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The following is from the report presented to the then Minister of Culture and Education Sarah Wescott Williams.

 

A HISTORY OF FOUNDATION SUALIGA YOUTH.

 

 

 

 

The early years. Our ideology and struggles.

This is the history of the organisation Soualiga Youth. The organisation officially began in 2000 in the student city of Groningen.

I will detail here as clearly as possible my experiences during the years 2000 until 2002 in Groningen.

I came to Groningen in 1999 after having worked for sometime in the Chase Manhattan Bank as a Teller and Data Entry Clerk.

This history must be chronicled, as the time is ripe. This is a history of Sint Maarteners who overcame prejudice and resistance; we overcame racism, extreme hatred, death threats and police surveillance.

When I came to Groningen, I immediately found a job as a factory worker at Van Gend en Loos.

Endeavouring thereby to serve as a visible example to the community, I found myself in as a hardworking young man.

Soon thereafter, my brother Bernardo Bailey joined me in Groningen, where we lived in Damsport in a student flat.

At a certain point, I went to the Alfa College and took a TOEFL exam, which is an entry exam.

During my time at Hanze Hogeschool/Hanze University of Applied Sciences, I completed an internship at Stitching Forsa, which is Papiamento for “power/force”.

That foundation was an organisation geared toward championing the cause of Antilleans in Holland; it usually worked out for the cause of specifically Curacaoans.

During that time, many Antilleans sold cocaine in Groningen. Specifically, crack cocaine was the preferred drug that many youth sold increasingly it was observed some Sint Maarteners were involved in the drugs trade in Groningen.

I and my brother were invited to a meeting by a social worker whose portfolio included certain (facilitated by Shem Rogers), Sint Maarteners who were on the verge of falling through the cracks and would become so-called randgroepjongeren i.e. delinquent youth.

Later that same day we were contacted by a mister Melvin Sille who worked for the gemeente or government in Groningen, he told us in no uncertain terms that the Groningen police were watching a group of Sint Maarteners for quite some time and if we did not intervene they would certainly be sent to prison.

He told us he contacted us because he heard we were influential in the community.

We were introduced to certain police officials after presenting them with the werkplan of the Sualiga Youth Foundation we were able to show and prove that the Sint Maarteners whom they were about to institutionalize were in fact all a part of Sualiga and were positively active in the community, only one person was convicted of a criminal act all the others were simply young and black and without representation in a European community hence their susceptibility to being lumped together with a vulnerable group in the community.

As a result of the meeting, Sualiga Youth was placed under the umbrella of Forsa. We were initially typified as a so-called student group; however, this was never the intention of the founding members. The intention was always to operate as a bona fide NGO with bylaws governing our organisation.

Another problem we also saw repeatedly was the vicious cycle of students being literally thrown out of housing to make room for others arriving for the new school year.

This practice caused some to turn to crime. In Groningen, this practice continued under the SSSS, directed by Linda Richardson. I have documented proof of such.

We, the Sualiga Youth, adequately informed the students about their civil and human rights in the scenario.

We soon became active with the First World alliance headed by Rafael Dollisson a.k.a. Chip.

We attended some of their activities, which were invited by Melvin Sille and Chip, where we met and worked with professionals from Humanitas, Sozawe, Forsa, and many other organisations and individuals.

When the so-called Hangjongeren became a societal burden in Groningen, we were called to represent the Sint Maarten community. We successfully brokered a truce between warring factions and helped many young men secure work.

The werhouder or Lawnmaker Patje promised us a building if we were able to secure a signed document from our leader of Government Sarah Wescott Williams.

Armed with a double mandate I boarded a KLM flight in the summer of 2000.

I came to Sint Maarten and gained an audience with the leader of government, Sarah Wescott Williams. The actual event was filmed and appeared in the local media.

The mandate was not fulfilled because I did not receive the requested letter of support.

I returned to Holland and came to Sint Maarten for good in September of 2002.

Sualiga Youth changed to Sualiga Extraordinary Minds as my documents will indicate the Sualiga Extraordinary Minds foundation went into talks with various government organizations we were brought up to date on the intention of the city Amsterdam to cooperate more with the Antillean authorities in the areas of culture and justice.

We were told that our expertise was not required at that time, and we were brought into contact with Basisberaad to support our institution, not financially but infrastructurally.

