Finding cojones at diplomatic missions

THE EDITOR: Incorruptibility aside, the greatest dearth suffered in our country, throughout time, is of cojones.

The ability to stand by your own considered judgment and, without fear, do what must seem correct continues to keep back our country.

A good exercise would be to try and name plenty people you could reasonably suspect of having any and who do not answer to the name of, say, Hector McClean or Karl Hudson-Phillips or Keith Rowley or Reggie Dumas.

In the Dominica OAS vote fiasco, neither the Foreign Minister nor the ambassador has done himself proud. Neither of them, if deserving of his position, enjoys any inalienable right to be robotic. The minister may have felt helpless in the face of some previously settled policy position, and the ambassador may have considered himself bound, even in the teeth of the manifest absurdity of it, and after everybody else had acted sensibly, slavishly to follow Ministry of Foreign Affairs instructions. Could two half-programmed robots have done worse?

Of what I speak I do know a little, having spent two decades in our foreign service. In 1982 (probably between high commissioners), as acting high commissioner in London, I wrote asking Port of Spain to authorise me, if I judged it to be desirable, as head of our delegation to a Commonwealth conference in Tanzania, to withdraw the candidacy of Ulric Cross for the chairmanship of the Commonwealth Foundation.

Despite the great lengths to which I had gone to explain why it could, at the right time, on the ground, prove desirable to withdraw, what I did get, in Tanzania on the morning of the conference, was an instruction to withdraw the candidacy.

Having assessed our chances, with inputs from trusted senior Caribbean colleagues, I ignored instruction. Cross was elected, and no evil befell me.

That was neither the first nor the last time that I adopted that kind of approach. I would rather have lost my job than done otherwise.

HORACE BROOMES, Champs Fleurs