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Dr. Odeen Ishmael, retired Guyanese diplomat, dies
Veteran diplomat, Dr. Odeen Ishmael, has passed. In a statement to the press, relatives of Dr. Ishmael confirmed that the retired Foreign Service official passed on Saturday afternoon at his home in Ocala, Florida in the United States of America. He was 70 years old.
During his lifetime, Dr. Ishmael provided diplomatic service by serving as Guyana’s ambassador to Kuwait, a post to which he was appointed in January 2011. In 2012, he was appointed non-resident ambassador to Qatar.
A recipient of the Cacique’s Crown of Honour, he served as Guyana’s ambassador to the United States of America (1993-2003), and later, ambassador to Venezuela (2003-2011).
During his assignment in the US, Dr. Ishmael was serving concurrently as Guyana’s Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States (OAS).
Veteran diplomat, Dr. Odeen Ishmael
According to information posted on a website, Dr. Ishmael worked as a teacher and achieved in the 1980s the status of deputy headmaster in the Guyana school system.
As a member of the Ministry of Education’s Social Studies Curriculum Committee, he and a small team drafted and tested the Social Studies syllabus for the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) in the mid-1970s.
Working in the areas of both secondary and adult education, he also taught in The Bahamas from 1985 to 1993. And in a break away from teaching in 1970-1971, he worked as an information officer in the Ministry of External Affairs (now the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) of Guyana.
From 1997, as Ambassador, Ishmael led Guyana’s delegation to meetings of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). He also participated in the Summits of Heads of States of the OIC in Tehran (1997) and Qatar (2000).
He was also Guyana’s chief negotiator at the Summits of the Americas in 1994 (Miami), 1998 (Santiago de Chile) and 2001 (Quebec City). He was also the chief negotiator at the Summit of Sustainable Development in Bolivia (1996).
Also, from 2001 to 2003 he was Caricom’s representative on the executive committee of the Summit Implementation Review Group (SIRG) of the Summit of the Americas. He was also a leading negotiator in the process that led to the establishment of the Inter-American Democratic Charter in 2001.
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