World Bank panel

It was the Guyana Times which last Saturday informed the nation that the Government of Guyana had sought the removal of Dr Janette Bulkan from the World Bank’s Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, where she had responsibility for reviewing Suriname’s Readiness Planning Preparation (RPP).

The details were spelt out the following day by the Kaieteur News, which obtained a copy of the government letter to the World Bank, signed, it was said, by Minister of Agriculture Robert Persaud. He described Dr Bulkan’s appointment as “alarming,” and requested her immediate removal from the panel because in the words of the KN report, she had “been guilty” of writing critical articles on Guyana’s forestry sector filled with inaccuracies, distortions and unsubstantiated allegations of corruption, bribery and illegal logging. He was quoted as going on to say: “Her correspondences are also defamatory and slanderous, accusing government officials including the President of Guyana of being incompetent and involved in clandestine activities. Even when responses to her correspondences expose her poor understanding of sustainable forest management principles; and debunk her slanderous comments, defamation, and inaccuracies, Ms. Bulkan refuses to concede and persists publicly with her hidden agenda.”

After informing the Bank that she would not be an objective assessor, the Minister was reported as then requesting a complete review of the World Bank criteria for the selection of such experts.

However, that was not the end of his harangue. He moved on to refer to the presentation of a map by Suriname at a Bank forum in October, which showed a part of Guyana’s territory incorporated into that of our eastern neighbour. He asked that mechanisms be put in place to prevent a recurrence – about which there could be no complaint – but then went on to comment that it was most unfortunate that Dr Bulkan who is a Guyanese by birth did not see fit to raise the threat to Guyana’s sovereignty as an issue during her review of Suriname’s RPP.

Officialdom was not yet finished with Dr Bulkan. On Thursday last week in this newspaper Commissioner of Forests James Singh, writing it seems on behalf of the Guyana Forestry Commission, took up the matter of the map in a letter to the editor. It was intended as a response to a letter from the technical advisor herself which had been published in SN on Tuesday, and in which she said (among other things) that she had not been present at the October meeting, and could therefore hardly have protested about the map. She ended by observing that it was “unclear what the government hoped to gain from intervening in my employment outside Guyana on a task not affecting Guyana…”
That statement sent Mr Singh into something of a paroxysm of indignation. “How is it possible,” he demanded, “that an insult and potential threat to Guyana’s sovereignty is ‘a task not affecting Guyana’?” He called on the Government of Guyana, political parties “and indeed all other patriotic Guyanese” to “denounce publicly this attempt to downplay” the issue, and said that “we” should let Dr Bulkan know that while she trivializes the matter, “we” will “always object… at all levels and in all fora.” He had prefaced this with statements that even if Dr Bulkan had not been present at the October meeting, she still would have seen the map when she reviewed Suriname’s RPP.

There are a lot of presumptions here. The first is that she saw the map; the second is that if she saw it, she noticed that the New River Triangle had been added to Surinamese territory; and the third is that she did not register any complaint. Assuming for the sake of argument that she saw, she noticed and she did not raise concerns with the World Bank, as Mr Eusi Kwayana said in a letter yesterday, responsibility for territorial integrity falls not within the ambit of private citizens, but within that of “full-time diplomats.” In fact, from a protocol point of view it is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which should have made a formal complaint to the World Bank and Suriname about the map, although there is nothing which prevents the Minister of Agriculture adding his voice. But did the Ministry of Foreign Affairs do anything? Suriname has been copying Venezuela’s tactic for some time now, and it requires the ministry to be especially vigilant in all fora where Paramaribo is represented, so there can be a constant and consistent response. Just how vigilant has Takuba Lodge been over the years, and how consistent have been its responses? Since when did the government delegate its responsibilities for foreign affairs to ‘private citizens’?

The most disturbing thing about the issue is the attack on Dr Bulkan’s patriotism. For all Minister Persaud’s glib talk of defamation, that is the true defamatory allegation; Dr Bulkan’s patriotism has never been, and is not, in question. The administration’s conduct of frontiers policy has been open to criticism over the years, for example, but that does not mean that the government or any member of it lacked patriotism because of any particular act of omission or commission. And as for those who are not government members as such, there was the case in 1995, just before the Caricom Heads of Government Conference here, when Suriname placed a prestige ad in the Guyana Chronicle – the state paper, no less – which included a map showing the New River Triangle as part of its territory. Surely Minister Persaud and Commissioner Singh would not seek to argue that because of this error the senior managers at the Chronicle should be publicly castigated and removed from their posts on the grounds they were unpatriotic?  

Furthermore, exactly what the head of a supposedly independent agency like the GFC is doing expressing himself in such immoderate terms publicly about a forestry expert’s character is a matter for concern. Since the issue of Dr Bulkan’s alleged lack of response to the map was raised first by Minister Persaud (although why he should have thought that patriotism would be a leading consideration of the World Bank, which wants its officials to operate as international civil servants, is a mystery), Mr Singh invites the conclusion that he has been responsive to political perceptions. He is very entitled to answer Dr Bulkan’s criticisms about forestry practices and the operations of his agency – and he has done so in the past – but it is quite unacceptable for him to behave like a politician and by so doing open himself to the accusation that he has followed instructions from political quarters.

But in any case, all of this is a sideshow and a cover. The government’s real intention is to secure Dr Bulkan’s removal from the World Bank panel not because of any perceived lack of patriotism, but because she is a critic, not merely of forestry policy here, but more significantly of LCDS. Since this objective makes the government vulnerable to criticism, it is doing what it always does in these instances – engaging in character assassination. It is a clumsy ruse. Minister Persaud’s attacks on Dr Bulkan’s professional credentials are nothing but nonsense, and the expert herself has challenged the Minister to provide evidence of the shortcomings he accuses her of, and to quote the various “defamatory and slanderous correspondences,” etc, to which he refers. One might add, why is Mr Persaud seeking to change World Bank criteria for the hiring of experts, when he has cited Dr Bulkan’s lack of understanding of forest management as one of his objections – an existing criterion for the hiring of someone in this field, one would have thought? Or is he suggesting World Bank advisors undergo patriotism tests?     

Given the history of this government, one should not be surprised at Minister Persaud’s undiplomatic if not rancorous tone. The malignancy at the heart of the ruling party is that it cannot accommodate criticism, and sometimes pursues its critics with a virulence which has no place in a true democracy. Dr Bulkan is a case in point. While it is bad enough that the present government clearly would not tolerate her being employed in a professional capacity in this country, it is simply extraordinary that it believes that it will always get away in the international arena with the kind of petty vengefulness it indulges in locally. One assumes the World Bank is sufficiently versed in the machinations of the various member states not to pay heed to Minister Persaud’s request. If it does, it would be nothing short of a disgrace.