No replies to this topic

[belizeculture]

The Dassault Falcon 7X carrying British billionaire Lord Ashcroft had not landed on Belizean soil for a full three years, and with good reason. His million dollar campaign contribution in 2008 to the then opposition United Democratic Party had helped to make Dean Barrow prime minister of Belize, the small, impoverished Central American nation of which Ashcroft had once said, “if home is where the heart is then Belize is my home”. But by 2009, Mr. Barrow had declared Lord Ashcroft – who had once served as Belize’s UN ambassador and been nominated by the Government of Belize for a knighthood – public enemy number one and a “new age colonial master”.

Mr. Barrow nationalized the highly profitable phone company once associated with Lord Ashcroft, enacted ad hominem legislation with stiff jail sentences for anyone seeking to arbitrate against the Belize government anywhere in the world and launched a sustained public relations campaign characterizing Ashcroft, Lord of Chichester, as the enemy of the Belizean people.

It was a risky, reckless move for a country dependent on foreign direct investment and highly vulnerable to external shocks. But Mr. Barrow gambled and rolled the dice, calculating that, if nothing else, expropriation of public utilities would ignite nationalistic fervor and secure his legacy as the great restorer of Belizean pride, dignity and nationalism. In much the same way that George W. Bush framed his presidency with the war on Iraq, so too, Mr. Barrow hinged his first term squarely on the partisan war against the so-called Ashcroft Alliance. Making his rounds on the local radio stations following the taking of the phone company, he declared that if the alliance wanted a war they should “bring it on”.

The alliance did bring it on: in wave after wave of unending litigation across three continents, in theatres of war that included Belize courts, US courts, British courts and international arbitration tribunals. Every ruling was appealed and every piece of legislation challenged. Mr. Barrow resolved that it was not a war he was going to lose; he certainly seemed prepared to do anything to avoid at all costs the political embarrassment of defeat.

When the Belize Court of Appeal, in June of 2011, reversed the high court and ruled that the government had in fact unconstitutionally nationalized the phone company, Mr. Barrow initially accepted the court ruling but later that same night, under pressure from party hardliners, he re-seized the company with the aid of state security forces and then enacted highly controversial constitutional amendments in an attempt to neutralize and nullify the court of appeal judgment. The Jamaica Gleaner newspaper warned that the prime minister was placing Belize on a slippery slope.

It should have been obvious from the start that it was foolish to commit the sparse resources of a tiny country to an expensive litigation war with no end in sight. Flashpoint had cautioned in its December 9th 2009 instalment that : “In protracted battles in which opponents are roughly evenly matched, a truce is sometimes declared to save money, time and resources, the initial fit of egotistical pique that precipitated the battle having succumbed to the reality of the pointlessness of it.”

The government and the alliance could be considered roughly evenly matched, except that one was using taxpayer’s money in an unproductive, unbudgeted enterprise for which the approval of the people had never been sought; the other was using private resources. But Mr. Barrow ploughed on, inflated by his perception of widespread support from the people for his patriotic defence of them. He ignored the warnings that foreign direct investment was dangerously plummeting, the Belizean economy stagnating and that business houses everywhere were complaining bitterly. Meanwhile, spiraling violent crime was getting Belize free international recognition as the fifth most dangerous country on the planet and dead bodies of feuding inner city youth were piling up in the streets of south side Belize.

Mr. Barrow called national elections a year before they were due, to get, he said, a mandate from the people to continue his defence of the country’s patrimony against the predatory alliance. The government was confident of a huge victory to the point of being complacent; their analysts were predicting that the party would capture even more parliamentary seats.

Mr. Barrow barely managed to hang on to the reins of government. In fact, but for the ignoble, treacherous resignation by two opposition safe-seat parliamentarians two weeks before the election, the government would have lost. Having captured 25 of 31 seats and by staggering margins just four years earlier, to have won by the skin of its teeth, aided by treachery, could hardly be considered a mandate or a vote of confidence. A 66 vote difference kept Mr. Barrow’s government in power. One of the PUP deserters re-emerged as a high-flying ambassador and economic advisor; the other was offered a high-profile diplomatic post in New York.

It was predictable then that rapprochement would be sought, and fittingly too, in the Colonial Garden of the Radisson Hotel. The stage used to signal to the public the commencement of negotiations between the government and the alliance was the Belize Bank’s 25th anniversary celebration. In a carefully worded 15 minute key note address confined to the context of the Central Bank of Belize’s ongoing dispute with the Belize Bank, Prime Minister Barrow declared that the time had come to choose cooperation over confrontation. He extended the olive branch to the Belize Bank; one cynical guest muttered wittily that an olive tree would have been more appropriate. The Belize Bank chairman, Lyndon Guiseppi, accepted the peace offering and pledged to work with the government while Lord Ashcroft stood listening among the audience like just another invited guest. Noticeably absent were the Governor of the central bank and those two beneficiaries of Ashcroft generosity in former times, Ministers Michael Finnegan and Boots Martinez.

The road to a full and final settlement of outstanding issues between the alliance and the Government of Belize will be difficult and tricky to navigate, requiring large doses of compromise on both sides. Mr. Barrow will be beset by hardliners in his party who view any compromise as capitulation to foreign interests. The opposition will naturally prefer if the hostilities continue to keep the government distracted (as it has been for the past four years) from the critical issues of crime, employment and economic growth. But Belizeans should support the process. Unless and until a settlement is found, Belize will continue to slip further into the economic hole it has dug for itself; the country will be consigned to another decade of stagnation while politicians desperately divert taxpayers’ money away from stimulating investment and economic growth and sink it into unsustainable programmes to keep the unproductive pacified and the steadily advancing criminals at bay.

-- Godfrey Smith