By Alex Rosaria
The three-finger salute has become the protest sign of the Burmese.
“It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it..” – Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991 when she accepted the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, 1991.
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was then under house arrest by the Burmese military. In 2015 she came to power as the de facto leader of Myanmar. (The military changed the constitution making it impossible for someone married to a foreigner to run for office. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is married to an Englishman).
A few days ago the military once again took control over the country and arrested Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi. The general consensus is that the power grab was because the military were afraid of losing power. Fact is, however, that the military never lost power under Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s rule. Fact is also that this time she cannot count on the support of the Burmese and certainly not on the international community that rewarded her braveness as a fighter for the powerless in the ’90s with a Nobel Peace Prize.
Her demise was letting a slaughter against the powerless Muslim Rohingya minority take place in her country as I wrote earlier, after a visit to Myanmar in 2016. In 2019 she faced charges for genocide in the International Court of Justice, but to the dismay of many framed the Rohingya as terrorists fighting the military. Many past Nobel Laureates called for her Nobel Prize to be revoked.
Apparently Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was also afraid of losing power and didn’t want to upset the military establishment by recognizing the plight of the Rohingya.
It is unclear what will happen next. The UN Security Council doesn’t have China on board to pass a resolution condemning the military actions. Also, the West doesn’t have much leverage with the Burmese military which it has always punished. Piling up sanctions will mostly hit the people of Myanmar and not the military.
I think that this shows that diplomatic relations should be based on skillful tactics and not merely on penalizing and isolating regimes that are not deemed friendly. Hopefully the Association of Southeastern Asia (ASEAN), which Myanmar belongs to, can quietly engage with the military without much unnecessary meddling by Washington and Brussels.
~ Alex David Rosaria (53) is a freelance consultant active in Asia and the Pacific. He is a former Member of Parliament, Minister of Economic Affairs, State Secretary of Finance and UN Implementation Officer in Africa and Central America. He is from Curaçao and has an MBA from University of Iowa (USA). ~
Dear Editor,
A month or so ago, I said farewell to you and to the readers of The Daily Herald, a decision that I still stand by, but please allow me here, one last time, to express my nostalgia and my grief in memory and in praise of a dear old departed friend, the late Roger (Roro) Petit. For the last three years or more, ill health, hurricanes, the pandemic and other storms of life had forced Roger to relinquish his outings: his boating and fishing. I presume that he was hoping, waiting for better weather to come his way when he could get back out to sea the way he used to do, some years earlier, before the ongoing calamities, the debilitating storms began.
The old seaman may have grown tired of waiting for the storms to lift, for the bad weather to go away. On January 25, 2021, he left all of his fishing gear at home: his rods, his reels, all of his lures and, very out of character for him – all alone – he headed out and away from everyone and everything; away from all of us who already miss him; all of us who loved him. He cast off and headed straight into the sunset. But if we cannot find him there, we can search for him elsewhere; he may be down by the old sandbox tree on that tiny beach over the retaining wall in front of his grandfather’s shop (later La Vie en Rose); there, or maybe mid-way down the wharf, or at the very end of it where the water is deeper, the fishing is better and there are steps going down to the sea.
Roger was not one of the “Boys from the Sand”, he was not from Sandy Ground; Roro was from Marigot and, every school day, he was driven (with others) to his classes in Great Bay. More to the point, Roro resided on the wharf, in Marigot; that is where he lived, not at his grandfather’s or at Mr. Luke Peterson’s next door. He lived on the wharf and on that tiny beach, the sand of which used to come and go with the tides. The beach is still there, I guess, trapped underneath the parking area and online, there forever for viewing at the “Museum van Wereldculturen” in the Netherlands. Last night, in my grief, going back in thoughts, I tried to imagine Roro on the beach in that Boy Lawson (1964) black and white photograph “Straatbeeld van Marigot”. The color version of the photo is sharper; the image is clearer, more detailed, but only a bit less depressing and drab looking.
