Haiti row
Caricom/US meetings called off
Stabroek News
April 28, 2004
The meetings between Caricom and US administration officials tomorrow in St Vincent and on Monday in The Bahamas are off.
Caricom Secretary General Edwin Carrington told Stabroek News last night that the meeting of the Joint Committee on Development, Finance and the Environment to be held in St Vincent tomorrow was called off by mutual consent after the US administration had requested significant changes to the agenda.
Carrington added that the community's Council on Human and Social Development has a very important meeting which starts today in Tobago and so the timing of the St Vincent meeting was unfortunate.
Carrington said the Bahamas meeting set for Monday has also been re-scheduled because of the unresolved positions of Caricom and the US administration on Haiti's presence at the meeting. Unlike the St Vincent meeting which was a gathering of Caribbean officials, Monday's meeting would have involved Trinidad and Tobago's Prime Minister Patrick Manning leading the community's delegation of National Security Ministers for discussions with the US Secretary for Homeland Security, Tom Ridge.
The US has been reportedly lobbying Caricom governments to have the interim administration of Haiti invited to the meeting in the face of the Caricom decision at its St Kitts Intersessional that Haiti's participation in its councils would be dealt with at annual heads of government conference in July. This was reaffirmed by the community's Council on Foreign Relations at its meeting in Barbados.