Perhaps it is one of Caribbean people’ survival strategies to take serious matters and turn them into jokes as we analyse our social and political situations especially. I think this is why the Mighty Sparrow’s rendition of the tune Three Coins In The Fountain has been in my head all week since Dr. Carlyle Corbin made clear the three options for exercising the principle of self-determination as espoused by the United Nations.

These options are free association, integration and independence. While the conference on UK citizenship made us all have either positive thoughts or fears of integration with the European Union, Anguilla’s concerns have mainly focused on economic development and to my mind, this has been at the expense of both social and political development. What is becoming clear however, and someone expressed it in reference to the Cayman Islands, is that there is no correlation between political status and economic development. Cayman is the least constitutionally advanced of the UK Overseas Territories in the Caribbean but it is in the kind of economic shape that Anguilla is still dreaming about. I felt really ignorant when I visited Grand Cayman some years ago and discovered that their dollar was of higher value than the US dollar. It was more of a lesson than a blow to find that I had to fork out US$1.25 in exchange for a Cayman dollar. Several times during his presentation at the recently concluded meeting of the UN Committee on Decolonisation, the Leader of Government Business from the Cayman was rightly proud to boast that the Cayman Islands had never received Grant in Aid from the UK. We cannot therefore blame our economic plights on our colonial status for neither Cayman nor Bermuda is a Sovereign State but thy are Territories with a very different history. We will talk about the history at another time but right now, the task facing this nation involves consideration of the UN’s three options as well as the suggestions that we can be creative, innovative and eclectic in determining how we want to apply the principle and process of self-determination to our own development.

Free Association - Anguilla’s experience of free association has been limited to our refusal to assume that status along with St. Kitts-Nevis and the British as a prelude to independence. We were very clear that we had no intention of prolonging our state of being a colony of a colony and refused to be part of that “Great trinity of islands set in an azure sea.” We looked on with interest but not with envy as various colonies around us became States in Association with Britain and got their Statehood flags, songs and Premiers. We also saw these States join what we used to think of as the community of international beggars and had very strong feelings that this is not how we wanted to proceed. The new learning for me is that free association does not even have to be with the United kingdom. It is really free association with any other State that may want to be associated with us and the terms agreed between the countries in the association are what are applied to give life, character and definition to that arrangement. What came to mind once I understood that was Mr. Ronald Webster’s idea that Anguilla should have a political arrangement, a union of some sort with the islands all around it. I am no political scientist but I know that at the level of the people, we have good relationships with our neighbours and some of them look to us and our relations with our administering power for guidance in their political processes. This is therefore a real possibility.

Integration – This is a really fuzzy area in which there is distrust and mistrust too. We have had European citizenship conferred on us and even those of us with EU passports are not at all sure of what that means for us and our children. The British keep trying to assure us, and we remain unconvinced, that there will be no reciprocity because no one has taken the time to educate us about all of the implications for us as the European Union expands and becomes more of a global force. What I want us to consider far more deeply than we are at present, is that no matter what integration with Europe means, we must seek to strengthen our position in the Caribbean regional integration initiatives. At the end of the day we share eco-systems that if not protected regionally may well see us all having to be migrated to 21st century Europe. Caribbean people also share a history and culture that here in Anguilla we still think of as baggage more so than as a developmental resource. It seems to me that our greatest area of ignorance is that of how the integration option can best work in our favour. This then must be a focus of the educational process that must be one of the outcomes of the Committee of 24’s seminar in Anguilla.

Independence - During our revolutionary years we toyed with notions of independence and other political arrangements but ended up opting to remain a colony. Euphemistically, we later became a British Dependent Territory and now we are an Overseas Territory - perhaps a language change designed to help us to stop being Dependent but like the people in other UKOT’s the people of Anguilla are independent in their minds and behaviours to the point of being individualistic in the best and worst of ways and, as already demonstrated, do have the potential and in some cases the capacity to become self-reliant. Since then the word independence became a bad word and in the recent past our only response to any mention of the word used to be NO! This is changing. We are not saying yes yet but we seem to be nearing consensus that we must have an independence agenda. Praise the Lord! What both civil society and government said to the UN and to the UK at the seminar was that before we can say this I word with confidence or even consider attaining political independence, we must be prepared. We are not interested in becoming like our neighbours whom we think did not demand or negotiate enough by way of readiness for sovereignty and we must not make the same mistake. We have sent a very clear message to the United Kingdom that we are not happy with the inequities of the partnership they offer and that we have very clear ideas about those areas of human resource development and capacity building needed to prepare Anguillians for the top jobs that are currently held by UK appointed personnel. We need to learn the ways of national, regional and global governance because the thing that we know with certainty is that independence is more than a new song, a new flag and a Prime Minister. We also know that when it comes to the three coins in the fountain, if we are creative and innovative it is possible to say, “All is mine”, though probably not at the same time.

Ijahnya Christian

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