Bdos: Action, not words

IN THE wake of the horrendous tragedies that have resulted from the fury of flood waters in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) would have to do a lot better than its expressed “mourning” sentiment over the loss of life, or its ambiguous appeals to the international community for emergency relief.

With more than 2 000 known to have died or disappeared, and thousands more rendered homeless and destitute, the international community was surprisingly slow in rushing emergency aid to the two Caribbean nations with shared borders.

As is often the case, it is the very poor who suffer the most in the natural disasters that have so often added to the agonies of life in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, especially from tropical storms and hurricanes.

This time they seem to have suffered the worse, leaving them to face serious health problems in the affected areas, including from dead bodies and livestock.

Haiti, already burdened with grinding poverty and continual political turmoil, is a member of CARICOM. But neither it nor its neighbour, the Dominican Republic, is a member of the regional emergency relief mechanism of the Community – the Barbados-based Caribbean Disaster Emergency Relief Agency.

This cannot, and must not, pose a problem for governments and organisations within CARICOM from exercising their own initiatives to mobilise speedy bilateral assistance for both Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

It is encouraging to learn that Jamaica will shortly be sending drinking water, medical and other relief supplies to Haiti.
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What seems much more urgent and relevant now is for member states of the Community, apart from United Nations agencies themselves, to immediately respond with practical forms of emergency aid to help the peoples of the two countries to cope with their immense disasters. And to do so without getting bogged down with institutional, bureaucratic procedures and processes.
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The responses of the powerful and wealthy industrial nations will, of course, be subjected to scrutiny to ascertain if more than temporary, band-aid assistance will be provided to the Haitian and Dominican survivors of the flood disasters to rebuild their lives and communities.

The sanctimonious and arrogant tone of this editorial just about sticks in my craw. Worse yet is the final paragraph in which the editorialist sounds as though "powerful and wealthy industrial nations" owe the Caribbean something other than human charity and compassion.

Here's what I have seen from crawling the web for Caribbean related news stories. The U.S., U.K., and Canada, along with some U.N. folks, are in the forefront of relief for flood victims in Haiti and DR. Jamaica, as usual, is standing up to help.

The newspapers of Barbados and the Lesser Antilles, which includes TT, have been acting as though nothing tragic is happening in the Greater Antilles. This is not to say that these countries have not been providing any assistance, it is just that the newspapers haven't carried a lot of stories on the flood and devastating loss of life in Hispaniola (the island which contains Haiti-DR).

Worse yet, Caricom does not appear to have a unified response to the situation in Hispaniola. Instead, Caribbean Disaster Emergency Relief Agency (CDERA) appears to limit its efforts to its own members, which list is not the same as for Caricom.

If the U.S. and other nations functioned like CDERA, Caribbean editorialists and journalists would be squawking about "[t]he responses of the powerful and wealthy industrial nations." Yet, they seem to be silent about Caribbean parochialism.

What about Caribbean nations extending a helping hand just because a nation is distressed? Is that too much to ask for? Why should Caricom countries expect "powerful and wealthy industrial nations" to provide aid that they are unwilling or slow to provide their own brethren? Furthermore, in all good conscience, how can Caricom countries accept disaster relief from nations to whose disaster relief organizations they don't belong when non-CDERA sister Caribbean nations can't get aid from that organization? Why have not Caricom established CDERA to be a first response disaster relief organization in a region that is so subject to hurricanes and such? Why the dependence on "powerful and wealthy industrial nations"? When will Caribbean journalists carefully scrutinize Caribbean agencies to see if they contribute to the growth and development of the region's nations?

With respect to helping distressed Caribbean countries, in spite of their straitened fiscal conditon, Jamaica has much to teach the rest of the Caribbean. Would that the wealthier Caricom countries would learn.