It was then that one of the workers (Jaap) took our werkplan and uitvoeringsplan to a meeting with the SSSS without our consent or knowledge.

Today, we see the very same organisation enacting its agenda as if it came from the students, when in fact it simply co-opted what they learnt from our material.

Let me be abundantly clear: while what they did was not illegal, Jaap did commit an illegal act, namely stealing. He, in turn, most likely acted as if he spoke on our behalf.

Yet since the SSSS purports to be professionals, they should have checked with us to verify his claims. They did not do so, and to date have not done so, as a result of their ineptitude. I can now publicly disclose all of their blunders.

Before the Sualiga Youth came along, no one could clearly and concisely articulate the following, as no one ever took the time to survey students in any given demographic in Holland from Sint Maarten regarding their needs and “levensomstandigheden” in their immediate scholastic and social environments.

In 2000, I travelled to Sint Maarten with a mandate from the Gemeente (the Government of Groningen) and the Antillean Community in Groningen, particularly the student body of the non-profit foundation Stitching Sualiga Youth.

The mandate came about as a result of the successful work carried out by the Sualiga Youth Foundation to the point where we, through properly informing both the government and the Antillean community in Groningen, were able to function as an arbitrator between the Gemeente Groningen and the Government of Groningen and the so-called problem youth of Antilleans in the community.

Certain Sint Maarten students were also described as problem youth, or so-called Randgroepjongeren or hangjongeren, which means, in English, delinquent youth.

We created a video showcasing the musical abilities of students from Sint Maarten, which showed that they were actively engaged in Dutch society and helped avoid them being lumped together with other youth involved in petty crime for no other reason than a lack of adequate information about the Dutch society in which they resided.

The success of our arbitration led to the then lawmaker Patje promising that if we could get a written statement from our government on Sint Maarten showing their support for Sualiga Youth and its activities, we would be given a building and the foundation would be subsidized on a yearly basi,s with the intention being to offer our services to the entire Antillean population in Groningen.

We never received such a letter, but the uitvoerings plan or action plan of our foundation has been largely co-opted and plagiarised by the SSSS.

The students’ daily living conditions were brought to light by the Sualiga Foundation. Before that time, no one in the government on the island knew, nor did they acknowledge, that Sint Maarten students sometimes lived in deplorable conditions in Holland.

For those in Groningen, their living conditions were brought about by the policy of making room for the so-called neiuwkomers, i.e., students coming from Sint Maarten for the new school year.

Today we see students from Holland coming to Sint Maarten to develop a sustainability plan whilst there are students from Sint Maarteners living here on the island and in Holland who have travelled all over Africa including the most recent trip of Bernardo Bailey to Ethiopia where he engaged in trade between Ethiopians and himself as a Sint Maartener i.e. Sualigan, he studied and is developing a plan of sustainable development for rural Ethiopians.

Another example is the farming cooperative of Rafael Dollisson in Ghana.

How is it that Sint Maarteners are good enough to develop sustainability plans for communities on the African continent, but they are being ignored by the present government?

I presented the commissioner of education Sarah Wescott Williams with a copy of a scientific survey, carried out by the foundation i.e. Sint Maarteners (The meeting and presentation was published in the daily herald of said year) 2000.

The Survey was entitled A Sociopolitical Cultural Academic Report on The Educational System on Sint Maarten.

In said report we also outlined the precise activity of the youth here on Sint Maarten it was using the holistic model that, the present spate of crime by local young black males would have been largely avoided.

The call of some in the business community for more police is simply a plaster on a festering wound, as only a long-term educational program developed along the lines of an African-centred education can prevent crime amongst a largely African population.

It is impossible to educate Africans as if they were Europeans. The successful programs in Europe where Antilleans have been successfully integrated into Dutch society, i.e. jobs and proper housing, with access to a basic education, have all been either spearheaded by Antilleans themselves or they were involved in the crucial elements of any plan of action drafted.

Here on Sint Maarten, we have the exact opposite. Europeans are recruited to solve the problems of the Caribbean people without any input whatsoever from the populace.

Not even in Europe are Europeans that imbecilic as to expect Europeans to solve the social maladies plaguing a non-European community without joint cooperation from non-Europeans in their midst. Here on Sint Maarten, some government officials believe that, because they cannot articulate or think for themselves, the entire populace is at a similar disadvantage.

