OPINION: Caribbean Women Equality

It has been a long, unfinished battle over several decades for Caribbean women to command equality by statute, education and social intervention in the work force, government, military and police. In this, Jamaica is probably at the zenith for the region with the chief of the Jamaica Defence Force being a woman. Female prime ministers have almost become the regular, with the first coming from Dominica, many decades ago.

Impressive in one view, it does not reveal the nominal nature of female military and law enforcement personnel of the Caribbean that lies anywhere between 13-25%, very low indeed in circumstances of over half the population being women.

Further, female parliamentarians are only one third in the Caribbean despite many short strides in this regards.

The female workforce of the region varies in dry statistics of 40-60% that are not reflective of the large itinerant work force of women near the poverty line.

Of greater significance is the large number of single parent households in the Caribbean, most of which are headed by women.

Bar enforcing a percentage requirement for women in the armed forces, police and political sphere, governments in the Caribbean will have to become practical in light of world developments.

Ukraine has had to recruit a significant numbers of female fighters out of necessity and Europe is contemplating conscription that would include women. Like armies everywhere, the USA has struggled to meet recruitment numbers and has demonstrated a willingness in the past to enforce conscription. In that event many of the conscripts would be women, perhaps 51%.

Significant numbers of foreigners, including many from the Caribbean, have traded service for citizenship in the past:

The first Canadian soldier killed in Iraq was in fact a Jamaican from Saint Ann, known as the garden parish of Jamaica. Bernard Gooden left Jamaica in 1997 before serving in the Canadian Forces reserves. He was killed in April 2003 during a firefight with Iraqi soldiers.Gooden was followed in June 2007 by Kimel Watt who served in the U.S. Army in Korea and Germany before he was killed by an IED in Iraq. Kimel was only twenty-one and he was given American citizenship posthumously. Kimel was among one hundred and sixty-one foreign born members of the U.S. Army who were naturalised as American citizens on the following Fourth of July. The group included another dead soldier from Morocco. Hanover born Dale McCallum, a long serving member of the British Army, was killed in the tumultuous Lashkar Gah district of Helmand, Afghanistan in the summer of 2010. McCallum had previously served in Kosovo and Iraq. The previous summer, three of five British soldiers killed in a single incident, in the same area, were only eighteen.Orphan Marlon Myrie, who migrated to South Florida and was raised by his sister, ended up being killed, also in Helmand, the following summer of 2011.

It may come as a surprise to the many holders of green cards, dual , triple and more citizenships of the diaspora or elsewhere, that their enlistment age daughters and sons are eligible for military conscription. Countries of birth or Caribbean connection would not save them.

The Caribbean has a long history of participation in foreign wars, not of their making or interest. It has been an unpleasant business starting with the execution of 17 year old Herbert Morrison from Riversdale, St.Catherine in Jamaica behind a church in Belgium on 29 September 1917 for what is called PTSD today. Many others followed.

So long as women are recruited, battlefield or summary or court martial executions, may apply to them.

World powers have been taking over Caribbean airspace, airports and seas for some time, and are now claiming entire countries. Like scarce minerals, it may come to the Caribbean providing men and women for conflicts elsewhere, for what some call, cannon fodder.

Young Trinidadian women may be the first to be enlisted or conscripted given the closeness of their leader to the USA in his military excursions, perhaps as a peace or monitor force in Venezuela.

No calypso, rum or beaches there, just an unhappy population and invaders. 

Sounds familiar. Vietnam, Angola, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not a video game, reality, as the youth swipe left.

Notes 

Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer from the Cayman Islands for several decades. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88. 

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