Ramphal rejects claims

FORMER Commonwealth Secretary General Sir Shridath Ramphal has rejected claims that he linked Barbados' immigration policy to 'ethnic cleansing'.

"I very much regret the misleading information that has wrongly attributed remarks to me about 'ethnic cleansing' in Barbados," he said in a statement issued yesterday.

"I make it absolutely clear that I never made even an insinuation about this in relation to Barbados, or any other country in the Caribbean."

'Ethnic cleansing' is the persecution through imprisonment, expulsion, or killing of members of an ethnic minority by a majority.

Sir Shridath's dismissal of the charge came about two months after Guyana's Stabroek News published a report about an address in which the term was used.

The comments triggered condemnation by several Caribbean academics, and last Sunday, Prime Minister David Thompson complained about "the refusal by (someone) who should know much better to publicly acknowledge the inappropriateness of the allegation of ethnic cleansing".

Sir Shridath said he had referred to 'ethnic cleansing' but people misinterpreted his comment.

"The only reference I made to the notion of 'ethnic cleansing' was in a speech on 25th June to a meeting organised by the Caribbean Court of Justice in Trinidad. "In doing so, I was criticising an editorial in a regional newspaper for intimating such a notion and I was making the very specific point that no Caribbean leader would countenance it.

"My remark was the very antithesis of the connotation that has been put on it."

According to him, what he actually said at the meeting was: "It is always a sadness when, however propelled, our societies are caught in a downward spiral of separateness with fellow West Indians cast as outsiders; those times when, as Annalee Davis (the Barbadian researcher) has described them, we become 'locked into nationalist crevices . . . and exclusivist cultural legitimacy'.

"We are at such a time, and both policies and practices are deepening Caribbean divides.

"'The knock on the door at night' is not within our regional culture; still less are intimations of 'ethnic cleansing'.

"No Caribbean leader would countenance such departures from our norms and values."

Sir Shridath stressed that he did not allude to genocidal practices Bosnia-style, "which are wholly alien to our Community, and especially alien to Barbados, which I have proclaimed globally to be a standard-bearer of human values within our region". (TY)