Roro is nowhere to be seen, of course, in that sad, that somber snapshot that looks like it was taken after a hurricane. But how could that be when the leaves of the sandbox tree are so plentiful, the foliage so dense? This picture must have been taken following a powerful “ground-sea”. In November 1964, wherever he was, Roger would have turned 17, and, by then, he would have changed residence; he would have moved indoors – off of his beach and his wharf. That year or shortly thereafter he would leave to study in Holland with friends and schoolmates; if I am not mistaken, with Henri Brookson, Josianne Artsen, and a few others. Three years later (in 1967) he was there when Leonard Cohen released his first album with his hit song, “So Long, Marianne”; Roger told me how much he loved it when it was released and he first heard it in Holland.
Back in the late ’50s and the very early ’60s, before I went abroad and Roro left for Holland, when he was not in school, morning, afternoon and, sometimes, in the early evening, he was on his wharf or on his beach with his fishing cane, the only person we knew back then who fished with a cane! He was a master at catching little “silver fishes” he would give away to others who used them for bait. Roro and I were not close back then: he was not from “the Sand,” and he was my junior; I was a big boy: our three-year difference mattered! But I remember him lecturing me and others at length on fishing and other things having to do with the sea. Roro had a master tutor: his grandfather.
Later, in Holland, Roger studied economics and history, two subjects that, along with politics, never ceased to interest him; he was an avid reader of books and of a number of magazines. Roger was a gifted teacher; he could have been a great university lecturer.
When we met up again back in the early ’80s and got closer, our three-year difference no longer mattered. Roger was then a young businessman involved in the then-booming restaurant business on both sides of the island with his older brother Ray whom he worshipped, to whom he looked up with the greatest of deference, modesty, discretion and of brotherly love. It was a relationship that has always struck me as special, exemplary. Roro had moved on, long ago, from his fishing cane; from those “redmen,” (squirrel fishes), and the “silver fishes'' to angling for marlins, tunas, and swordfishes among other game fish. Sometimes, when I watched Roro wrestling some of those monsters, I would remember him standing on the wharf, casting the line on that strange fishing cane of his.
With much discretion, Roro Petit was always ready to assist his friends and others; he was a judicious and most important contributor to the development of the Saint Martin community; he was a behind-the-scenes key person in almost everything of importance that came to fruition, to actualization in his community over 45 years or more. Some of Roger’s actions or of his words may have hurt or offended some folks; he was not without reproach. He was like most of us, and maybe much less blameworthy than many of us. Who will cast the first stone? Who among us is blameless?
My friend Roger was a sensitive man, a caring person; some years ago, I saw him weep like a child while telling me how the young son of our friend, Dr. F. Anaïs had taken ill suddenly and died. Roger was a loving, caring father to his daughter Tamara and to his son Stephan; he was a dedicated companion to Robin and Marjolein. He was also a doting grandfather to Lyla and Luke; I extend my heartfelt condolences to Marjolein, Stephan and Tamara, to Ray, Robé, Patrick, and Caroline; to Robin and Chemaine; to all of Roger’s cousins (too many to list here) and to all of his many friends in Saint Martin and abroad. I deeply regret not being able to be present to pay my respects at the Funeral Home in Galisbay.
I must end this long “remembering” of mine; I return, online, to Boy Lawson’s “Straatbeeld van Marigot” (1964) photograph now, seemingly a “Cultural Treasure”, and I persist. I concentrate on the image; I try to find Roro in the picture; I am sure that he is there, somewhere. Now the scene is animated, the day is bright and promising; white clouds in a blue sky with green hills in the background. Folks are milling around on the wharf and assembling in the shade of the sandbox tree. I gaze beyond the green vehicle and the man standing by it, beyond the ribbed bars and the rusty oil barrels; I survey the scene. Roro is nowhere to be seen, he is not there, he is nowhere anymore, except in our thoughts. In my “remembering”, Roro is standing on the wharf; he has cast his line, he is looking towards the Bluff, waiting for a bite. He is waiting there for us.
