Silly Politics on the CCJ, Part III
September 14, 2003
by Dr Winford James
A letter writer to the Sunday Newsday of August 29, one Stephen Kangal, took me to task over the second part in this series of articles. He saw the piece as being characterised by 'convoluted reasoning' and 'contradictions'. He seized on my description of the establishment of the Caribbean Court of Justice as a West Indian cause to lambaste me for not seeing that the West Indian people were not consulted for their views on the matter and that, therefore, the CCJ could not truly be called a West Indian cause. He mocked at my call for the exercise of independent thought [by the individual members of the opposition in this country] [to enable the legislation that will facilitate the establishment of the court]. And, in a ruthless final paragraph, he dismissed my reference to our being 'ex-slave, ex-indenture societies' as indicating 'a level of anachronistic thought that is fundamental to a genre of misleading and outdated neo-colonialism that no longer impresses anyone.'
Wow! And do you know that I agree with Kangal that our national and regional politics should be far more consultative than it has been traditionally? Do you know that I happen to be an advocate of a regional referendum as the instrument for settling the question of whether we should stay with the Privy Council or replace it with the CCJ?
Kangal's vigorous attack was therefore gratuitous. Indeed, he either missed the point of my piece or else deliberately ignored it.
My point was quite simple, really. I was arguing that, since Panday supported the CCJ when he was prime minister and claimed he still supported it as opposition leader, he should vote for it and not jeopardise a West Indian cause on the opportunistic altar of a local political gain in the form of a concession from Manning on [racial] discrimination. And, in that connection, I was calling on the other opposition parliamentarians to use independent thought to break free from the shackles of sycophancy and vote for the establishment of the court.
If he understood the point - how could he not if he can write such a heavy final paragraph? - he preferred to focus on an apparent peeve of his, the lack of popular consultation in the move to set the court up. And he chose to base his focus, spuriously, I think, on my characterisation of the court as a West Indian cause. He assumed that that description necessarily presumes that there should have been widespread consultation between West Indian governments and their peoples. The assumption is badly flawed and can easily be shown to be so.
There are all kinds of causes in our troubled world and hardly any one of them is the product of popular consultation. Let's pick a few at random. There's the Palestinian cause against Israel. And the Americo-British cause against terror. And the Al Qaida cause against the west. And the Sendero Luminoso cause against the Peruvian government. And the Venezuelan opposition cause against the Chavez government…. They are all causes with highly emotional and committed supporters, but one is not aware that there was a process of consultation that spawned them. Rather, they are the products of deeply held perceptions of injustice, exploitation, discrimination, incivility, intolerance and such states of affairs. The perceptions start with small numbers of persons and spread by osmosis to larger groups of persons who either also shared them or are influenced to share them. The vehicles for the diffusion are social interaction, routine repetition of grievances, sustained agitation in a variety of forms.
In the Caribbean, we have our causes as well, and two of the uncontroversially good ones are the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the West Indies cricket team. We did not establish UWI through a process of popular consultation, but it is a most important cause for us nonetheless since we recognise its pivotal importance to Caribbean social development and international competitiveness. We did not establish the West Indies cricket team by popular consensus, but look how passionately it moves us, how our spirits exult with its triumphs and sag with its defeats.
In Trinidad and Tobago, carnival, chutney, calypso, steelband, and feteing are causes, but they did not emerge out of widespread consultation. They evolved into widespread acceptance.
No, some causes are part of the social inheritance, institutions from a tyrannical past which we accept as being good for us. Some are the creations of a few which capture our love and loyalty. Some are the ideas of elected governments, which are imposed on the multitude via the parliamentary process.
The CCJ is in the last-mentioned category. Our governments are imposing it by virtue of the deceptively autocratic practice of government in the Caribbean, but autocracy does not necessarily mean that an imposition is not a cause. In my social interaction, I find that a majority of persons favour the court, preferring a state of affairs in which we manage our own jurisprudence instead of continuing the inherited dependence on outsiders. Whether our governments impose it or not without consultation, many of us want it.
Finally, Kangal should consider that the Privy Council was an imposition which we came to accept, respect, and even passionately support. So in our governments wanting to change it apart from us, it is not as if they will be changing something that came out of our considered collective thinking. But I could join Kangal in an agitation for a referendum one way or the other.
Part I | Part II | Part III
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