I also have documented evidence of the SSSS openly stating that they are and were unwilling to assist what we call long-term residing students as those students must leave their flats or apartments before the arrival of the new students who will come to Holland at the beginning of the new school year.

The above-described scenario is a very serious situation that results in students living together for extended periods of time in a flat or apartment without adequate information as to how to contact persons who can assist them, such as various organisations, such as the Bureau Voor Rechtshulp (the Bureau for Legal Aid)

There are myriad such organisations throughout Europe, and students have a fundamental right to be informed about their basic civil and human rights by most of them. Still, if they are unaware of this, they cannot make use of the organisations

and their resources. (Sualiga Youth informed students for years without any government funding whatsoever).

Note that I never said our foundation requested funding from the government, unlike many people on Sint Maarten who mistakenly assume the government is responsible for them. We know that we are responsible for ourselves.

Since our intellectual capital has been used in an underhanded manner, I make this publicly known that the claims laid down herein are all factual and can be viewed by anyone in the community who wish to do so.

Until I came to Sint Maarten and presented the leader of government and the department of education with the report drafted by a team of Sint Maarten intellectuals living and studying in Holland no government official had the vision much less the intellectual capacity to draft and articulate a long-term visionary report equal to the standard of the one drafted by Sualiga Youth it was after reading the Sualiga report that they then began to gain a keen insight and firsthand account as to the actual situation. The new government policy we now see is a direct result of that information being digested by them; we were never acknowledged by these people in any way.

I do so now, Bernardo Bailey a.k.a  Ras Enoch, for his unceasing efforts on behalf of the youth and his visionary insight never giving up even when it nearly cost you your very life and family blessed love Lion heart, Rolando Laurence for his outstanding high caliber work,

Giovani Williams for his flawless translation of highly standardised Dutch-language legal documents, and an unknown soldier, Oscar Gumbs, a.k.a. Peaches, who opened his home to many Sint Maarten students when they had nowhere else to go. (P.S. to all the others, this is for those who were down from day one, not the people who came along after, give honour to whom honour is due.)

The societal problems plaguing this community will never be solved by any one group of persons but a concerted effort must be applied by all concerned, we of the Sualiga Foundation are willing and able and will continue to do our part by working directly with the young so called “criminal”  “I prefer the term miseducated” and non criminal Black Youth population here on Sint Maarten and in Holland that is our mandate and destiny.

End of letter:

 

With kind regards.

The audacity and utter insanity of a non-European government in allowing so-called experts from a foreign country to come to Sint Maarten and claim they can conduct any meaningful survey without local professional input are doomed to fail.

Any government on this planet that cannot come to terms with its own internal inadequacies is doomed to fail.

The tendency of the so-called government officials who are, in fact, as per a real democracy, an illegally installed cabal, as is evinced by their method of buying votes with their yearly cash handouts and their well-known illegal and undemocratic practices.

The so-called government then does not exist since, in a real democracy, the people would not have been bought with cash handouts or any other obviously illegal tactics.

Sint Maarten is, in fact, an oligarchy ruled and dominated by a cabal of corrupt bureaucrats who are funded and supported by a foreign merchant class.

These merchants fund politicians’ campaigns and are therefore the ones whose interests are, in fact, protected by the politicians who depend on them for their continued political existence.

The incidences of youth on Sint Maarten murdering their peers is as a direct result of the self destructive policy of the illegally installed “government” since the children of those whose interests the politicians represent are not part of the prison population it may bode well for the average person to pay keen attention to what is written herein and develop some sort of awareness as this book is in fact a teaching tool which will not only highlight problems but it will offer solutions that will attempt to solve some of the most pressing of those problems.

A way to ensure that the so-called government of Sint Maarten becomes an actual public service organ that functions in the best interest of the population at large would be to, for a special interest or pressure group, bring a case against the government of Sint Maarten before the United Nations Tribunal of Human Rights and charge the individuals within the so called government with Human rights violations.

If such a charge is properly launched, it will gain international prominence, and on this platform, the real country of Sint Maarten can be formed.

In the event of an actual formation of an independent government and country, the entire population would have to literally be re-educated and deprogrammed from the mis-education and racist, genocidal policies of the present system of government.