Why declare Caribbean a zone of peace

Network of NGOs for the Advancement of Women

"COME GET me, come get me, please mama," the child called. His mother found him on the ground, his leg and arm blown off. He died by the time she got him to hospital. This is why we call for the Caribbean to be recognised as a zone of peace. We don’t want war. We do not want drones whizzing over the heads of our children.

No deal that can be offered to get our economy out of its present crisis can be worth living in a war zone. If that is the bargaining chip, we will take peace. We don’t want to be in a place where lives are worthless and blind killing machines are turned loose overhead. We have seen enough of such action broadcast live from Gaza.

The Network of NGOs for the Advancement of Women is convinced that the impact of war is gravest to women and children. News out of Haiti, reported by The Associated Press on September 24, noted that explosive drones targeting a suspected gang leader killed at least eight children inside Cité Soleil, just outside of Haiti's capital, and seriously wounded six others. Relatives and activists blamed the police for the attack.

Haiti's National Human Rights Defense Network accused police of launching two exploding drones in the Simon Pelé community of Cité Soleil as suspected gang leader Albert Steevenson, known as Djouma, prepared to celebrate his birthday. He remains unharmed.

Are we really in support of the US/Panama-led initiative to create a gang suppression force to combat criminal gangs in Haiti? A force that is charged with “securing territory,” meaning occupy Haiti? Have we not stomached enough of occupation and seen enough of what occupation has made of Gaza? There must be greater efforts at negotiation and social transformation.

Every time our political leadership defines our country in terms of “gangs” and “narco-terrorists,” do they think that they are putting fear into our population, and somehow this fear will lead them to support any erosion of citizens' rights? What is really happening? We are endangering our population, from the reckless war machinery of Western powers and exposing our children to the fate of those children in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Haiti.

The US military presence in the region, acting to combat narco-trafficking, has not had a good record. By their own estimates, the war on drugs in Colombia resulted in the deaths of 220,000 people between 1958 and 2013. Some 80 per cent or 177,307 of them were civilians. This effort resulted in the world’s second largest population of internally displaced people when more than five million civilians in Colombia were forced from their homes within the same period.

In 1985, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who was an American intelligence operative, offered to help the US by allowing Panama as a staging ground for operations against the FSLN (the Sandinista National Liberation Front) and offered to train Contras (those fighting against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua) in Panama.

Eventually, US co-intel-pro documents would expose how drugs, guns and money, zigzagged across continents, ending with drugs in African American communities used to destabilise the civil rights movement and American guns in Iran. Where did Noriega end up? Charged and convicted for drug smuggling and money laundering in an American jail. The whole ugly affair did not end well.

And somehow we are willing to go back to square one.

The Network of Non-Governmental Organisations of TT for the Advancement of Women calls on all responsible parties and sensible right-thinking women and men to stop this mindless drift towards war and violence. It is important for every citizen to be engaged at this time. There is still room for negotiations and diplomacy. We warn that those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Let this region be a zone of peace.