Use Zone of Peace principles for guidance

THE POSITION recommended and advanced in the MIDWEEK NATION Editorial of October 29 entitled Foe Or Friend? is a thoroughly amoral one which urges us – Caribbean people and governments – to acquiesce in and accept the extrajudicial killing of human beings on the basis that “the price to be paid for the obliteration of narco-traffickers, human traffickers and gunrunners may one day be worth it”.

It is also fails to acknowledge that the United States government has provided no proof whatsoever that the human beings it is obliterating are “narco-traffickers, human traffickers or gunrunners”. The editorial also fails to acknowledge that the flood of illegal firearms that is causing so much death and destruction in our Caribbean societies emanates primarily from the territory of the US and not from Venezuela!

In addition, the editorial is based – either wittingly or unwittingly – on a fundamental misunderstanding of the notion of our Caribbean region being a Zone of Peace, and I would therefore like to use this opportunity to shed some light on this invaluable concept that is rooted in international law.

On June 30, 1978, at the Tenth Special Assembly of the United Nations General Assembly, a resolution was adopted which called for and authorised “the establishment of zones of peace in various regions of the world under appropriate conditions to be clearly defined and determined freely by the states concerned in the zone, taking into account the characteristics of the zone and the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and in conformity with international law . . .”.

It is against this background therefore that in October 1979, Grenada (under the leadership of late Prime Minister Maurice Bishop) successfully co-sponsored an Organisation of American States (OAS) resolution that called on all states to recognise the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace.

The General Assembly of the OAS resolved: 1. To express its deep concern over the heightening of tension in the (Caribbean) sub-region resulting from the recent increases in military activity in the Caribbean area.

2. To repudiate the concept of the region, or any of its sub-regions, as a sphere of influence for any power.

3. To stress its support for the principles of ideological pluralism and peaceful co-existence, which are essential to the peace, stability and development of the region.

4. To call upon all states to recognise the region as a Zone of Peace, and to devote all their efforts, in appropriate regional and international forums, to the advancement of this concept.

CARICOM governments and statesmen then proceeded in the following years to further elucidate the specific elements of the definition of a Caribbean Zone of Peace.

For example, in 1986 Prime Minister Errol Barrow declared to the opening ceremony of the CARICOM Heads of Government conference in Guyana as follows:

Moral commitment

“My position remains clear that the Caribbean must be recognised and respected as a Zone of Peace . . . . I have said, and I repeat that while I am Prime Minister of Barbados, our territory will not be used to intimidate any of our neighbours: be that neighbour Cuba or the USA. And I do not believe that size is necessarily the only criterion for determining these matters. It is important to let people know where you stand . . . in what is a moral commitment to peace in our region.”

But perhaps the most significant development in this regard has been the January 2014 Zone of Peace Declaration which was unanimously adopted in Havana, Cuba, by the member states of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) – a hemisphere-wide organization which includes all of the independent nations of the Caribbean and the Americas, with the exception of the US and Canada.

It was based on the following principles:

• Our permanent commitment to solve disputes through peaceful means with the aim of uprooting forever the threat or use of force in our region;

• The commitment of the states of the region . . . not to intervene, directly or indirectly, in the internal affairs of any other state and to observe the principles of national sovereignty, equal rights and self-determination of peoples;

• The commitment of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean to foster cooperation and friendly relations among themselves and with other nations irrespective of differences in their political, economic and social systems; to practise tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours; and

• The commitment to fully respect the inalienable right of every state to choose its political, economic, social and cultural system, as an essential condition to ensure peaceful coexistence among nations.

It may be usefully noted that the leader of the Trinidad and Tobago delegation to that 2014 CELAC conference was its then Prime Minister, Kamla Persad Bissessar.

It is therefore precisely these Zone of Peace principles that our CARICOM governments now need to look to for guidance when they are confronted with the phenomenon of US warships and a US nuclear submarine sailing into the waters of the Southern Caribbean, targeting Venezuela, and blowing the occupants of small vessels into oblivion without any process of interdiction, arrest, trial, conviction or sentence.

This is an egregious violation of the concept of our Caribbean being a Zone of Peace.

– DAVID COMISSIONG

DAILY