Latest update April 18th, 2025 8:12 AM
Sir Shridath issues clarification on wrongly attributed remarks
Senior regional integrationist, Guyana-born Sir Shridath Ramphal, has expressed his dissatisfaction with what he described as ‘misleading information’ that has wrongly attributed remarks to him about ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Barbados.
Sir Shridath Ramphal
Yesterday, Sir Shridath, an international figure of repute, said that he never made even an ‘insinuation’ about this in relation to Barbados, or any other country in the Caribbean.
According to Sir Shridath, the only reference he has made to the notion of ‘ethnic cleansing’ was in a speech on June 25 last to a meeting organized by the Caribbean Court of Justice in Trinidad.
In doing so, he said, he was criticizing an editorial in a regional newspaper for intimating such a notion.
“I was making the very specific point that no Caribbean leader would countenance it. My remark was the very antithesis of the connotation that has been put on it.
In a very short remark in a speech lasting over an hour to an audience of the Judiciaries of the Region on the impact of ‘globalization’, I lamented events which were threatening the cohesion of CARICOM and putting it at risk. Among these was the intimation in the editorial (to which I have referred above) that one of the ‘ravages’ of unmanaged CARICOM migration could be “a disturbance of the existing equilibrium among races”.
Sir Shridath then emphasized that what he said was, “it is always a sadness when, however propelled, our societies are caught in a downward spiral of separateness with fellow West Indians cast as outsiders; those times when, as Annalee Davis (the Barbadian Researcher) has described them, we become “locked into nationalist crevices … and exclusivist cultural legitimacy”.
We are at such a time, and both policies and practices are deepening Caribbean divides. ‘The knock on the door at night’ is not within our regional culture; still less are intimations of ‘ethnic cleansing’. No Caribbean leader would countenance such departures from our norms and values.”
Sir Ramphal noted that his purpose in making the comment was to remind all that the basic premise of the regional lives is that West Indians are one people, and to recall natives of the region, to the vital importance of the integration and cohesion in a highly competitive world which has little regard for small countries. He made reference to a recent opinion expressed by Prime Minister David Thompson of Barbados that, “integration is the last best bet for the Caribbean”.
“I certainly did not allude to genocidal practices (Bosnia style) which are wholly alien to our Community, and especially alien to Barbados which I have proclaimed globally to be a standard bearer of human values within our region. Any ‘slur’ on Barbados was in that editorial; not my repudiation of it,” Sir Shridath stressed.
In concluding, he said that anyone who misunderstood what he said– or did not read what he said- he sincerely hoped that his statement would clarify the matter.
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