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ASKING GUYANA TO TURN A HUG INTO A VICE WAS WRONG!

Jan 28, 2011 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Guyana is not Trinidad and Tobago. Foreign countries are not going to dictate to Guyana when it comes to the rendition or extraditing of foreign nationals, and more so when that foreign national is an invited guest.
It was highly disrespectful of that foreign mission, whoever they were, to have asked the government of Guyana to arrest the president of Suriname.
The government of Guyana has indicated that it would not do so because the president of Suriname was at the time an elected head of state. But even if he were a lowly minister or simply a visitor, once he was a guest of the state of Guyana and not on a private visit, Guyana could not entertain the idea of arresting him for the purposes of extradition.
It would have amounted to entrapment for Guyanese authorities to have arrested Mr. Bouterse after he would have been received as an official guest of the country. That would have been an act of dishonour on the part of Guyana to have welcomed someone with open arms, only to have those very arms become a vice.
Guyana acted decorously in refusing the request from the foreign mission, even if it did so for the wrong reasons. A country does not arrest its guests so that they can be extradited.
In any event, Mr. Bouterse could not have been arrested in Guyana because as a head of state he enjoys diplomatic immunity here. Guyana cannot openly flout its obligations under international conventions by arresting the Surinamese president.
Had Guyana laid a finger on Bouterse, he could have found a remedy in an appeal to international law under which he enjoys diplomatic immunity as head of state of a country.
Further, to have arrested a head of state of a neighbouring country would have triggered an angry reaction from that country and no doubt resulted in possible military retaliation. The government of Guyana could not have risked that possibility.
The president of Guyana has only made known the request that was made for the arrest of Mr. Bouterse after there was a leak of some alleged correspondence said to have emanated from the United States Embassy in Paramaribo to the Embassy in Georgetown, which we were told were released as part of the Wikileaks disclosures and which accuses the Surinamese President of having links with one Shaheed Khan, a Guyanese who entered in a plea bargaining case and is serving a prison sentence on drug trafficking charges within the United States of America.
What is most interesting about the leaks is that it did not take place through any of the Wikileaks websites or to the news houses that are releasing the 250,000 US diplomatic cables.
The alleged leaks about the Surinamese President is not even to be found on the Wikileaks website, which has so far published the contents of 2, 734 cables of which only four refer to Suriname, and none of which mention the name of the Surinamese President.
The leaks originated from newspapers in Holland and Norway, two unusual sources for such leaks.
This raises the possibility as to whether these leaks were orchestrated to provide the government of Guyana with a basis for arresting the Surinamese leader who is likely to be visiting Guyana as a follow-up to the talks he and President Jagdeo held late last year.
By linking the Surinamese to the activities of someone who is said to have committed crimes in Guyana, the leaks may be attempting to provide Guyana with a legal basis for arresting the Surinamese president.
Or it may be that what we are witnessing is one big hoax in so far as the leaks are concerned, since it is highly unusual for correspondence containing that sort of intelligence to be passed from one embassy to the next.
The usual route would have been to the State Department and copied to the relevant missions.
The United States has denied that any of its missions had asked for help in arresting the Surinamese President, and therefore it can only be concluded that the request came from a European country with an interest in Desi Bouterse.
The United States has gone further than simply denying that it ever asked for Mr. Bouterse’s arrest.
It has added that it recognized Mr. Bouterse as the elected president of Suriname and looked forward to good ties with him.
They should invite him to the United States for an official visit.

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