Sometime around 1995 when the Labour Party became the Government of St. Kitts-Nevis, one day, my late friend St. John Payne came to visit me. He was angry. He had bad news. Dr. Douglas had signed the Ship Rider Agreement. He was then Ambassador to the OAS so it was logical for me to deduce that he did not agree.
The Ship Rider Agreement gave the United States the right to board any foreign ship suspected of carrying contraband such as drugs intended for the United States market.
This was not the first ship Rider Agreement. Since 1808 when the British abolished the Slave Trade in the Caribbean, they realized that their law would be ineffective unless the other slave trading nations did likewise. So they persuaded their fellow Europeans to permit the British navy to board the ships which flew foreign flags and confiscate them if they had a cargo of slaves.
Ironically, the United States which still traded in slaves for its cotton plantations in the South, declined to be a part of this arrangement at that time.
Over time, Ship Rider has remerged in different forms and the United States has become its champion. What made St John angry the most was the Hot Pursuit provision of the new Ship Rider.
Hot pursuit, in theory meant that the Ship Rider could follow the suspected culprit ashore if he managed to evade capture on the sea. In practice, it can mean that a US bounty hunter could enter our territory by sea or air, capture a suspect and take him into US territory to face charges.
I was as angry as St. John was because, like him, I believed that the Ship Rider Agreement in theory and practice, violated the sovereignty of our newly independent nation.
Both St. John and I were naïve. We had grown up under Robert Bradshaw, a man of severe integrity. We were close enough to him to know that when he stood up for principle he was not joking.
So naturally, he approached political leadership in St. Kitts from the standpoint of what he had learnt under Robert Bradshaw and could not conceive of a scenario in which the integrity of a Prime Minister of St. Kitts or any of his team could ever be in question by any one within or without St. Kitts & Nevis.
Thus, St. John thought that circumstances would never arise to give a reason for the United States to intrude upon our sovereign space and impose their own will on our nation. I don’t think that he could ever have envisioned the situation in Jamaica where at the behest of the United States, that island stands on the brink of a civil war as Jamaican Police kill Jamaican people to capture a Jamaican for export to the United States.
That is how it is, unfortunately. One by one all across the Caribbean, governments have been forced to buckle and accede to the US demands to capture their own Caribbean nationals and deport them to America to go to jail.
We have all seen the evens. Trinidadians put into chains and sent to America. Kittitians put into chains and sent to America for crimes alleged to have been committed not on American soil, but right here within our territorial limits.
It does not seem right. However, upon further reflection, it might very well be expedient.
In fairness to the United States,
they are acting out of frustration with the political leaders of the Caribbean. Many of these three-piece-suited politicians are crooks. They use their high offices to access great wealth and, to secure their great wealth they participate in corrupt and criminal activities.
From one corner of their mouths, they spout all kinds of platitudes against drug traffickers. They impose sentences on home grown ganja planters and users of the weed. They go to the mountains and gleefully root up the few ganja trees depriving the unemployed youth an income from the local market.
From the other corner of their mouth, they give comfort to the Columbians who make our island a warehouse for the cocaine market in the United States.
There’s absolutely no evidence that the young men who try to nurture small marijuana plots in the mountains, take part in international traffic. Their weed satisfies the local demand, which includes the tourists who visit for a day on the cruise ships or stay for a few days at our hotels. If they did cocaine, they would not be engaging themselves in the toil in the blazing sun in the hills
Cocaine, however, comes all the way from South America, brought into the island by subterfuge and re-exported to the North America. The traffic in Cocaine is obviously undertaken by people with plenty of money, and plenty of connections to people with plenty of power.
Nobody in St. Kitts is stupid enough to believe that the volume of cocaine, which transshipped to the United States comes into St. Kitts and Nevis is fishing boats.
Anybody with the smallest iota of sense would be able to deduce that whoever brings this stuff into St. Kitts does so with confidence that he/she would never be caught.
Isn’t it a bit strange that whereas every now and then, a policeman would bump into someone with a bag of weed but no officer has ever got lucky and bumped into a cache of cocaine?
There is something fishy in this.
Yet the United States know who the Cocaine Traffickers are and who are their high profile connections.
This is no mystery. There are many Americans living in St. Kitts. There are Peace Corps Volunteers and Medical Students and staff. There are many African students studying at the American College of Nursing. It is not farfetched to think that the United States finds out things about St. Kitts and Nevis through these channels.
And if you think that the tiny islands of St. Kitts and Nevis are too small for intelligence gathering by the United States you are dead wrong.
St. Kitts has had a long history of transshipping cocaine to America. This was the reason for the extradition of Charles Miller ( Little Nut) and others to the United States.
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The United States had to draw the attention of our Government to the existence of the Traffic.
It must have been a great disappointment to the US Government to find that drugs were stored in St. Kitts pending transshipment to the US. They naturally felt betrayed by a friend to whom they had been so helpful
They had donated Coast Guard ships, trained Coast Guard officers, given all kinds of financial aid, and then discovered that our island leaders were double crossing them and laughing at them on the side.
They found the island leaders untrustworthy and corrupt cohorting with Drug Lords who pump cocaine into their territory, under the full gaze of some of these island leaders. Just imagine how you would feel if some poor relative to whom you give your substance try to fool you with assurances of support, all the while siding against you.
Well this is how the United States feel and this is what motivates them to secure their own interest. The Ship Rider is their way of securing themselves.
The Jamaican Version of Ship Rider is to place the onus on Prime Minister Golding. It must be strong medicine for this island leader to give up a friend and financier of his party. However, the United States want him for shipping illegal drugs to their country.
If there was justice in Jamaica , any trafficking would be punishable by the country where the crime was committed .Thus Dundas would be tried in a Jamaica Court and get his just reward in a Jamaica jail. But when the Jamaican Prime Minister is known to be his friend of the drug baron, and will go to the full length to avoid justice, it leaves the United States no other option but to embarrass Jamaica and Jamaica’s Prime Minister in front of the Caribbean public.
The result of this impasse is that all the professions of sovereignty and territorial integrity in the Caribbean have become hot air and some of these leaders are exposed as a bunch of naked scoundrels who share the bounty of their office with the underworld.
The experience of Jamaica should teach Kittitians and Nevisians a valuable lesson. |
