?I was dis­tressed to read (Guardian, Feb­ru­ary 5) that Ja­maica has had to with­draw its troops and aid per­son­nel from Haiti be­cause oth­er Cari­com coun­tries have not made good on their promis­es to as­sist in meet­ing the costs in­volved and Ja­maica can­not bear all these costs alone.

Ja­maica has not been rep­re­sent­ing it­self in Haiti; it has been rep­re­sent­ing Cari­com. Fur­ther, we all know that the coun­try is now un­der the IMF gun. If ever there was an op­por­tu­ni­ty to show sol­i­dar­i­ty with a fel­low Cari­com mem­ber state in dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances but nonethe­less work­ing on be­half of the re­gion, this was it. But, once again, Cari­com ap­pears to have fal­tered.

I am re­mind­ed of the be­hav­iour of the so-called "in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty" which since 2004, at its var­i­ous "donor con­fer­ences," has been pledg­ing aid for Haiti which gen­er­al­ly does not ma­te­ri­alise.

Ac­cord­ing to your re­port, Ja­maica has run up a bill of over US$450,000. The Prime Min­is­ter of T&T and the Pres­i­dent of Guyana have each promised a do­na­tion of US$1mil­lion for the Haiti re­lief ef­fort. Could a part of these monies not be used to help de­fray the ex­pens­es in­curred by Ja­maica which, I re­peat, has been work­ing on our be­half?

Regi­nald Du­mas

Ba­co­let