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Jamaica’s Bruce Golding To Visit Haiti

Posted by CaribShout on November 22, 2009 at 8:55pm
By Tony Best Haiti, which is facing serious economic challenges, needs assistance and Jamaica wants to see how it can extend a helping-hand. And that’s why Bruce Golding, the English-speaking Caribbean nation’s Prime Minister, plans to visit Haiti soon to meet with that country’s leadership and explore ways both his country and the region as a whole can work together to ease the pain being felt in Port au Prince and elsewhere across that land. “I am particularly concerned about Haiti,” he told the Carib News after addressing the 14th annual Caribbean Multi-National business Conference in Montego Bay. “There is a situation in which the economic difficulties are simply compounding the political problems. A new Prime Minister had to be installed recently. I am hoping to visit Haiti very soon. The (Jamaica) Foreign Ministry is making arrangements. We are so close to Haiti that we cannot help but be interested and be eager to help.” The Haitian Senate recently fired the country’s Prime Minister, Michele Pierre-Louis, and set the wheel in motion for Max Bellerive, Minister of Planning, to replace her. The reason the senators gave for removing her in less than a year was that she hadn’t moved fast-enough to reverse the country’s economic slide. They complained that she spent too much time traveling the world but didn’t devote her full energies to uplifting Haitians. The ouster has been strongly condemned by Haitians in the Diaspora who complain that President Rene' Preval played a major behind-the-scenes role in ousting Pierre-Louis. “It was a constitutional coup engineered by Haiti’s President Rene’ Preval,” said Garry Pierre Pierre, a leading Haitian and Caribbean journalist in New York. “The Prime Minister was doing a decent job and the Senate’s decision to remove her from office at the urging of President Preval may only serve to help continue the perpetual cycle of chaos in Haiti.” Dr. Serge Camile, a former Haitian cabinet minister of Youth and Sport, who also described the Prime Minister’s ouster as a “coup,” warned the move “may very well set the stage for further instability in Haiti.”
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