At a forum associated with the recent visit to Guyana by President Santokhi of Suriname, both Minister in the Office of the President Dr Ashni Singh, and Suriname’s Foreign Minister, Albert Ramdin, reportedly expressed the view that, over time, Guyana and Suriname had failed to make good, the advantage of proximity to raise the profile of their bilateral relations in fields that include cross-country investment and other forms of business and economic cooperation.
Their sentiments, though hardly news, are accurate. One of the Achilles heels of Guyana’s bilateral relations with neighbouring countries (the situation in relation to Brazil is probably even worse) has been its abysmal failure to realise the actualisation of bilateral agreements in matters that have to do with critical areas of the country’s development. In fact, analysts of the phenomenon have come to see the ritualistic signings of Agreements in one envisaged field of cooperation or another, as ends in themselves rather than means to worthwhile ends.
The propensity to indulge in these rituals which, in the final analysis, amounts to more form than substance, derives, one often feels, from the nature of diplomatic relations between and among countries which is often characterised by a feeling that it is desirable that there be a decorative underpinning to the practice of diplomacy. In the instance of President Santokhi’s recent visit (and the previous ones) to Guyana, it was evidently felt that it was ‘the done thing’ to adorn the occasion with some kind of signing ceremony. Precedent strongly suggests that these signing ceremonies have been no more than sideshows since, all too often, there is scant evidence of any real effort to actualise the commitments printed on paper. Sometimes, it is not a matter of these signed agreements never receiving any serious attention, but rather, a matter of pointed failure to afford them the kind of deserving sustained attention in the absence of which, the full realisation of the undertakings spelt out therein are almost never realised.
Mindful students of the history of relations between Guyana and Suriname (and there are probably still a few of them around) will doubtless confirm that the history of diplomatic relations between the two countries and more particularly the bilateral encounters at the level of the thirty-odd-year-old Guyana-Suriname Cooperation Council, had frequently been a hotbed of bilateral grumpiness, a circumstance that arose out of the fact that there had been enduring difficulties (reportedly mostly on the part of the Surinamese) with leaving the ‘baggage’ of the boundary dispute behind during bilateral engagements at the level of the Cooperation Council. So that while there may well have been instances in which understandings were reached, in principle, and might even have been actualised on paper, the wider timbre of relations between the two countries often robbed both sides of the institutional will to take forward into actualisation that which had been agreed on paper. Here, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs might perhaps wish to illuminate us further on this matter by favouring us with a report card that balances agreements or understandings arrived at in its bilateral engagements with its opposite number in Paramaribo against the fruitful actualization of those agreements.
A key issue that will have to be dealt with (sooner rather than later) insofar as relations between Guyana and Suriname are concerned, has to do with whether the significant resurgence of country-to-country relations that clearly derives from their recent hugely significant respective oil finds will be sufficient to cause the persistent cat-sparring over the question of fishing in the Corentyne River to be set aside. Frankly, the objective evidence at this time suggests that the jury is still out on that matter.
The surfeit of exchanges of visits at presidential level between Guyana and Suriname that have been in evidence recently, is in a sense, a sounding of their voices to the rest of the world over the promise (hopefully) of significant economic transformation. That, however, is only part of the equation. Dr Singh’s ‘wish’ that Guyana and Suriname be seen as a single economic space amounts, at this stage, to little more than wishful thinking since that cannot be separated from the strongly-held sentiments that have to with territorial integrity, which sentiments cannot simply be harnessed and pressed into service by government alone, either in Suriname or here in Guyana.
Arriving at a collective determination as to whether the oil fortunes of Guyana and Suriname can metamorphose into a subsuming of the prevailing differences between them will require a far greater, more genuine diplomatic effort than has been in evidence up to this time.
