Report on the ACP by David Comissiong  The Daily Nation newspaper - Barbados.

It was left to the Clement Payne Movement, with a team composed of Bobby Clarke, Edison Crawford, and David Comissiong; along with Iannique Jean-Louis and Carl Lee Best, to hold aloft the banner of Barbados at this important Caribbean convention.

The Assembly of Caribbean People (ACP) is a Pan-Caribbean gathering of social movements, farmers, trade unionists, working people, students, feminists, youth, artistes, intellectuals, NGO’s and representatives of community organisations.

To their credit, the hard working regional executive committee of the ACP, and our very generous and industrious Haitian hosts, were able to put together an Assembly of some 700 delegates.

If I were forced to identify some specific issue which dominated the assembly, I would single out the matter of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the need to mount hemisphere-wide resistance campaign to this latest Yankee 'Trojan horse' of neo-imperialism.

All over the Caribbean, social and political activists are expressing deep concern about the FTAA and its potential to deal a permanently crippling blow to our long-standing efforts to build sovereign states and national economies in our own geo-political space.

We all therefore made a collective resolve to redouble our efforts to educate the masses of the Caribbean people about the true intent and purpose of the FTAA, and to challenge our governments not to sign on to the FTAA.

Aside from this critical issue of the FTAA however, the members of the Clement Payne Movement were most moved and touched by the Haitian people themselves - their current condition, history and culture.

We were well and truly shocked by the level of poverty and human suffering that unfolded before our eyes - the lack of proper sanitation, sewage, housing, health care and other social amenities that so many of our Haitian brothers and sisters are subjected to!

Indeed, we could not help but wonder how our Caribbean political leaders could travel to Haiti, witness this level of human suffering and degradation with their own eyes, and come back home and not speak about it, or seek to make it a priority issue.

As far as we are concerned, it is shameful that in the heart of our 'Caribbean Community', literally millions of our kith and kin could be existing in conditions of such misery, and our governments and civil society organisations make so little effort to come to their assistance.

The Clement Payne Movement has therefore resolved to establish a local organisation to reach out in brotherly care and assistance to the people of Haiti. We will also be lobbying the governments of Barbados and CARICOM to bestir themselves and to embrace the people of Haiti in a more meaningful way.

Our organisation also played a critical role in piloting a resolution at the ACP, calling upon the government of France and other guilty parties to pay "Reparations" to the people of Haiti, for the tremendous damage that they inflicted on Haiti during centuries of slavery, colonisation and neo-colonialism. This is a matter that the Barbadian people will be hearing a lot about in the months ahead.

But as saddened as we were by the poverty, we were 'blown away' by the power and vitality of the culture and history of Haiti.

Indeed, the high point of our entire sojourn in Haiti was our visit to the massive mountain-top fortress of La Citadelle, which was constructed by King Henri Christophe, about 200 years ago, in the early phase of Haiti’s independence.

The 3,000 foot high Citadelle must rank as one of the wonders of the world, and is clearly the most impressive man made structure in the entire Caribbean. As one approaches the fortress on horseback, one is left with a palpable sense of the majesty of Haiti’s past - of the revolutionary heroics of such legendary figures as Macandal, Boukman, Toussaint, Oge, Dessalines, Christophe, Biassou and Petion.