Gérard M. Hunt
Dear Editor,
When the Netherlands joined the United Nations in 1945, it committed itself to two fundamental obligations as far as St. Maarten is concerned. The first was to fulfill in “good faith” its obligations under the United Nations (“present”) Charter and the second was to ensure a “full measure of self-government” for St. Maarten.
The idea behind the “full measure of self-government” was to ensure that European colonial powers no longer exercised control over colonized peoples. The United States and Russia had just defeated Nazism in Europe. Just as the United States and Russia had helped to free Europe from Nazi domination, both nations were demanding that European colonial states free their colonial peoples from foreign domination. That was the basis behind the concept of a “full measure of self-government” or decolonization if you will. The Netherlands signed onto the UN Charter and ratified it. Therefore, it is bound to comply with its obligations under the “present charter”.
The Kingdom of the Netherlands and the “putative” (that which appears lawful, but in fact is not) Kingdom Charter was met with much skepticism by the UN General Assembly in 1955. The members pointed out that a governor, as well as Articles 44, 50, and 51 of the Kingdom Charter were incompatible with a “full measure of self-government”. The members consequently refused to acknowledge the “Kingdom of the Netherlands” and instead addressed Resolution 945X of December 1955 to the “Government of the Netherlands”. They furthermore rejected the Kingdom Charter, and for the first time included two amendments in Resolution 945X stating that it did not grant the peoples of the Netherlands Antilles a full measure of self-government.
The Kingdom Charter, COHO [Caribbean Reform Body – Ed.], and the CFT [Committee for Financial Supervision] agreements are of the same legal character as an employment contract in which the employee “out of free will” agrees to work for less than minimum wage. We know those types of contracts well on St. Maarten. What the Netherlands is attempting with the Kingdom Charter, COHO and the CFT was, and is, to cheat St. Maarten out of its full measure of self-government. (The UN wisely saw through that move with the Kingdom Charter in 1955.)
The fundamental problem with the Kingdom Charter is that it stands in direct contradiction to the UN Charter. Once the full measure of self-government has been achieved, there is simply no role for the Netherlands, which includes the CFT and COHO, to play in these parts any longer. In 1945, the Netherlands signed onto the UN Charter and ratified it. Therefore, it is bound to comply with its obligations under the “present charter”. Simply put, there is no lawful role for neither the Kingdom government nor the CFT on St. Maarten.
Pro Soualiga Foundation
My people,
The script was very familiar on Wednesday evening when I was the only Member of Parliament who voted against cutting your benefits and in some cases salaries.
I have asked over 100 questions about these cuts to civil servant benefits and in some cases salaries. I have gotten carefully worded non-answers which clearly show that these decisions were not based on any tangible studies, reports, union involvement, nothing. While other MPs were satisfied to vote for cuts based on very little and with no information about when your rights will be restored to you, I simply could not. We have seen too many “temporary” measures on St. Maarten become permanent.
Even with that truth in mind, the Prime Minister stood up in Parliament and questioned on which side of history we will stand.
History will show that I am not afraid to stand alone while fighting for my people. I could never in good conscience support making people’s lives more difficult by passing laws that do exactly that. Political opponents can call me what they want, but the people of St. Maarten know where I stand. I cannot in good conscience vote to infringe on people’s rights, salaries and benefits knowing that there is no substantiation for these cuts, financial or otherwise, other than the Dutch say so. No matter how you fluff it up, no matter what amendments you add, it all boils down to cutting what people have worked hard for and infringing on their basic human rights.
Some have been quick to publicly dismiss my warnings and concerns. Every single thing that I have raised a red flag about since November 2020 is now coming to pass. And no-one can say or point out otherwise.
This notion that they keep pushing that “base salaries will not be touched” is what you call a shallow lie. Shallow because they refuse to delve deeper.
