The Office of the President (OP) yesterday aborted a special presidential briefing for the parliamentary opposition parties on Guyana’s stand on the Cariforum/EU Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA).
Earlier in the day, the PNCR publicly refused an invitation to the meeting, while the Alliance For Change (AFC) claimed that it had not received any notification. Late yesterday afternoon word spread that the proposed engagements had been cancelled. Guyana Action Party-Rise Organise and Rebuild (GAP-ROAR) MP Everall Franklyn told Stabroek News that he had planned to attend the forum but later learnt of a postponement. AFC Chairman Khemraj Ramjattan, meanwhile, said he had no knowledge that the party had been invited to any such forum.
Stabroek News attempted to get an official comment from OP Press and Publicity Officer Kwame McKoy, but he said he had did not know officially what time the forum was to have started. He was not in the office at the time this newspaper made contact with him, and could not say definitively whether the meeting was cancelled or postponed.
At a press conference yesterday, the PNCR Chief Whip Lance Carberry said the party was officially notified of the briefing with Jagdeo via a letter, dated September 11, from Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon. Carberry, reading from a prepared statement, explained that the party’s decision to boycott the briefing came following mature consideration. He said that given previous experience, no good would have been served by attending it. He added that the party was at a loss to determine what purpose the briefing would serve since President Jagdeo’s pronouncements on the EPA are already in the public domain.
Also, setting the record straight on the party’s position on the EPA, Carberry said the agreement was deficient, though it possessed many positive aspects, including its potential for aiding Guyana’s trade and development. He added that while the party saw merit in some of the President’s arguments, it has strong reservations about his timing.
Carberry pointed out that the government inherited a template for negotiations with the EU and if followed the President and his administration would have mobilized all the relevant institutions, invited experts and worked out a comprehensive negotiating policy framework underpinned by a robust public information programme.
Later, responding to a question on the issue of sensitization, he stressed that the EPA was too important to be treated as one only for the President and the government. He said the implications of the agreement should have been known by all each step of the way.
PNCR MP Aubrey Norton also noted that the party had expected government to use the consultations held prior to the Barbados summit as an opportunity to inform those present and invite views, but said the process was not such. He explained that the party responded to that invitation for consultation because it expected that the process and approach would have been a genuine one. But he said the occasion turned out to ne nothing more than a stage-managed forum for President Jagdeo to advocate his views.
Carberry said the party was dismayed that the Jagdeo administration appeared not to have seen the need to have a proper inter-agency and multi-stakeholder approach to the EPA, in which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Trade and International Cooperation would have played pivotal roles. “Equally disturbing, is the absence of any evidence that the Guyana Mission in Brussels was properly briefed and staffed to support this important national exercise, in order to effectively contribute towards the promotion and protection of Guyana’s interest in relation to the EU and the EPA,” he added. Instead, he accused the government of choosing to fragment those activities. He said the President appeared to have operated, “as if he alone is the custodian of the interest of the nation.”
Dangerous politics
Carberry drew attention to the fact that the government had since April 2004 — when the Caribbean Forum of ACP states launched the EPA negotiations with the EU — to take all necessary steps to organize for the negotiations, in a manner that he said would effectively promote and protect the interests of the people of Guyana. In this context, he said the President’s activities days before the Caricom special meeting and his attacks on Caricom’s Regional Negotiating Machinery (CRNM) must be seen as a reflection of poor planning, inefficiency and a lack of appreciation and understanding of the diplomacy of the negotiating process. Carberry noted that the institutional arrangements of Caricom would have ensured that RNM was briefed and guided at every stage of the negotiations by each Heads of Government Conference convened from the start of the process in April 2004 to the initialling of the EPA in December 2007. He added that representatives of the Guyana government have continued to be integrally involved at each stage of the negotiating process and had ample opportunity to promote and protect the national interests.
In this context, he described the President’s recent criticisms of the CRNM as “dangerous politics and ill-considered diplomacy”. At a press conference last week, President Jagdeo questioned the CRNM’s ability to represent Caricom’s interest in trade talks.
Moreover, he suggested that it was time that it was brought under the authority of the Caricom Secretariat. Jagdeo maintained that Guyana was urging other member states against signing the EPA in its current form because it compromised the interests of the region in many ways. However, he said the region appeared to be no longer interested in technical arguments on the EPA but in politicizing it. He accused the CRNM, which is supposed to be a technical body, of lobbying for the agreement when it should have been briefing the heads of government about all of the options available and about the discourse on the EPAs taking place in Europe, Africa and the Pacific. “…But instead they have joined the political bandwagon and [are] creating talking points for the region,” he had said.
