(Curaçao Chronicle)

At the time of independence, in 1975, Dutch subjects living in the colony of Suriname were given the choice of Dutch or Surinamese citizenship. Amazingly, 220,000 out of a population of 450,000 left Suriname for the Netherlands – a level of migration that is staggering in size and scope. Many people didn’t have much faith in the economic future of the country.

From the former Dutch Antilles, the “mass” immigration started in 1985 when the big oil refineries on Curaçao and Aruba closed down their operations. Today, many individuals from the Dutch-speaking Caribbean islands of Aruba, Curaçao, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, Saba and Sint Maarten immigrate to the Netherlands to find jobs, complete their education, and lead a better quality of life.

About 28.5 million Latin American and Caribbean people live outside the countries where they were born, 70 per cent of them in the United States, according to a new study by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). People migrate to break the cycle of poverty – generational as well as situational poverty. Of all means to fight poverty, migration has proven to be the most effective.

Cultural heritage and language turn out to be of little consequence in the decision to pack up and leave. Language, held by many as the main reason for a suitable destination, has little impact. It was hilarious to attend a swearing-in ceremony for new US citizens by a Judge, whose spoken English was so bad that nobody understood her: her bailiff had to do the translation.

Cultural heritage once praised as the inalienable value of each individual, turns out to be transportable. After hundreds of years, Dutch immigrants in Pennsylvania may still cling to Sinterklaas, herring and “skutse zeilen,” but they would never consider migrating back to Holland. Hindus in London built their temples, and many never made it back to India in their lifetime. Escaping poverty and creating a better future for your children overrides all arguments of faith and philosophical ideology.

Last year, we witnessed the migration of millions of Middle Easterners, supplemented by millions who were in the waiting rooms of refugee camps in Africa. Recent parliamentary elections in the Netherlands produced a treasure trove of data and analysis. The anti-migration party, PVV, appears to have a staunch support group amongst elderly Surinamers and Antilleans, themselves once immigrants in the ‘70s to ‘90s. Their good luck in their new homeland, Holland, and escape from poverty and tyranny, has not turned them into “selflessness” leaders, concerned for the welfare of others, but rather self-centred opportunists who wish to exclude others from such good fortune.

By Jacob Gelt Dekker

Dear Editor,

“My people, mijn volk, mi pueblo, myn minsken, I have been elected into office to protect our heritage and defend you from them”. Surely this sounds familiar. You have heard it in one or more of the four official political languages of our Kingdom of the Netherlands –English, Dutch, Papiamento, and Frisian. Like it or not, these days heritage is explicitly being wedded to formal politics. As is the case in the four corners of the globe, political elites throughout the Kingdom of the Netherlands are claiming to be the guardians of heritage.

By defending our heritage, elected officials and aspirant ministers and members of parliament bellow in every public presentation that they are supposedly protecting our imperilled way of life, our honour, identity and collective survival. The protection “from whom” (the them) question needs to be preceded by the query of what exactly is our heritage?

If heritage is a name for our collective inheritance, is there such a thing as a Kingdom heritage? Or is it wiser to be precise and namely ask, for instance, what is the heritage of Sint Maarten? Or should the question be St. Martin heritage as a Caribbean expression (given that the island consists of a Northern/ French and Southern/Dutch side in the sea of isles where the Gulf Stream originates)? And extrapolating should questioning the heritage of the Netherlands not also be about Europe, since that is where that constituent state is located?

Alternatively given that all constituent states in the Kingdom are ethnically diverse – you encounter expressions and ideas you can also come across in Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Saint Kitts & Nevis, Saint Vincent, Grenada, Venezuela, Colombia, Germany, Belgium, Turkey, Morocco, Canada, the United States of America, France, Poland, Hungary, India, Israel, Lebanon, China, Somalia, Nigeria, Ghana, etc., here. And heritage is not the same thing as exclusivist nationalism, should we not also critically cherish the multiple heritages of the old- and newcomers that inhabit our trans-Atlantic federation?

