32.8 C
Belize City
Thursday, March 28, 2024

World Down Syndrome Day

Photo: Students and staff of Stella Maris...

BPD awards 3 officers with Women Police of the Year

Photo: (l-r) Myrna Pena, Carmella Cacho, and...

Suicide on the rise!

Photo: Iveth Quintanilla, Mental Health Coordinator by Charles...

Compton discusses Ismail Omar

HighlightsCompton discusses Ismail Omar

“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is often interred with their bones.”
– William Shakespeare

I don’t know of any”evil” that my good friend, the late Ismail Omar Shabazz, may be guilty of but I do know of the many “good” things that he has done. It is my sincere hope that Mark Anthony’s poetic utterance will not apply to him.

I can remember well the hours I spent with him at his home discussing one of his favorite topics, the composition of the coat of arms on our national flag. Ismail was passionate that the original 1819 version document in the Honduras Almanac of 1829 which depicted two black men who represented the slaved and their descendants, men who did the back-breaking work for over a hundred years at the mahogany camps in the forest of Belize, should not have been modified to the extent it is today.

The only other person I can recall who was as passionate about our flag and its coat of arms albeit for a different reason was the late Edward A. Laing, Jr. When Laing was our country’s ambassador to the United States and also the United Nations, Ambassador Laing tried to persuade me to join him in a campaign to re-design our flag which prompted me to ask, “Eddie, why do you want us to change our flag?” His response was, “Because I have had many complaints from other ambassadors that because of the coat of arms the flag is too complex to be produced accurately.”

On May 25, 1985 when Belizeans in New York hosted Prime Minister the Hon. Manuel Esquivel at the Roosevelt Hotel on Madison Avenue, I had the honor of explaining to the 2,000 plus guests that Belize was one of only two countries in the world that depicted human beings on their national flag: the other country was St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Today, Belize is the only country in the world that has such a flag flying at the United Nations among 192 other nations. Five months after I spoke at the Roosevelt, St. Vincent removed their coat of arms of 1912 which depicted two women and replaced it with three simple diamonds arranged in the shape of a “V.”

Check out our other content

World Down Syndrome Day

Suicide on the rise!

Check out other tags:

International