Former Ambassador to Cuba and the African Union, Bruce Goodwin, is questioning the sudden announcement of the opening of an Antigua and Barbuda Embassy in China, which will be fully financed by the government.
Last Tuesday, Prime Minister Gaston Browne, along with the non-resident Ambassador to China, Brian Stuart-Young, Foreign Minister EP Chet Greene and Chinese diplomats, opened the embassy.
However, taking into account some of the steps that should have precluded the opening, Ambassador Goodwin queried whether the government had followed the proper procedures prior to doing so, to include due diligence and a good standing check to ensure there’s nothing that legally prevents the setting up of the embassy, plus vetting of the facility’s potential staff.
“Now, that is not a process that takes a day or two, or a week, or a month; it takes a while,” he said.
“So for us to hear suddenly … that we are going to open an embassy in Beijing right now, as the case might be, it makes you wonder, did the government go through this established procedure?
“Or do we have a situation where the Prime Minister, being as whimsical and arbitrary as he usually is, did he just get a tour around Shanghai or wherever he is and set up an embassy?” he argued.
It is unclear at this point as to the full cost of the construction, maintenance and who exactly will serve as Antigua and Barbuda diplomatic staff in the Chinese embassy, but Ambassador Goodwin suggests that there needs to be further clarity to ensure that the embassy’s potential benefits do not outweigh those expenditures.
“For a very long time, there have been discussions at the level of the OECS concerning the matter of joint representation in various countries and I remember, while I was in Cuba, this is a matter that I always brought to the fore in the discussions.
“I was always concerned with the fact that we have our embassies in Cuba, every Caricom state now has an embassy in Cuba, and we have six independent countries here in the OECS, each of us has an embassy in Cuba, and I thought it was an unnecessary waste of money to have six OECS embassies to be there in Cuba, spending their people’s money when a single giant mission could do everything that was being done,” he said.
He suggested that Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica and Grenada could have established a joint diplomatic mission to China which would have been more cost effective while serving the interests of the three OECS nations.
