TT foreign policy on Guyana a shambles

THE EDITOR: While Prime Minister Dr Rowley was in Ghana, the acting prime minister Mr Imbert announced that TT was not going to interfere or get involved in Guyana's domestic, internal affairs regarding its general elections. This position seemed to be nonsensical if not very contradictory and inconsistent at worst.

This policy of detached non-interference which gained traction in the Maduro political crisis in Venezuela, cannot be applied willy-nilly to the current stalemate in finalising official results of the Guyanese elections, for the following Guyana-specific reasons:

• Guyana and TT belong to the same economic and market space (CSME) and political tension in Georgetown can strangle the operations of CSME against the interests of TT and other Caricom states;

• TT and Guyana being members of the Commonweath, OAS and the Caribbean Community (Caricom) are deemed to support/endorse the findings and pronouncements of the respective Observer Missions mounted by these three regional bodies and accredited by the Guyanese Government unless TT absolved itself previously from the participation and findings of these observer missions, which it has now reluctantly now done, in support of these findings;

• TT and Guyana with other Caricom states subscribe to the tenets of functional co-operation in their common economic space as well as well as co-ordination and even harmonisation of foreign policies in the political sphere in the Treaty of Chaguaramas.

Our ministers including the absentee Minister of Foreign Affairs, who has not spoken on this high-profile regional issue, do not seem to appreciate that TT is bound by the stated findings of the observer missions which were in Guyana for the elections, having not previously exercised its sovereign option to be excluded or to disengage.

Upon his return however from his Ghananian safari on Tuesday, Rowley, at Piarco changed TT’s position to now lending support for the higher profile Caricom “interfering” multilateral meditation process headed by Caricom chairman, PM of Barbados Mia Mottley.

Our foreign policy ambivalence must be embarrassing to the thinking people of TT who demand a higher standard of diplomacy, statesmanship and common sense, not waffling, uncoordinated and discordant nonsense from a motley lot.

STEPHEN KANGAL

CARON