KINGSTON, Jamaica, Oct 24, CMC -Ten former Caribbean Community (CARICOM)leaders have reiterated the need for the Caribbean to be maintained as a zone of peace, saying that they are impelled to urge a pull back from military build up to avoid ‘any dimunition of peace, stability and development within our regional space that has the potential to pull the region into conflicts which are not of our making’.
The leaders, including the former Jamaica prime ministers, P.J. Patterson and Bruce Golding, as well as former Guyana president Donald Ramotar, said in a joint statement that when Caribbean Leaders had gathered at Chaguaramas in 1972, with the then Trinidad and Tobago prime minister Dr. Eric Williams as the chairman, ‘it was accepted that peace was a dominant factor in shaping the social and political framework for Caribbean development.
‘As a result, the ‘zone of peace’ has been codified and become a cornerstone in the architecture of our Caribbean sovereignty and the axis for our relationship with the countries of our Hemisphere, Europe and the world at large.’
The other former leaders who have signed the statement are Baldwin Spencer of Antigua and Barbuda, Said Musa and Dean Barrow of Belize; Freundel Stuart of Barbados, Edison James of Dominica, and Tilman Thomas of Grenada.
Former Trinidad and Tobago prime minister, Dr. Keith Rowley in a Facebook message supporting the statement, noted that on his 76th birthday ‘ I find it necessary and dutiful to sign on to this historic statement of former heads of CARICOM.