Dr. Martin Luther King said there is nothing more dangerous than willful ignorance and conscientious stupidity. People planned around their increments, bonuses and other benefits. When you do not have these things, you have to turn to that same base salary that they keep boasting will not be touched, to now choose which obligation you will pay. So, the NAf. 300 you planned for now has to come out of a base salary that is already committed to other obligation. So, the base salary is being touched, not by their hand directly, but by their actions nonetheless.
And it will not end with these three laws. These laws are just the beginning of much bigger issues for this country and its people, neatly wrapped up in the COHO [Caribbean Reform – Ed.] entity and the country packages. Here too I have been asking questions and raising the alarm for months. And here too you should not expect to hear the truth from this government. What you will probably hear is a concerted effort to manipulate the world to make it give them what they want, not tell you what really is. This government has proven that they are incapable of pursuing what is meaningful and right for its people. They rather choose what is expedient and flawed, and never speak the truth.
They will make it sound like the choice before them was not a simple one among many, that it was the only one. They will try and make you believe that they could not find the same equivalent of government waste to cut. Ask the government what operational costs they cut and they will tell you gasoline and telephones. Then turn and boast that they were creative.
In the meantime, they have made cutting benefits sound like no big thing. As if single mothers weren’t depending on a bonus, or families don’t depend on vacation pay not to go on vacation, but to pay house insurance. As if all the years you have worked to secure a little extra to try and live a decent quality of life can be just tossed out and tossed up as a win. But they live more comfortably than most of you.
The other dimension to this argument should be looked at through the prism of fairness. The government will impose upon its people measures that their counterparts in the Netherlands will not be subjected to. It goes against the very spirit of UN conventions and is not equal or fair.
They will never tell you that to date they do not have an economic recovery plan. To date! A full year into the pandemic and this government does not have a plan. They have failed in their responsibility to provide a level of stability and creativity that can form the bedrock of an economic recovery. In fact, key to that is maintaining demand in the economy, especially as the recovery of key sectors such as hospitality and tourism will be driven by consumer spending in 2021. That is why the decision to freeze or cut salaries and benefits is just a poor decision for our economy.
We need our people participating in the economy and they simply won’t if they are worrying about their income falling behind or if they just don’t have that income at all.
The same goes for the proposed additional taxes that the CFT want to see levied on St. Maarten. I can’t wait to get to that discussion to see the so-called conscience of some be put to the test after cutting people, then looking to impose more taxes on them. It is an economically illiterate step that will harm the private sector as well as the public sector.
Anyone watching the debate on Tuesday would have seen quite a show on the floor of Parliament. You would think that we were achieving something great with all the sarcastic tones, campaign speeches, gleefully making statements as if we just struck gold. Giggling and laughing and being sarcastic while putting more financial strain on their people. They seemed so proud of themselves that they were making political headway among themselves, totally oblivious to the people of St. Maarten who do not live as comfortably as they do.
And then the Prime Minister pontificated about the careful use of words. That’s funny. You see, I love words and how they are applied. But all my life I have sought to use words to tell the truth. Even more so as I sought public office. Words do indeed have power, words are power, words could be your power.
Words can be a destructive tool for anyone who wants to add an emotional twist to a blatant lie. Words can be a weapon used by someone who without reservation can tell their people to eat crumbs while they eat caviar. Yes, words. You can compile a lot of words in your attempt to answer questions hoping that these words would hide your negligence. But you are effectively saying nothing while exposing your truths to be lies.
With words, truthful, honest words, you can change a life and you can inspire your nation. Unfortunately the words we have heard from this government and its support in Parliament have changed lives for the worse and have depressed a nation, not inspired it. I will continue to fight for you and the people of St. Maarten as long as God gives me the strength to do so. God bless you and your families.
