Editorial

Political love is a dangerous undertaking, especially in America. The consoling fiction that any candidate’s private virtues will ensure unwavering constancy to their putative ‘core principles’ is tenable only if you don’t read the papers.

On Monday we reported newly appointed Secretary General of the Guyana National Commission for UNESCO Inge Nathoo as saying that she had restarted the process of trying to get sites in Guyana inscribed on the World Heritage List.

The Twenty-Ninth Meeting of the Caricom Heads of State and Government concluded its business at the end of last week and, as is usual, gave the conclusions of its deliberations in its communique.

Considering how much time has elapsed since the discovery of the remains at Camp Lindo and the disarranging of the site, it is vital that the government move speedily to secure skilled pathologists and forensic investigators.

The BBC was not alone in describing the hostage rescue carried out by the Colombian armed forces last Wednesday as like something out of a Hollywood movie script.

When 147 Heads of State and Government met at the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000 and signed a declaration vowing to meet eight set goals in 15 years, no one could have foreseen that today, at just past the halfway mark, forces – both natural and man-made – would have conspired to make achieving those targets much more difficult than they seemed back then.

On June 19 the European Union, at the urging of Spain, which has significant economic interests in Cuba, voted unanimously to lift the diplomatic sanctions it had imposed on Cuba five years ago.

Last weekend in Jerusalem the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) announced its intention to distance itself from the “militant secularism and pluralism” that has made sections of the church “compromised and enfeebled in their witness.” 

In one of what must be a record number of Heads of Government meetings in a half a year, our heads of government meet again this week in their regularly scheduled formal annual meeting, and it seems that they certainly have a lot of talking to each other to do, and some talking to do to us, the citizens of Caricom.

Long before the Lusignan, Bartica and Lindo Creek massacres, the Government Information Agency in September 2007 had reported Lieutenant Colonel Jawahar Persaud of the Guyana Defence Force as expressing satisfaction with the maturity with which the Joint Services had been able to coordinate their operations.

Regardless of who the Camp Lindo murders point to there is one stark and accusing fact that will haunt the government, law enforcement and all of society.

Last Saturday Mr Leonard Arokium emerged from the jungle with a horrific tale to tell: all eight of his men – two of whom were close relatives – had been killed in the most brutal fashion and their bodies burnt at his mining camp in Lindo Creek.

One week before it released its 2008 World Drug Report on Thursday to coincide with International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) issued a press release culled from the information that fed into the report on drugs and crime in Central America and the Caribbean.

Born in Barbados to a Guyanese father (economist, Dr Vishnu Persaud) and a Trinidadian mother (novelist, Lakshmi Persaud), educated in the United Kingdom, where he has distinguished himself as a practising psychiatrist, academic and media star, Dr Raj Persaud has achieved more than most of us could ever dream of attaining in his 45 years.

Anyone who has followed the vicissitudes of democracy in the developing world will find the chaos surrounding Zimbabwe’s latest elections all too familiar.

The visit of a Taiwanese delegation to Beijing over the last fortnight suggests a determination of both the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the new government of Taiwan to begin a process of normalization of relations – though without an as yet clear indication as to what form this will eventually take.

After nearly a decade of dangerous descent into disorder, drug-gang warfare and criminal violence, has Guyana started to move back onto the high road to public safety, security and stability?

When he berated businessman Yesu Persaud at the launching of the Guyana Times on the question of tax concessions for QAII, President Jagdeo argued that the assigning of these concessions was rule-based and according to law.

While the police have clearly made some progress in dealing with Rondell Rawlins’s gang, the public is nevertheless puzzled as to why, in the first instance, most of the members had been able to escape during the Christmas Falls operation.

On 23rd May, with an eye already on the battle with John McCain for the world’s most prestigious political prize, Senator Barack Obama, the then presumptive presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, told the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) in Miami that he would maintain the 45-year-old US economic embargo against Cuba.