Editorial

It is somewhat ironic that even as we were calling last Friday for heads to be banged together in order to resolve the constitutional crisis in Honduras, an announcement was being made to the effect that a high-level US mission, led by Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, had succeeded, on the previous evening, in getting representatives of the deposed president, Manuel Zelaya, and of the interim leader, Roberto Micheletti, to agree on a negotiated solution.

The seeds of violence, planted, watered and fed have taken root and blossomed; violently cut down they spring up again sprouting numerous branches wherever one is lopped off.

Caribbean observers will have been watching with interest the efforts of the Bruce Golding government, since its accession to office in Jamaica, to come to terms with what domestic and external observers recognize as a serious economic crisis.

Public confidence in the Guyana Police Force has been eroded over the past decade by numerous allegations of bribery, corruption, collaboration with narco-traffickers, extra-judicial killings, torture and other wrongdoing.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the abandonment of the UK Security Sector Reform Programme is the unmistakable signal from the Guyana Government that the course as it relates to security issues is set.

All societies need men and women of vision; people who can lift their eyes to the horizon and assimilate the larger contours of a landscape rather than studying only the earth beneath their feet.

In just over a month, the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen will attempt to strike a balance between developing nations who need to reduce their use of carbon, and industrialized nations who have already deforested their own nations and perpetrated many of the environmental  mistakes which they are seeking to prevent their poorer counterparts from repeating.

Contrary to expectations that a negotiated solution to the four-month-old crisis in Honduras was near, the stalemate continues.

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez told the citizens of that country last week that they should shower for just three minutes in order to conserve on water usage in the face of low water reserves as a result of the current El Nino weather phenomenon.

From time to time there are suggestions that Caricom is not making progress or has lost its raison d’etre.

Only two days after Shaheed ‘Roger’ Khan had been jailed in New York for several crimes including importing cocaine into the USA from his base in Georgetown, Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee found it appropriate to congratulate the Customs Anti-Narcotic Unit and pour praise on its personnel for their “work in the suppression of illicit trafficking in narcotics.”

After years of unremitting pressure, the government seems to be attempting to do something about the elephant in the room – the rampage of Roger Khan and his cohorts in these parts.

There was some discussion earlier in this newspaper, particularly in the letters column, about whether Mavado should have been banned from performing in this country.

Within the space of a week, the mainstream press in the United States has embarrassed itself at least three times by confusing fact and fiction Not only have many television stations and newspapers managed to attribute unsourced (and patently false) racist remarks to the conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, they have also managed to attend a fake press conference without realising that they were listening to actors, and devoted dozens of hours and thousands of column inches to the dramatic story of a young boy borne up into the sky by a homemade balloon, only to discover that he had never been inside the balloon and that the whole incident had been staged by his family.

Queen’s College alumni from the Diaspora, the majority of them old boys from the late 1950s and early 1960s, have already started to arrive for next week’s reunion hosted by the Queen’s College Old Students’ Association (QCOSA).

As yet another week of power outages and low and high voltages begins to wind down, one cannot help but wonder how it is that we seem to not be able to get it right.

As then Senator Barack Obama campaigned for the American Presidency he seemed to understand well enough that the war in Iraq had become a millstone around President George Bush’s neck, in much the same way as, in the mid-1960’s an inherited war in Vietnam put Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s administration in jeopardy, eventually forcing the President to declare that he would not seek re-election.

Commissioner of Police Henry Greene admitted at the Guyana Police Force’s 170th anniversary awards ceremony last July that the rising rates of armed robbery with violence and robbery with aggravation continue to be “worrisome.”

Aside from all of the other ramifications, the sentencing of Mr Roger Khan in a New York court for conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States shines the spotlight brightly on the government’s stark failure to interdict and tear down the drug trade.

So finally Roger Khan has been sentenced in a New York federal court for drug smuggling, witness tampering and gun possession in Vermont.