Unbiased look at the Sint Maarten Elections
PHILIPSBURG--Describing the Dutch government's actions to impose Article 51 to tackle integrity issues in St. Maarten as a slap in the face of St. Maarten's government and a slap in the face of St. Maarten, Democratic Party Member of Parliament (MP) Sarah Wescot Williams said sidelining elected representatives of the people of St. Maarten is not the way to ensure durable and lasting solutions to the problems the island face.
"After holding the St. Maarten government 'on the line for a while,' Dutch Minister of Interior Affairs and Kingdom Relations Ronald Plasterk has 'come clean,' to use a local expression. I am of the opinion that nothing that St. Maarten has done with respect to tackling integrity issues has made any difference for Minister Plasterk and his colleagues in the Dutch cabinet as far as imposing a measure of higher supervision on St. Maarten. That's what an article 51 measure is," she said in a press release issued Monday.
She said it was a measure Minister Plasterk had been threatening for a long time and he actually had used the government of St. Maarten, as he had made it appear as though a good plan by St. Maarten could ward off higher supervision.
"It is my guess that some persons will react with satisfaction to this news and, as we heard when St. Maarten wanted to clean its own house and commissioned its own integrity investigation, 'What do you have to fear from a measure or an instruction by the Dutch government?'
"That reasoning misses the point. Are we to conclude that St. Maarten cannot find even a handful of upstanding citizens to execute and guide this process and not be intimidated by the politics of the day? That would indeed be a sad conclusion to arrive at, one that gives no hope, and I strongly disagree with that assessment.
"As I have argued from day one, when we first commissioned the global agency Transparency International to do an in-depth and general integrity assessment of St. Maarten and subsequently also established our own integrity committee to investigate matters, integrity is not a matter of a day, neither are the solutions available overnight," she said.
