Dear Editor,
The Guyana Chronicle of Wednesday, January 7, 2009 (‘Guyana condemns atrocities perpetrated against Palestinians – President Jagdeo’) carries the unfortunate comments of Guyana’s beleaguered President on the Gaza situation, noticeable in its carelessness and misrepresentation for the outrageous comments that Israel’s strong military response to years of day-by-day, unprovoked, Gazan missile-fire is somehow tantamount to “sanctioned genocide.”
The article follows another buried deep in the Stabroek News of December 31, 2008, and captioned ‘US must stop supporting Israel’s “terrorism” – PPP.’
Then, one had hoped that this foolish talk was going to be limited to standard party misinformation and speechifying, and not be seen to be indicative of a ‘government’ or ‘national’ position. Sadly, with the President’s latest statement, doubtless inspired by a lack of response to the PPP article, we now have the unthinkable.
By no stretch of the imagination should the President’s own political myopia be considered or propagated as a ‘Guyana’ position. He has not consulted the people. He has clearly not entertained all the facts. There are other, equally significant, implications for this misrepresentation at the regional (Caricom) level.
With the just-concluded EU-EPA debacle, when the President found himself at stupendous odds with his Caribbean counterparts, a shocking lack of statesmanship and leadership led to an absence from the signing ceremony. Now we have a strident and histrionic political announcement on Gaza when even Egypt has been very careful about pronouncing upon the situation given its distaste for Hamas. With the violence poised to escalate to regional (Mid-east) proportions, we should be careful about inflammatory statements in our own Caricom.
It is clear to all but the politically blind that Hamas’s hypocrisy and treachery has led to this ‘Red Sea’ of its own making in Gaza. And they don’t seem to care about their own people (who foolishly elected them to power on a promise of continued aggression against Israel), choosing to use them as human shields in a contemptible terrorist agenda. This has been well documented, and we need not waste time arguing about it.
Guyana’s position should in fact be that an enduring solution to the Gaza issue must include the total cessation of rocket-fire on Israel. Anything else would be hypocritical. But then this is the virtue that defines standard Arab governance and diplomacy.
Given Hamas’s willingness to sacrifice the blood of its electorate (these “Palestinians” the President speaks about) this will not soon happen. In the meantime, Israel will, and must, defend itself after years of daily bombardment.
In the meantime, ill-considered rhetoric by any Caribbean leader should not replace considered consultation with the Guyanese people, the opposition, and Caricom on this issue.
Guyana’s President needs to focus at this time, and understand that his time would be better spent answering age-old questions resuscitated by Lall Kumar Ramsingh in the SN of January 7 (‘If so much money has been spent on drainage, why is it not working?’).
Yours faithfully,
Roger Williams
