Dismantling meeting fails,
Curaçao not ready as yet
WILLEMSTAD--Discussions on the content of a draft proposal on the dismantling of the Netherlands Antilles didn’t take place during Tuesday’s political consultation, to the unpleasant surprise of the St. Maarten delegation.
Constitutional Affairs Commissioner Sarah Wescot-Williams was disappointed that St. Maarten was not apprised before travelling to Curaçao that not all parties were ready to discuss the matter.
Curaçao Constitutional Affairs Commissioner Zita Jesus-Leito said when the meeting started that Curaçao wasn’t ready to take decisions because the island had not had enough time to discuss the draft decision list on dismantling of the Netherlands Antilles in the island’s permanent and broad-based committees.
Wescot-Williams also believed there was no consensus within the Council of Ministers on the phased dismantling. It was agreed that parties would meet again on October 24 in a second effort to take decisions on the dismantling trajectory.
Jesus-Leito said, among other things, that because certain politicians and advisors had been in St. Maarten last week for a meeting with Aruba, Curaçao had not been able to discuss the proposals.
Wescot-Williams stressed that the necessary consensus within the Council of Ministers should be reached before parties met on October 24.
“What we primarily have done is ratify the decisions taken in December 2007. There was no consensus on the transfer of Central Government tasks in the Council of Ministers,” Wescot-Williams said.
She had expected that the proposal of phased transfer would be discussed. She also wanted to discuss the finances that go hand-in-hand with the transfer of the authorities.
“We have some concerns with how this is being proposed, that it should be budget neutral. In the case of St. Maarten, it does not have several of the Central Government directorates, so there is no Central Government budget for them.
“However, we have not even come close to these discussions and the civil servants meanwhile are living in uncertainty because, for example, we cannot tell the people of the Tax Office when they will become part of the new organisation of country St. Maarten. In order to do that the island of St. Marten needs to get the authority.”
Yesterday’s discussions were the first at the political level regarding the dismantling after the Central Government took the decision that it would dismantle in phases and that it would be looking at having all authorities and tasks transferred by the end of 2009.
A Council of State advice agreed with and supported the Central Government’s decision to dismantle as soon as possible.
“It’s important that we get on with decision-making on dismantling so the Central Government can get on with the transfer as soon as possible,” Constitutional Affairs Minister Roland Duncan said at the beginning of the meeting. He said the Central Government would like to start as soon as January 2009.
However, parties failed in their objective and the defective AC condenser of Marriott Hotel in Curaçao where the meeting took place did not help matters.
St. Maarten Commissioners Wescot-Williams and Roy Marlin together with National Alliance Parliamentarian and Island Councilman William Marlin arrived just in time for the scheduled 3:00pm meeting. They arrived on a DAE flight, which has been flying the St. Maarten route with the ATR jet aircraft instead of the Fokker 100 jet planes, making the flying time between St. Maarten and Curaçao about 45 minutes longer.
Wescot-Williams and Marlin immediately went into some preparatory discussions with the Central Government delegation and Curaçao, as they had not been able to attend such meetings that had been taking place since the morning hours. Therefore the meeting on dismantling started about one hour and forty-five minutes late.
Wescot-Williams said in her opening statement that she was disappointment that no decisions would be taken after all the preparations that had been made.
“A mixed dismantling committee has been working hard and in the last weeks daily consultations took place for the political meeting to have taken place yesterday. The St. Maarten delegation came to Curaçao because it thought it to be extremely important that decisions are taken as to when different Central Government responsibilities will be transferred to the islands.
“While in the document the premise established is that the islands can start to build up the new entities, in practice it doesn’t work like that. Decisions with respect to when these authorities will be transferred must be taken,” she said.
After the meeting the Commissioner told The Daily Herald that 99 per cent of the agenda points had not been ready for decision-taking. “For weeks the joint dismantling committee has been meeting. There was a frantic attempt to have the papers ready for this meeting, which should have taken place in St. Marten on September 26.”
As late as Monday the Commissioner had said she had been requested to attend the meeting because decisions should be taken on the phased transfer of Central Government responsibilities. The joint dismantling committee prepared a schedule of transfers, specifying what task could be transferred when. In addition there were some proposals pertaining to the prerequisites for the transfer.
“Regretfully, while the meeting had the name of being a political consultation, clearly it was not ready for that. My disappointment had to do with the fact that this must have been known before the St. Maarten delegation travelled down (to Curaçao, ed.) for the meeting,” she said. “This is a trajectory, not an individual thing. If the dismantling and transfer does not go according to plan, then what are we preparing in the other trajectories such as Kingdom laws?”
