Dear Editor,

A basic tenet of democracy is that it is the will of the people that prevails or, as Edmund Barton put it, “..creating a nation requires the will of the people”. Here in the Caribbean, we have some leaders trying to create a United States of the Caribbean called Caricom, without the will and consent of the Jamaican people. For, if we go back to just over half century ago, it was definitely not the will of the Jamaican people.

However, based on the “school tie concept”, some leaders in the English-speaking Caribbean are determined to push the idea of Caribbean unity down the throats, all because the colonisers had left us with the concept of the British West Indies and West Indies cricket.

While it is true that the people of the eastern Caribbean are one big family — and this even includes from Guadeloupe, Martinique because of their proximity to the rest — those of us in the western Caribbean have no such ties that bind. The proximity of these islands mean that when you are born in Grenada, hopping over to school in Trinidad is normal or to Kittitians, having Christmas dinner with relatives in Antigua is the norm, so they know each other and are close family; unlike us, who are virtual strangers, apart from the parochial UWI trained politicians. For the man in the street in Jamaica there is no relationship or even knowledge about the people or culture in the eastern territories. In fact, many Jamaicans know so little about the other Caricom member countries that it is not unusual to hear my countrymen referring to Guyanese as “small islanders”. Neither do the people of the eastern Caribbean know much about us. Some even think of us all as being gun-toting, trigger-happy people, and only realise that the country is relatively peaceful and we are like them in many ways when they visit.

It is the fact that we know so little about each other that makes our being a part of Caricom so counterproductive. And, besides, in terms of trade, we are too far from the eastern Caribbean and their populations too small to make free trade advantageous. In terms of free travel throughout the region, the difficulties we are having are mainly because the man in the street knows nothing about us and judges us by the statistics that put us in the top five murder capitals of the world.

In short, until regional unity becomes accepted from the ground level, and the UWI school tie clique can prove to us that there are practical benefits and less counterproductive reasons for us to get closer to our eastern Caribbean cousins, apart from it being the wish of our leaders, most of us will never willingly accept this shot-gun marriage.

Joan Williams

gratestj@gmail.com