BY TOMORROW, if not this evening, we expect an official statement to be released on the two-day ‘Special Retreat’ of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community that got started yesterday morning in the Mazaruni region,
The two-day event, hosted by Guyana’s Head of State, President Bharrat Jagdeo, resulted from a unanimous decision taken at last February’s Inter-Sessional Meeting of the Community’s leaders in St. George’s, Grenada. It was hosted by Prime Minister Tillman Thomas, current chairman of the 15-member Community.
That meeting had “reaffirmed the commitment” of the Heads of Government to attaining the major goals of the regional integration movement and agreed that the “objectives of the regional agenda should be focused on improving the lives of the people of the Caribbean Community…”
Quite a laudable decision that came with an acknowledgement of their stated awareness that there appeared to be “a loss in momentum with regard to the regional agenda….”
Consequently, the Grenada Inter-Sessional Meeting agreed to accept the invitation from President Jagdeo to host a “Special Retreat” of Heads of Government to “reassess the approaches (being currently pursued) with a view to determining the modalities that would re-energise the regional integration endeavour in accordance with that vision”–(namely, focused on improving the lives of the people of the Community)”.
Surprisingly, a quartet of Heads of Government failed to be present yesterday when the retreat got under way in a closed door session and without the usual fanfare of formal opening speeches and with the media in attendance for such a session.
Absent were the Prime Ministers of Trinidad and Tobago (Kamla Persad-Bissessar) and The Bahamas (Hubert Ingraham) and the Presidents of Haiti (Michel Martelly) and Suriname (Desi Bouterse).
The Surinamese Head of State, we understand, is ill, but is represented by his deputy; and the new Haitian President (Martelly) is still in the process of trying to establish his first cabinet with a Prime Minister he identified just on Friday (business executive, Daniel-Gerard Rouzier).
But the real surprise was to unofficially learn that Trinidad and Tobago was not represented at any level with an unofficial source explaining that the People’s Partnership Government (PPG) of Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar was involved in arrangements this weekend to celebrate its first anniversary in office.
It is to be hoped that the absence of the quartet of Heads of Government would not affect the two-day “Special Retreat” which concludes today, from taking the serious decisions anticipated when the leaders met in Grenada and unanimously settled to adopt “new approaches” to better improve the welfare of the people of our Caribbean Community”.
Would the official statement be cast in the format of a “Mazaruni Declaration” on the way forward for CARICOM?  We shall see.