Dear Editor,
Migration has become one of the greatest challenges for people in search of a better life. It is a serious issue confronting governments and people around the world today. The complexity of illegal migration and the displacement of people have led to human catastrophe and controversy. The plight of refugees fleeing conflict zones ravaged by wars, political injustice, religious beliefs, and natural disasters is the worst humanitarian crisis not seen since the Second World War in 1945.
Hundreds of migrants have died fleeing conflict areas for a better life for themselves and families. Many died at sea trying to reach Europe from Africa. It’s a heartbreaking situation for people wanting to enjoy a better life. Their children are dying from starvation, malnutrition, and diseases. Millions of refugees in Yemen, Syria, and Bangladesh are suffering from hunger and starvation, and desperately in need of help, but no one to the rescue. Many don’t have food to eat, clean water to drink, and money to spend.
World Government has no immediate solution to end the migrant crisis. Many countries are closing their doors to asylum seekers. African migrants are sent back home from some European countries. Migrants are not treated fairly in most countries. Most of the times, they’re look upon as terrorists or runaway slaves. The majority of people from Latin America and the Caribbean are suffering from low wages, slow improvement in the economy, and the national debts of their countries are quite high.
Hundreds of prisoners are deported from the United States resulting in gang violence back home. People are dying as brutal gangs carry out kidnapping and murders. In Honduras 17,000 people decided to walk to the Mexican border trying to reach America, the land of opportunity, a desperate struggle for a better life or death in search of work. Refugees in Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, and Indonesia are homeless, lack of food and money is a global problem facing migrants and refugees today.
The political and economic situation in Venezuela is causing people to flee to Colombia and other Caribbean countries to find employment. The world economy is shrinking, and governments are struggling to help out financially. In order to curb the plight of illegal migration in the region, authorities must try to control free movement of migrants seeking asylum, introduce new legislations to protect their citizens in the job market, grant refugee status to migrants with special education and skills, and give status to those fleeing religious persecution.
Refugees are no longer welcome in some European countries, and must be aware of those establishing laws in parliament to send migrants to criminal islands to be treated like slaves. Migrants fleeing countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are sometimes victims of wars, unfair prosecution, political injustice, terrorism, and natural disasters, hoping to find work, and enjoy a better life. Some of these countries are in ruins, causing people to flee to other countries, creating illegal immigration and constitutional crisis in many countries.
Their children are starving, some suffering from malnutrition, and many children and adults drown at sea. The majority of countries in Latin America have a 25 per cent illiteracy rate, a huge debt ceiling, and high rate of unemployment causing their citizens to migrate elsewhere to find work. While world governments look for solutions! Hope and dreams are high among many in search of a better life, but dreams don’t always come through.
For now, exploitation, deportation, and unfair prosecution are the result in their struggle for a better life.
Joseph Harvey
Dear Editor,
Can our compatriots in the Caribbean Netherlands count on enough and good support from the Netherlands and/or Europe when the Cold War threat starts to escalate?
Since 10-10-’10 the islands of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba form a kind of municipality of the Netherlands called BES. The other islands such as Aruba and Curaçao are separate countries in the kingdom.
As many know, a humanitarian disaster has been going on for years in Venezuela, the country facing the ABC islands. Until recently, this “only” meant that Venezuelan refugees went to the ABC islands. But for some time now, Venezuela has received more and more help and support from mainly Russia and, to a lesser extent, China.
Communist dictator Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela has let himself be installed as leader for a new term on Thursday. In Venezuela there is talk of extreme electoral fraud and residents who for years almost literally die of starvation or a lack of medicines. The stores in Venezuela are almost empty and the items that are for sale have become unaffordable because of the extreme hyperinflation, so only Maduro and his party mates can still pay. It is therefore no wonder that millions of Venezuelans have been fleeing.
The OAS (Organization of American States) has asked Maduro more often to resign and to adjust his policy. Secretary-General Luis Almagro even said in September 2018 that the possibility of military intervention to overthrow Maduro’s regime should not be ruled out. Their large neighbouring South American country Colombia has also requested Maduro to step down.
