STATE Minister for Diaspora Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Marlene Malahoo-Forte has defended her ministry’s handling of a number of controversial Diaspora issues, as accusations of government high-handedness threaten to derail the upcoming Diaspora Conference scheduled for June 2011.

News of a possible boycott of the Conference, scheduled for the Jamaica Grande Ocho Rios on June 15-17, broke just a week ago, when some Diaspora members raised concerns about being excluded from the planning of the conference agenda.

The diaspora’s discomfiture was first brought to light in last Sunday’s Observer where the Head of the Southern United States chapter, Marlon Hill, was quoted as saying “persons on the ground are no longer interested in talks.”

“They want to be engaged in a manner that produces value and results for the benefit of Jamaica,” Hill is also quoted as saying.

Future Leader representative on the Diaspora Advisory Board in the United States, David Mullings, said the structure of the upcoming conference “did not address some of the issues which were of longstanding importance to the Diaspora”. He said issues of interest, such as security and local investment opportunities, were not on the conference agenda.

Mullings said it was unreasonable for the Government to expect Jamaicans in the Diaspora to invest in the country, “without fully understanding what is happening on the security front”.

But, in a statement in the Senate on Friday, Senator Malahoo-Forte said her office was working with the Diaspora to formulate the conference agenda.

“We have had feedback from them and they have been incorporated… we continue to refine the Agenda, even as we continue the planning process,” she said.

In a recent Observer article criticising the Government’s handling of the issue, former Foreign Affairs Minister turned political commentator, Delano Franklin, said the Government appeared to have breached the resolution encouraging broad-based discussions agreed on at an earlier conference.

“When the previous government in 2002 gave the charge that members of the Jamaican Diaspora must be accorded a greater role in the development of the country, one of the first decisions taken was to convene a meeting of known leaders in the Diaspora to begin the dialogue. At that meeting, in October 2003, the members of the Diaspora stated, among other things, that ‘the Government (any government) must not sign off on any policy initiative or programme without first discussing those initiatives with the community’,” Franklin said.

In addition to issues relating to the conference, Diaspora members say they are also upset about moves by the Government to have the minister select members for the Advisory Board. The new process would see the minister having the final say in the selection of board members, a move criticised as an attempt to politicise the process.

But Malahoo-Forte countered Friday saying that at one point it was the minister who appointed the board.

“It is really unfortunate that the proposal to give the minister a say has caused some to conclude that this is an attempt to politicise the process..,” she said.

In a subsequent release issued Friday via the young professional arm of the JLP, the G2K, the minister said:

“I wish to make it abundantly clear that I will not be part of that destructive political culture that has been nurtured and which had created a partisanly divisive landscape, resulting in more harm than good.

“Given the current immaturity of our political culture, questions will invariably arise as to whether people who have faithfully served one Administration, with which they are politically sympathetic, will display the level of professionalism to serve another Administration, with which they may not be politically sympathetic, to advance the policies on that new Administration,” Malahoo Forte continued.

The senator blamed the current brouhaha on the country’s failure and timidity to deal with this prickly matter candidly, adding that she intends to raise this matter with the Diaspora

In her assessment, much of the discord relates to the fact that no meeting has been held with the existing Diaspora Board since January 2010.

She added that plans are being made to convene a meeting immediately.

A new Board should have been put in place in June 2010, but that was not done because last year’s scheduled Diaspora Conference was cancelled.

“The new board will be put in place through a democratic process, without anyone having to worry about the process,” asserted Malahoo-Forte.