Most political leaders in office will disagree. The flavour seems to be one of favouring the narrowest definition of heritage. Understandable, given that all formal politics is local. If you are elected on Sint Maarten or say the Netherlands, it is from the electorate of these specific constituent states that you receive your vote of confidence or non-confidence. It is a public secret that in all parts of the Kingdom many are hurting economically. Many are uneasy with the emerging multicultural realities, and as a result, many are weary about the future.

Can those who aspire or crave political power ignore this? The opportunist air that Trump, Orbán, Erdoğan, and Le Pen breathe is not so different from that which our main political leaders inhale and exhale.

When times are hard and austerity is the name of the game, a scapegoat needs to be found. Whether it be the political leaders of another constituent state within the Kingdom that are accused of being neo-colonial or kleptocrats, newcomers that are supposedly taking all the jobs and eroding the moral fabric of society, or fellow Dutch citizens who migrated from another part of the federation that are labelled racists or lazy, someone else is blamed for the state not fulfilling its obligation to redistribute. A “they” supposedly stealing our heritage is always assigned to blind the symbolic or demographic majority within the particular constituent states of our Kingdom.

The counter-remedy ought to be a refusal to scapegoat by radically uncoupling heritage from exclusive nationalism. The admittedly imperfect creed that markets distribute while states ideally redistribute ought to be common consciousness throughout the Kingdom. This article of faith ought to be understood as the reason for the existence of government in liberal democracies such as ours. The redistributive function of the state is to enable the working poor and their offspring to improve their economic situation, minimize inequalities between classes, and encourage public debates and programmes that hopefully lead to more acceptance of diverse ways of living.  

If what you have read makes some sense to you, should we not summon our elected representatives throughout the Kingdom of the Netherlands to be defenders of our socio-economic, civil, and human rights? Isn’t this the common heritage that we should cherish most in these trying times?            

Dr. Francio Guadeloupe

President of University of St. Martin

In Saint Martin we forever whining

On the French side we wine n dine

For Carnival Dutch side we jump

And wine

And every other day

We whine

Not working

We whining

No money fo shopping

We whining

We ain’t voting

But we whining

And we whining whining

When we don’t wine n

dine

We jumping

And wynning

And when we done

We pick up we problems

And go back te we

Daily whining

And when we ain’t have

No wine

Tiz only then we whining

For we Saint Martiners

Are just a set ah

Whiners

We wine n

Dine

And still whining

All the time

Raymond Helligar aka “Big Ray”

Dear Editor,

As a long-time timeshare owner (R.I. - 1985) on this beautiful island I have long been aware of the troubles that many of us have had with their ownership teams exceeding the terms of the contracts that owners have agreed to (Not mine!). These usually result in excessive fees tacked on to the annual maintenance fees payable by owners to resorts that have clearly not used the monies received in the proper way.

With timeshare resorts going through ownership changes in order to stay in business, and at the same time failing to perform ‘promised’ maintenance with the fees that owners are contractually obligated to pay, it is the corporate ownership of these businesses that needs to be monitored and controlled with proper ‘timeshare’ legislation. Perhaps the bill(s) pending before the Government right now need to be re-titled as the ‘Contract Authority’ to manage these companies’ failures to abide by the agreements that they enter into with their unsuspecting clients.

To put the burden of the cost of government enforcement upon the people who have chosen to purchase a ‘piece of paradise’ with their timeshare investment is a warped view of what needs to be done. We ‘owners’ have bought into the timeshare experience and have faithfully paid our agreed-upon fees and thus have the right to expect all terms to be followed by the corporations that have taken our monies. This is the problem with timeshare-living in SXM now. The task for the government is to manage the outrageous behaviour of the resort owners, not the thousands of tourist-owners who have lived up to their part without costing the government anything. Incidentally, timeshare owners have also paid their government taxes each year and perhaps this should be seen as having already paid for the upcoming legislation many times over.

I urge the elected officials who will be enacting this legislation to think about what the ‘timeshare legislation’ needs to accomplish. Is it to impose further insult to the past and future guaranteed tourist visitors that the timeshare industry brings to the island, or is it to monitor and ensure that those same tourists are not taken advantage of when they make their investments in St. Maarten?

Jim Giner

Voorheesville, New York