, and there is
no immediate plan to alter that financial trend.
As it seeks to carry out the mandate handed to the Secretary-General through the
Summit of Americas process, and by consecutive General Assemblies, the OAS could
find itself void of any serious capacity to deliver on well-intentioned promises
and designs.
It is our hope that deliberations at assemblies such as this will enable us to
avert this disaster. Indeed, the OAS must continue to refresh itself and to
undergo far-reaching changes if it is to remain dedicated to the realisation of
the ideals envisioned in its charter, namely, "to achieve peace and
justice, to promote and strengthen solidarity among its numbers, to defend their
sovereignty, their territorial integrity and their independence".
Everything points to testing times ahead in the realisation of such ideals.
Today, we all live in the shadow of September 11. That horrific tragedy has cast
a pall across the whole hemisphere. It is therefore entirely appropriate that we
focus our efforts on combating terrorism.
Only last week the Parliament of Barbados passed comprehensive anti-terrorism
legislation in harmony with the recent initiatives of the United Nations and the
inter-American convention on terrorism. Ever mindful, however, of our national
commitment to democracy and human rights, this legislation is fully compatible
with due process and all the other rights essential to the freedoms we hold
dear. For it would be a victory for the terrorists if we were to curtail the
liberties that they seek to destroy.
But while the hemispheric community should work together as a matter of urgency
in a genuine multilateral effort to strike against the international terrorists
and criminals that threaten our very existence, we must not forget that there is
a development agenda in this hemisphere that also needs to be pursued with equal
urgency.
More that 170 million of the hemisphere's population live in poverty. The
eradication of poverty must therefore be at the top of our agenda as the
permanent issue,.) in which we have, all a permanent interest. For as a great
American statesman, President John F. Kennedy said, "If a free society
cannot help the majority who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich
".
I am therefore pleased to note that the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the
hemisphere have selected "The Multi-Dimensional Approach to Hemispheric
Security" as the main theme for this General Assembly. For any meaningful
definition of security can no longer be limited to the traditional military
operations, but must recognise the need for an integrated approach to
confronting the conditions which create instabilities in our society and which
degrade our humanity.
It would be a fundamental error on our part to limit security concerns to anyone
area while the scourge of HIV / AIDS, illegal arms and drug trafficking,
trans-national crime, ecological disasters and poverty continue to stare us in
the face.
This sub-region of the Caribbean is proud of the culture of peace and democracy
which we have managed to achieve over the last four decades of the twentieth
century. The adoption in September last year of the Inter-American Democratic
Charter signaled another step by the OAS and the hemisphere to strengthen the
capacity to manage and maintain our democracies. But the Charter is not the
final destination.
This instrument cannot remain static in this dynamic political environment in
which we live. It will be necessary to revisit the Charter from time to time to
incorporate elements that will allow it to become truly representative and keep
us on the path of true democracy and of the creation of a truly democratic
culture.
Neither must the Charter be seen merely as a punitive instrument. It should
serve both as a yardstick as well as a reference point from which we continue
other supportive activities such as election monitoring, training and education
and the strengthening of other complimentary instruments.
On this matter of Democratic Charters, you must allow me to use this occasion to
speak to the leaders of the Americas in the terms in which Prime Minister Musa
of Belize recently spoke on the Caribbean's behalf to the European leaders
during our recent encounter in Madrid:
"The first thing that needs to be said from the point of view of the
countries of Caricom is that we constitute, and have done for a long time, a
region that has lived by democratic values and the rule of law and the steady
enlargement of human rights. The strengthening of civil and political rights in
the Caricom countries of the Caribbean has been the basic story of our evolution
-as it has been of the countries of Europe.
I say this not to blow our own trumpet -no country is above improvement in any
of these areas -but because there is a tendency on the part of the industrial
world -and countries of the European Union are not immune from this tendency -to
imply that the adoption of these values is the solution to the problems of
development. Were that so the Caricom countries of the Caribbean would have been
havens of prosperity.
The help that we need is not for adopting democracy and the rule of law and
securing respect for human rights, but in preserving them from erosion by the
instabilities that derive from under-development and indeed from deterioration
in the global political environment where these same values at the level of the
international community are being consistently, and at accelerating pace,
eroded.
The persistence of under-development -the denial of social and economic rights
in their full plenitude -is the major challenge that Caribbean countries face in
relation to the preservation and strengthening of the values for which we stand.
It is important that we make this clear because it has become all too easy for
western countries to excuse themselves from any significant effort towards
poverty alleviation and economic development generally by implying that
salvation lies in the area of civil and political rights. That may be true for
some countries in some parts of the world. It is not true for the Caricom
countries of the Caribbean.
For us the future of our democracies lies in the strengthening of our
economies,. in a more favourable trading environment for our products; in more
effective and rapid debt relief,- in the protection of legitimate areas of
globalisation and the precepts of liberalisation to the needs of small
economies. Our future lies, in short, in escaping from the trap of poverty. That
some are poorer does not make us less poor than we are, that some are less
developed than we are does not alter our state of under-development. These are
the realities we face".
I wish before I close this evening to acknowledge the presence and to salute the
extraordinary contribution of Mr. Valerie Theodore McComie, a Barbadian citizen
of Trinidadian birth who served as a guiding light and inspiration in building
the links between the English speaking and non English speaking states of the
hemisphere. 'Val', as we affectionately call him, served as Barbados' Ambassador
to the United States and Permanent Representative to the OAS and was the first
resident Ambassador of Barbados in a Latin American country.
He served with distinction as Assistant Secretary General of this Organisation
for ten years from 1980 to 1990. His contribution as an educator in Barbados and
St. Kitts-Nevis, helped to encourage many key decision makers in newly
independent Caribbean states to become more aware of our Latin neighbours at a
time when political contact could have been said to be almost non-existent. Val,
we all owe you a debt of gratitude for having the foresight of and appreciation
for the value of cross-cultural contact.
As we convene this 32nd Regular Session, the OAS stands poised either to be
re-fashioned into an institution that responds to the developmental needs of the
hemisphere or one which can become marginalised and non-effective, if it is not
given the requisite support. It is our call as member states that will determine
its fate. It is my hope that by the conclusion of this meeting, the Organisation
would have had another dose of reinvigoration to take it will into the
twenty-first century. This Assembly must be seen as a step in that direction.
History will judge us how it will. It was an international historian who said
that history teaches us no lessons, but punishes us for not learning them. Let
that not apply to us.
We already have the vision of a Pan-American Community of nations. Let us
embrace the courage to fulfill it.
May the warmth of our hospitality embrace you, the delight of our surroundings
inspire you, the future of our hemisphere recommit you and may you not lose the
opportunity, outside of your busy work schedule, to savour some of the delights
which our island offers to every visitor.
I thank you.