Meanwhile, Maduro is not going anywhere, and the region is supported by the other communist and economically backward country of Cuba. Maduro also continues to expropriate American oil sources, which has also made the US quite angry. Spain has already voiced its disapproval of Venezuela’s policies, the EU indicated that it disagrees with the re-election of Maduro and last week, Germany did not accept Maduro’s reappointment. So, the tension is high on the edge of our kingdom.
In December two Russian nuclear bombers landed in Venezuela and Maduro agreed that a Russian military base would be established on the Venezuelan island of La Orchilla, 311 km east of Curaçao. The TU-160 Black Jacks nuclear bombers have meanwhile been supplemented with even more aircraft from Russia. Maduro himself visited the Kremlin last week.
Meanwhile, the US is aloud speaking of a new Cold War in their “backyard”, just like the Cuban crisis in 1962. CNN reported extensively about it yesterday.
Meanwhile, I hold my heart and ask the question: “Suppose there is a second Bay of Pigs and the situation escalates militarily, can the inhabitants of the ABC Islands count on support from The Hague and the EU?”
Will be continued without a doubt …
Petra Meese
Dear Editor,
Good morning St. Maarten. I am once again approaching you about an issue I still believe is very important to all of us as a people in which I am challenging all of us to see if we are just people that only complain without seeking a solution for whatever problem or disagreement that we are faced with, or if we are serious about results. I am hereby referring to our 2019 number plates that have been changed from the slogan or trademark of the friendly island which defines all of our people, to 50 years of Carnival which defines some of our people.
I am in no way or form trying to stop Carnival here in St. Maarten, which according to the Minister of Culture is a cultural event and to some the biggest economic contributor to our government coffers. As born-again believers, it is our opinion that the conduct displayed during this festivity is not conducive to our young people and also to the people who profess to be Christians, which is a believer in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
The 2019 number plates are finally here on the island and they will be starting to be distributed on Monday, God's willing. Those persons that have met me on the streets and have called me since this issue came out I would like to thank, but moreover challenge, because if we would like to see a solution to the sudden change of our number plate slogan, which was done without even consulting us as the shareholders or owners of this country St. Maarten, then I believe that we should all be united with this cause. This is about protecting our voice in this country so that future general decisions would not be taken without prior consultation with us, the people of St. Maarten.
On Sunday upcoming at 4:30 pm the government in collaboration with the Christian Council of Churches, the St. Maarten United Ministerial Foundation and the Seven Day Adventist Church will be holding its 14th Annual National Day of Prayer and the entire population is invited to attend. This is in no way meant to force anyone to be present at this event but I am just informing you that if we as a people cannot even come together in prayer to thank God for His grace and mercy, especially for sparing our lives after the two devastating hurricanes, namely Irma and Maria that we experienced in 2017, then how are we supposed to be able to see positive results from our government when they realize that we are just all talk and no action.
In closing, I am saying to all of us and especially to the leaders and members of all the 200 registered churches here on our island to come out in numbers to send a clear message that we are truly united because we all serve one God Who never fails but always has the last word.
The ball is now in your court. Do you want to see a change made to the 2019 slogan that is on your number plate? Then you be that change and come out on Sunday, January 13, at the new Government Building at 4:30 pm to show government that we are UNITED. God bless St. Maarten and see you on Sunday, God's willing.
Jeffrey Richardson
Dear Editor,
Mr. Alexander G. Markovsky’s article “Climate Change – Who Stands to Gain?” in the American Thinker of January 2, 2019, is worthy of some echoing and commentary.
The writer is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research at King’s College, New York City. The crux of his argument is that environmental concerns that had existed in the West for some time were crafted and used in the 1960s by President Charles de Gaulle as a “sinister plot to contain American expansionism.”
He writes: “From de Gaulle to Macron, while the political and economic landscape has changed, this strategy remains assertively consistent. He concludes (I believe correctly) that “fossil fuels (oil in particular) will maintain their economic and strategic importance in the US well into the 21st century.”