MP Christophe Emmanuel
Dear Editor,
An inventory of the eclectic tastes of the lives of those whose minds were cultivated to delight in the pleasures of higher mental operations such as the sciences, art and ideological activities will certainly reveal a stark contrast when compared with the tastes of a life and mind left largely undeveloped, unschooled and suited for mere manual labour. The cultured class with their refined sensibilities and air of urbaneness derives pleasures from their mode of being that are qualitatively superior and healthier to those of a lower class, whose agreeable pursuits, it seems, revolve around a perpetual state of instinctual satisfaction.
The sublime or the elevated human, a polished end product of culture and breeding, acquires his nourishment for body and mind from sources far removed from the reaches of man the animal. Give man the animal or the organism his daily recommended dosages of calories or more, strenuous physical work, and an abundance of opportunities for disposing of libido concentrated in his genitals and he would be forever grateful to you for prolonging his much loved mechanical state of existence. In biblical parlance man the animal wants bread alone.
But his counterpart, the exalted superorganic creature whose needs and recurring discontents sustains his quest for higher and nobler things, wants culture; his renunciation of a life governed purely by the instincts now puts at his disposal reserves of instinctual energies dedicated and in service for creating new worlds and elaborate modes of gratification. The high-brow man has resolved to labour mentally to discover his nature and the life proper to his kind. Man the human doesn’t want to go back to the woods once he has tasted culture, he resents that primal appeal we all share and which threatens to relegate him back to the animal kingdom just as an indifferent member.
Sublimated man needs to derive pleasures not just from the erogenous zones of his body filled with erotic potentialities, he also requires constant cognitive stimulation. He wants to excite his imagination and rarefied senses, he desires a life of the mind, to apprehend its role in existence and longs for the pleasures of cognized events, he wants to discover truths that once resided in the hearts and minds of poets, philosophers, musicians and painters. And for this he must engage the likes of Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach and their peers, and whenever so desirous of reaching even higher emotional states he must inevitably reach for the champion Wagner.
Discovering the subliminal messages and truths embedded in the androgynous nature of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa riddled with symbols of the sexual completeness and nature of man as both masculine and feminine must tickle his fancy. Urbane man must be so constituted that he finds sensual the cubist form of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques, with its characteristic multi-perspectival style. Piet Mondrian stand-alone forms and the artistic goals of the other abstract expressionist painters he ought to find interesting too.
The poets who are the heirs to the mystical tradition must rile and soothe his emotions, the poets who anticipated Freud in discovering the unconscious were revealing truths and ideas to man long before Freud discovered a scientific method (psychoanalysis) for making our unconscious purposes and ideas conscious. Debonair man should be equipped to savour the poetic sweetness of a Rilke's, “unlived lines of the body”. Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum) must salivate his existential angst. And whenever Karl Marx’s Marxism is unceremoniously introduced as a potential conversational piece, the cultured man by now intoxicated from his repository of luxurious pleasures would have been impatient to explain why Marx said philosophers up until Hegel have merely interpreted the world, what is needed now is action. The preceding an obvious precursor to Marx’s revolutionary fervour.
Pondering the revolutionary ideas and scientific principles of Albert Einstein must continue to replenish his economy of joy. The residues of Victorian mannerisms, politeness, morals and sexual attitudes manifested in the ruling class of former colonies of the empire the enlightened man must hasten to adhere to and observe; knowing that it happily distinguishes him from the baser and coarser ways of his inferior. The gastronomical and culinary delights of civilized man must extend beyond the sole function of satisfying his pangs of hunger and intake of calories; the selection and consumption of food must be a qualitative experience rather than a laborious and unhealthy gut-stuffing exercise for him.
Seeking out avenues of pleasures that genuinely fulfil the higher needs of a high-minded man is in itself an enjoyable undertaking. Consistently submerging himself in the sea of the aesthetically pleasing enriches the life of exalted man, so much so, that he is forever the object of envy and ridicule from his beastly opposite. Unsuited and unable to exploit the superior tastes and subtleties of cultured man, the beast becomes enraged and angry, constantly repeating it must be the devil in him.
Orlando Patterson.
