Dear Editor,
A few weeks ago in a letter to your newspaper I alluded to comments made by two late presidents of Guyana about the United States and expressed the hope that our current president would be more restrained than his predecessors in his public comments about the world’s only superpower. What I did not mention in that letter was how those public attacks resulted in negative action against Guyana.
Recently, in an address to the military, President Bharrat Jagdeo made some public comments about the United States. No one can fault the President for holding certain views about America. In fact, a lot of what he said might be indeed factual, but what is at issue is his approach.
Public diplomacy is an acceptable form of the conduct of relations between and among nations. But like everything else in life there is a cutoff point. The President’s approach could hardly be accepted as a legitimate act of public diplomacy. Guyana and the United States both have diplomatic representation in each other’s country and Guyana’s responses to the recent US Human Rights and Narcotics reports would have been better handled, at least initially, through the established diplomatic channels.
Foreign Minister Rudy Insanally should have summoned US Ambassador David Robinson to Takuba Lodge to register Guyana’s concerns and Guyana’s Ambassador to the US, Bayney Karran, should have been seeking an urgent audience at ‘Foggy Bottom’ (US State Department) to challenge the conclusions in the respective reports. These could have been followed by press conferences disclosing the actions that had been taken.
The President would be naive to believe that his public pronouncements would go unnoticed in Washington. If his comments were merely noted in Washington, that would be okay. But that is not the case. During the Burnham era, a US newspaper published an article headlined ‘Reagan is watching Guyana’. Mr. Burnham’s ego was inflated by the alleged attention he was supposedly getting from Reagan. I had at that time to caution Mr. Burnham that, while he had met Reagan in Cancun, the truth was that Reagan might not even remember him, let alone be watching him and/or Guyana. I explained that who was really watching him and Guyana were a bunch of ‘young turks’ in the State Department, National Security Council, Justice Department, Pentagon and on Capitol Hill who are always eager to create issues, more so for the advancement of their careers rather than safeguarding America’s best interests.
So, it was no surprise that following Mr. Burnham’s public response to the article at a speech in the National Park, the US successfully moved to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to have a loan for Guyana’s MMA project switched from one borrowing window to another, thus making the loan more expensive.
Mr. Jagdeo’s comments have already drawn ideas from some of the current ‘young turks’ in Washington. One aide to a Republican Member of Congress is suggesting that a look be taken to determine whether there is an outbreak of dengue fever in Guyana following the sudden death of a Canadian citizen who recently returned from Guyana. Another has gone so far as to suggest that the provision of visa services be transferred from the Georgetown-based embassy to Trinidad and some Democrats argue that the Guyana President could attack the US in the way he did because he has an arrangement with some Republican hardliners to allow Mr. Kerik to be in Guyana for purposes related to US relations with Venezuela. While I do not believe that this sort of thinking would find favour with the real decision makers in Washington, the fact of the matter is that these so-called recommendations will remain in their consciousness and if pushed often enough to do something, might just sign off on them.
To the President’s credit, he did say he is not anti-American and I don’t believe he is. But public outbursts, especially when addressing the military, and on the same day the US handed over a disaster relief building and supplies with which the military will be associated, are not helpful to the maintenance of positive relations with, whether Guyanese accept it or not – the most powerful nation on earth. Today, much more so than three decades ago, many Guyanese Americans have contacts, if not clout with elected officials and US government decision makers, and can seek/have sought to lobby against any precipitous action. However, there is no guarantee that our efforts would yield the desir-ed results.
Yours faithfully,
Wesley Kirton