The French may have “assumed” the role of the world leaders of the environmental movement in 1968, as Mr. Markovsky informs us, but the beginnings of the movement were much earlier in the USA where the real leadership has remained to this very day. “climate change” and “open borders” are intrinsically linked and firmly rooted in the USA. They have been consistently and, until recently, stealthily financed by successive post-World War II US governments (Reagan’s excluded) via the UN, the EU and various US and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The “climate change” and “open borders” movements are the two giant Siamese squids that President Trump and his administration are now trying to wrestle. Quite a task!
I fault Mr. Markovsky for linking French legislation on nature during the 1960s with President de Gaulle’s so-called obsession with Napoleon; with a supposed “messianic vision of returning France to the status of a great power.” In 1964, as epigraph to the foreword of his landmark book Avant que nature meure (Before Nature Dies), published in 1965, ornithologist Jean Dorst placed a rather long (translated) excerpt of President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources. President de Gaulle enacting French laws to protect “nature” in France in the 1960s was a “sinister plot designed to contain American expansionism;” really?
Historians have seen the documents; today, they know that the French leftists of that era, Maurice Thorez and his Communists, particularly, were taking their marching orders from the Soviets. Informed readers everywhere are now well aware of the putrid political waters President de Gaulle was forced to sail through in post-World War II France – in spite of him being the French hero of the liberation of his country. That he was able to herd those cats, to keep those hyenas (the left and right) at bay while forging a sense of national unity and solidarity to the extent that he did, is testimony to the exceptional individual he was; to the genius of the man and to his love of country – the French nation.
Gratitude for this great patriot, for all he succeeded in doing for France and for the world is vital in the present debate wherein too many elites in the West are undermining so many of the values he championed. Instead of scapegoating him, Mr. Markovsky and others would benefit greatly from studying his relationship with both the “liberal” and the leftist press of that era. They can begin with Alain Peyrefitte’s C’était de Gaulle (That was de Gaulle), 1994-2000. They will discover how the French media of the 1960s were a preview to most of the US media today.
American conservatives – professed patriots – should be unmasking and naming the key authors of a number of nefarious political events in the 1960s and beyond; events such as the Revolution of May 1968 that drove the patriot-warrior-savior-hero of modern France – Father of the Fifth Republic – out of office. He died two years later in 1970. This great man, a French sovereignist before this expression came into being in Quebec; a nationalist and patriot before these words were soiled and tabooed, was a victim of the politics of the rabid extremists of that era and of so-called liberal journalists.
Like Democritus’ atom, utopianism/socialism/communism/leftism is an ideology that never dies, and no one should wish it to disappear completely. Yesterday’s utopists, communists, bolsheviks, Marxists, Leninists, fascists, socialists and other leftists are morphing into today’s “progressives-globalists-socialists”. Like in chemistry, “Nothing is lost, nothing is created: everything is transformed.” The more it changes, the more it is the same old story. “(…) and there is no new thing under the sun.” But we, my reader, my friend, have made it into 2019 and for that we must be grateful. Happy New Year to all!
Gérard M. Hunt
Once again, for this new year, I would like to reaffirm my most fervent commitment to what we hold dear: entrepreneurship in St. Martin. We were able to spend the first year after Hurricane Irma with resilience and faith in our ability to bounce back. 2018 was rich in movements, challenges, difficulties and emotions. We will also be able to approach 2019 with serenity and perseverance, as we continue to build our future, and our success will be collective.
Our Chamber is the link between the reality of our territory and public decision-makers, and it is in this sense that I want to continue to wear the colours of our uniqueness and continue the battles of this new year which will bring, I am sure, its fair share of challenges in the face of the upcoming deadlines. Our Chamber is unique, it is up to us to make it essential!
On the strength of our commitments and convictions, the President, elected representatives and staff of the Chamber extend to you their warmest and most sincere wishes for this new year. For you, for us, for St. Martin. Happy New Year 2019!
President Angèle Dormoy
