OUR Caribbean region is currently also caught up in the global diplomatic hullabaloo over leaked messages involving embassies of the United States of America that are impacting negatively on relations between Washington and governments of the Caribbean Community (Caricom).

For years some Caribbean governments, political parties and a precious few sections of the region’s media felt obliged to complain against “interventions” by foreign diplomats — primarily from the USA but also including Britain — in their domestic affairs, including misrepresentations that at times had resulted in costly social and political conflicts.

This was virtually the norm during the period when orchestrated anti-communism, anti-Cuba hysteria was the political game plan by some governments and parties in this region that became the funded allies of the US State Department with their official representatives operating out of various embassies.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and some easing of the inordinate pressures on Cuba in the so-called “new era for democratic governance”, we are now learning of a continuation, under new labels, of foreign diplomatic interferences in the region’s domestic affairs — thanks to the world-famous whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.

The disclosures that have been forthcoming, following last month’s ‘unintended'(?) downloading of a massive WikiLeaks document of some 250,000 electronic messages on United States foreign strategies, that included spying on “allies’ as well as “enemies”, could be considered mild.

That is when compared to exposures involving other nations in relation to misrepresentations of claimed “private conversations” in cabled messages which had flowed between Washington and regional capitals, among these Kingston, Georgetown and Bridgetown — the last being the primary base of operations of the US Embassy for the Eastern Caribbean.

Barbados scene

In Barbados currently, attention is focused on reports involving a well-known political scientist and pollster (Peter Wickham) and the commander of the Barbados Coast Guard (Sean Reece) over claimed separate controversial conversations with two former diplomats of the US Embassy.

Wickham who, incidentally, was suddenly dismissed last Thursday by the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) with a four-line letter that provided no details, has been identified among the misrepresented “victims” of cabled messages to Washington, as exposed by WikiLeaks.

He said he has sought “legal advice” in connection with unflattering claims made against him by former US ambassador to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, Mary Kramer, in relation to allegations he had made regarding two current prime ministers and a former prime minister of the Eastern Caribbean.

Commander Reece, on the other hand, has strongly denied having spoken about “corruption” in the Barbados Coast Guard with former US Chargé d’Affaires Brent Hardt, as well as about the circumstances surrounding his appointment two years ago to head the BCG. Hardt was recently nominated by President Barack Obama to be the new US ambassador to Guyana.

Earlier, in June 2007, another former US ambassador to Barbados, Mary Ourisman, had made an unflattering assessment of the lifestyle and suitability for high office of former Deputy Prime Minister Mia Mottley in the then government of Prime Minister Owen Arthur.

In Guyana

Meanwhile, two Caricom leaders — first Jamaica’s Prime Minister Bruce Golding, and more recently Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo — have found it necessary to publicly speak out against aggressive behaviour by US officials in their respective countries. Golding’s angry rebuke came during controversies focused on extradition arrangements for drug kingpin Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, now a prisoner of American justice.

For his part, Jagdeo last week told a press conference in Georgetown that had it not been for the exposures by WikiLeaks, he may never have known of the extent of gross misrepresentations by outgoing US Ambassador Thomas in relation to opposition to the appointment of former Crime Chief Henry Greene as police commissioner.,

He accused the US envoy of making serious claims based on “personal impressions” but unwilling to produce “evidence”, when invited to do so, about Greene’s alleged narco-trafficking connection.

President Jagdeo was to conclude that the WikiLeaks reports “tell us a lot” about how some diplomats from these countries (in separate references to the USA and UK) make policies in relation to small countries, based not on objective assessments of situations, but based on the impressions of their representatives here….”

Previous and current administrations in both Jamaica and Guyana have often been subjected to claimed aggressive interventions involving American and British diplomatic personnel.

But then, as we know now, there was no such phenomenon like WikiLeaks to also inform us about the complicity, at times, of our own politicians, diplomats and others with foreign powers against nationals of this region.

By last week, however, the world was shocked to learn — not via WikiLeaks — but from captured documents in Tripoli by Human Rights Watch about the sordid co-operation that had existed between US and British intelligence (CIA and MI6) with President Moammar Gadhafi to whom they had secretly handed over his political opponents in order to win his co-operation as an “ally” in the “war on terrorism” by al-Qaida and Muslim extremists.

Some of these anti-Gadhafi opponents were imprisoned, tortured or killed but among the survivors, ironically, is the former suspected Libyan al-Qaida terrorist, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, now commander of the NATO-backed rebel forces in Libya while American and British intelligence continue to co-operate in the desperate hunt to capture Gadhafi — dead or alive, in the name of ‘freedom and justice’.