THIS DAY IN OUR PAST

The following events took place on January 22 in the years identified:

1970: A comprehensive review of Jamaica’s foreign policy is carried out in the five-day meeting of heads of mission of the ministers of external affairs, which takes place in the conference room of the Ministry from January 15-21. The conference is under the chairmanship of prime minister and Minister of External Affairs Hugh Shearer. The prime minister is assisted by Mr. Neville Gallimore, MP, parliamentary secretary, and James Lloyd, permanent secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs.

1980: The Jamaican Government declares that it does not support the call to boycott the 1980 Olympics to be held in Moscow or for a change of site of the games. The Government’s position is made known by Minister of Education, Youth and Sports Hugh Small in a statement through the API. In the statement, the minister says that the Government has observed “the previous attempts to disrupt the holding of the Olympics in Moscow and does not accept the current controversy concerning the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan to be any justification for a change of the site of the Olympics or for a boycott of the Games”.

1987: Edward Prime Minister Seaga urges indebted Latin American and Caribbean nations to pool their efforts to redirect multilateral lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) towards greater sensitivity to “adjustment problems.” Mr Seaga tells delegates and observers attending the first plenary session of the Special Conference of the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, in Mexico City, that the need for greater realism exists as much on the side of the debtor nations as on that of the creditors, be they commercial banks, bilateral or multilateral Institutions.