How a Royal Visit Helped Weaken the Crown's Grip on the Caribbean

[marmar]

(The Nation) On Tuesday, March 15, six months before the death of Queen Elizabeth II would reignite a conversation about the British crown’s colonial legacy, the chairman of Indian Creek, an Indigenous Maya village in southern Belize, received a call. A police officer told Sebastian Shol, the chairman, that the village would have to cut down the trees bordering a soccer field in the next few days, because a helicopter would be landing there. Despite being pressed by Shol, the officer refused to give any other information.

The next day, Shol received a call from a woman representing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She apologized for not providing information sooner and told him that the visitors would be Prince William and his wife, Kate Middleton, who would be traveling to Belize, Jamaica, and the Bahamas the following week to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s platinum jubilee, marking her 70 years on the throne.

Although all three countries fought for their independence from the crown, they have not become republics like Barbados, Guyana, or Trinidad and Tobago; instead they remain, along with the majority of countries in the Caribbean, part of the British Commonwealth, with the British monarch as the head of state. Each country has a British High Commission in its capital and a governor-general who represents the monarch in “overseas territories” as a government executive.

Shol convened an emergency meeting during which the villagers decided to stage a protest. Their biggest concerns, he told me during a phone interview, were the fact that they were not consulted before the visit, the requirement that the villagers would have to stay 200 meters away from the royal couple at all times, and an ongoing land dispute with Flora Fauna International, a charity with connections to the royal family. Last year, 12,800 acres in Indian Creek were sold to FFI, but, according to the association of Maya villages in the region, the land—which includes the village school, the community center, and a couple hundred homes—was sold illegally.

On March 18, the day before the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were set to arrive, dozens of people gathered at the soccer field carrying signs that read “Not Your Land / Not Your Decision,” “Prince William Leave Our Land,” and “Indian Creek Say No to FFI / Keep Out.” Not long after, the government of Belize told the Daily Mail that, because of “issues,” the visit to Indian Creek had been canceled and the royal couple would visit another village instead. A spokesperson from Kensington Palace confirmed the cancellation to the newspaper. ...................(more)

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/prince-william-kate-caribbean-reparations/

[BlueLucy]

1. Now they have more problems.

With Prince William's godmother and a racially charged interrogation of Ms. Fulani.