Professor David Dabydeen has denied nominating President Bharrat Jagdeo for the Nobel Peace Prize for efforts on climate change but revealed that he has been reliably informed that a North America-based Trinidadian academic has done so.
In an official response to Stabroek News following a request for this newspaper to write to him with its queries, the Guyana-born writer and academic said while he did not propose Jagdeo, “I am happy to propose, if it is in my gift to do so, any deserving Guyanese for international awards.”
Stabroek News was reliably informed that the nomination and information package has already been sent to Oslo, Norway and that Dabydeen was responsible for the nomination. When contacted in the UK, he had told Stabroek News that he could not speak on the matter and had provided his email address and had asked that this newspaper make contact with him.
This bit of information was reported and five days after the December 2 publication Stabroek News wrote to Dabydeen to confirm whether he had nominated Jagdeo for the world-renowned prize and whether he had anything to say with regard to the nomination.
In a full response yesterday, Dabydeen told Stabroek News that he did not make the proposal but was told by a usually reliably source that the Trinidadian who made the nomination did so following Time Magazine’s 2008 announcement of President Jagdeo as one of the 20 heroes of the environment and lectures given by Jagdeo in 2009.
Meanwhile, he argued that Guyana has produced many persons of international distinction and listed Dr Yesu Persaud, Sir Shridath Ramphal, Professor Clive Thomas and Baroness Valerie Amos and said he would be happy to propose any deserving Guyanese for international awards.
He said he was supportive of any effort to redeem Guyana’s reputation from the horror of Jonestown.
“I am acutely aware, from my travels, of how Guyana’s rainforest is associated exclusively with Jonestown, and Guyanese are seen as citizens of a benighted country that experienced the largest mass suicide/killings in modern history. This, frankly, makes me ashamed to be a Guyanese,” he said.
He further stated that he was grateful to former late president Desmond Hoyte who in1989 created Iwokrama as the first step towards such redemption. “… and he and I, two weeks before his death, discussed the promise of his initiative and the possibility of him being the Guyanese Patron of Iwokrama (the Royal Patron being Prince Charles). I had previously contacted Sir Richard Attenborough to give a talk in Britain on Iwokrama, to give the project greater international public profile,” he said.
Dabydeen also said that Hoyte was undoubtedly a visionary and with regard to the rainforest, “he put Guyana on the world’s environment map.” He observed that others more grounded in Guyana could comment more exclusively on Hoyte’s politics.
He said too that President Cheddi Jagan then signed the Iwokrama Act in 1996, and President Jagdeo is now in the process of international negotiation to bring economic benefits to the country in return for safeguarding the environment.
“It seems to me that when Raleigh sought gold in Guyana in the 1590s, he couldn’t see the wood from the trees (or indeed, the trees from the wood), for the wealth of Guyana may well lie in its rainforest. Wealth, not just in terms of money, but in the rainforest’s amazing ecosystem and its capacity to contribute to the well-being of the planet,” he said.
Dabydeen told Stabroek News that the real issue is not whether President Jagdeo should get the Nobel but whether Guyana can do enough to deserve such global acclaim, “and by Guyana I mean all of us.
“My complete conviction is that the future is not black or brown or white or yellow (ethnic issues should be in the 20th century dustbin). The future is green, and Guyana has an abundance of it.”
President Jagdeo has spearheaded a campaign to fight climate change which has as its centrepiece, the monetizing of the value of Guyana’s forests.
He recently secured a pledge from Norway of US$250 million for the preservation of Guyana’s forests in advance of the current Copenhagen Summit on climate change which is expected to see a major push for financial assistance for developing countries with forests. He has also campaigned extensively overseas on behalf of climate change as adumbrated in the Low Carbon Development Strategy which his government presented recently.
In October this year, US President Barack Obama was nominated for and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Every year since 1901 the Nobel Prize has been awarded for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for peace. The Nobel Prize is an international award administered by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank established the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize.
