Dear Editor,
I refer to the comments of the Hon. Attorney General Mr. Anil Nandlall that, inter alia, the presence of Mr. Azruddin Mohamed in parliament in the high office of Leader of the Opposition would leave a ‘stain and…international stigma’ on Guyana and ‘cost us permanent damage’.
In May 2010, the Mega Combination coalition led by the late Mr. Desire (“Desi”) Delano Bouterse won the Suriname elections. Under Suriname’s peculiar constitutional arrangements, Mr. Bouterse then won the majority votes in Parliament in July to allow him to assume the presidency, which he did in August 2010.
It is no secret that President Bouterse had serious legal challenges in The Netherlands to contend with. Partly based on evidence provided through the special procedures under Dutch law of “anonymous witnesses”, he was tried in absentia, convicted and sentenced in 2000 to 11 years in prison on drug trafficking charges. He was also accused at the time in Suriname of being responsible for the murder of fifteen persons and also for being responsible for the killing previously of indigenous Surinamese.
Within the corridors of power in some CARICOM Member States, the prospect of President Bouterse taking his place within the Conference of Heads of Government was initially the subject of conversations. However, in applying the similar yardstick of electoral democracy with which we in the English-speaking Caribbean are familiar, it became accepted that “De Voorzitter” had been elected through the popular expression of the will of the Surinamese people and had thereby earned his rightful place among other democratically-elected CARICOM Heads of Government.
A month after his inauguration, President Bouterse made a request to visit with then CARICOM Secretary General Sir Edwin Carrington at the Secretariat. Being aware of the disquiet in some quarters (not the host country) over Mr. Bouterse’s ascendency to the Presidency, I reached out to my very good friend, now of blessed memory, the then Foreign Minister Winston Lackin – Winston was in the Suriname Embassy in Brussels when I was Legal Counsel at the ACP Secretariat. The Foreign Minister assured me that he had done the necessary diplomatic legwork and there was no prospect of any diplomatic incident occurring, for which either the Secretariat – or the Community for that matter – might even in the most remote of circumstances, be found in any way to be complicit. The visit went ahead as planned.
Thereafter, President Bouterse assumed his place among other Heads of State and Government on the global stage. In January 2012, he assumed the Chairmanship of CARICOM. It so happened that within days, the Government of Guyana, at the request of then President Donald Ramotar, called for an urgent meeting of the Prime Ministerial Sub-committee on Cricket (PMSCC), to bring to its attention the impasse in the governance of cricket that existed at the time with the government, the WICB (now CWI) and the GCB (amazing how far we have travelled from then to now).
It so happens that the Chairman of Conference serves as an ex-officio member of the PMSCC. Thus, in a fit of apparent panic, Minister Lackin called me to confess that neither President Bouterse nor himself had the slightest clue about the issue at hand, much less the game of cricket in general. I assured the Minister that the ex-officio position was a formality and that as usual the Secretary General’s office would provide guidance to the Chair and that in any event, the substantive Chair of the PMSCC would conduct the meeting. That meeting also went ahead as planned and, in the days before Zoom, we welcomed President Ramotar to the Secretariat to participate in the meeting, with Chairman Bouterse joining by telephone.
Thereafter President Bouterse discharged his duties as Chairman of CARICOM effortlessly, hosting his colleague Heads of Government at a Conference in Suriname in March 2012. He also Chaired proceedings between CARICOM and its bilateral partners and participated in a meeting between CARICOM and the US chaired by President Barack Obama in the margins of the Sixth Summit of the Americas in Colombia the following month.
Editor, the sitting President of the most powerful country in the world is a convicted felon. With all the sanctions against President Nicolas Maduro, the US oil giant Chevron was still anxious to do business in Venezuela. President Vladimir Putin, also under international sanctions, was given a red-carpet welcome on US soil by his counterpart last August. The de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, against whom serious human rights allegations have been made, was visited by a US President (fist bump and all) and welcomed to the White House just last month by another. The extensive oil and gas reserves in Equatorial Guinea continue to support commercial exploration and exploitation by major international companies, despite the fact that its President, Teodoro Obiang, is the longest serving leader in Africa and runs the country like a family enterprise.
All this means that in spite of the legal and other governance challenges facing these various world leaders, it is largely “business as usual” when it comes to the decidedly transactional relations with their countries. Suriname, two Presidents after Desi Bouterse, is now counted among prosperous oil-producing states, as is Guyana since 2015.
The recognition of President Bouterse by a previous PPP/C administration is a clear sign that the party understands the realpolitik involved in peaceful co-existence among nation-states. We have seen the resident US Ambassador pivot away from her initial expressions of apprehension over Mr. Azruddin Mohamed’s political future, to the post-election position whereby a “workaround” would be found.
If this kind of modus vivendi could prevail when it comes to sitting Heads of State, what manner of ‘stain and…international stigma’ would befall Guyana, that a little oil and skillful diplomacy can’t remove? What ‘damage’ would we suffer, that we would not be able to mitigate? This is all the more so as Mr. Mohamed is sitting among non-governmental members of the Assembly and not occupying a governmental office, much less that of a Head of State. Moreover, Mr. Mohamed is a citizen of Guyana who, while not before a court in the US, is rather the subject of a grand jury indictment, for which he is entitled both here and in the US to the constitutional guarantees of the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial and to due process of law.
As a young diplomat some years ago, in a delicate diplomatic conversation with Dr. Lennox Ballah a well-respected diplomat from Trinidad and Tobago, also of blessed memory, he explained to me that a certain course of action was occasioned by the fact that ‘Guyana’s political odor at the time was acceptable’. I submit that once again, in the current circumstances, oil rich Guyana is smelling fine and rosy…unless goat bite we!?