Delivered
by
The
Honourable Assad Shoman
To
the
32nd
Regular Session of the General Assembly
of
the Organization of American States
Bridgetown,
Barbados
3rd.
June 2002
Article
11 of the Inter-American Democratic Charter states that “democracy and social
and economic development are interdependent and mutually reinforcing.”
While
this article clearly emphasizes the link between democracy, integral
development, and combating poverty, the focus vis- a- vis the Charter has been
on the strengthening of democratic institutions, not on addressing the scourge
of poverty, which is on the rise and whose relentless momentum threatens all
advances made in democracy.
As
Prime Minister Owen Arthur of Barbados said at the opening of this conference,
quoting the Prime Minister of Belize, if the adoption of the democratic values
were the solution to the problems of development, CARICOM Countries would be
havens of democracy.
It
is clear that the passing of the Charter by itself will change nothing in our
hemisphere, unless States go beyond discussion and grandstanding on the
importance of this Charter, and address the very real matter of its
implementation. We must apply the
Charter to all countries and at all times.
This
is our poverty season : Unemployment,
HIV/AIDS, Migration, the brain drain, narco-terrorism, the proliferation
of arms, these are but some of the
names for our disasters. We must
begin the implementation of the Charter by fighting poverty. Nothing contained
therein is more urgent.
Democratic
freedoms mean nothing to a parent who does not enjoy the dignity of a job, who
cannot afford to provide her family
with food, who cannot take them to a doctor for medical attention much less buy
medicines for them, and who cannot
educate her children to give them the opportunity to try for a better life.
Poverty
and its lethal hold on our people breed the children of Sisyphus, and its
unwanted effect is men and women who commit crimes of despair, and these
conditions crystallize the pebble that tips the avalanche of criminality,
discontent, and hopelessness, that
endangers feeble and sturdy democracies alike.
How
can a “democratic and free” country be free, when most of us –and our
children and future too -are shackled to crippling
foreign debt, when funds that we should be investing in education and social
services must be diverted to servicing these debts instead, and when ninety
cents out of every dollar we earn goes out to buy imports ?
Free trade must be fair trade – or we will sink from poverty to misery
to utter despair.
To
quote my Prime minister again, for
us, the future of our democracies lies in the strengthening of our economies; in
a more favorable trading environment for our products; in more effective and
rapid debt relief; in the protection of legitimate areas of economic progress
like our financial services industry, in tailoring globalization and the
precepts of liberalization to the needs of the 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 underdevelopment.
These are realities we face.
If
we are to do right by our people, we need to get past the rhetoric, and
implement democracy by fighting poverty.
Apply the Democratic Charter – and to make the whole of it effective,
let us take care especially and urgently, to apply article 11 along with article
9 – the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination,
Article 10 – Workers’ Rights and the
other Articles of Part III.