The Carter Center should be granted permission to return

May 04, 2020 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The final script has not yet been written in the ongoing saga of Guyana’s 2020 General and Regional Elections. The latest twist in the tale, as at yesterday at 16:00 hours was that the government had not granted permission to the Carter Center representatives to return for the recount.
It should be recalled that it was the Government of Guyana which invited the Carter Center to observe the 2020 General and Regional Elections. The Center did not come on their own accord.
The Center, which was founded by former United States President Jimmy Carter had indicated that it was willing to return for the recount. In its departure statement on 20th March 2020, the Center said, “The Carter Center remains committed to its mandate to observe the entirety of the electoral process and remains on standby to return to Guyana.” It is now being denied such an opportunity.
The United States Embassy has reportedly escalated the request for the Center’s return. It has asked for a review by President David Granger. He is likely to grant it because he is the person who agreed to a recount and who had invited the Caricom team to scrutinize the process.
The government has always seemed willing to play a “good guy”, “bad guy” role when dealing with contentious issues. The good guys always end up cleaning up the mess that the “bad guys’ created.
We saw this happening when the COIVID-19 Task Force initially demanded that the members of the Caribbean Community be quarantined for 14 days upon arrival in Guyana. The President intervened and overrode this directive.
The same is expected in the case of the request for the return of the Carter Center. But even if the President denies the permission, it does not mean that the Carter Center cannot complete its observation of the elections.
There are independent persons, from Guyana, the Caribbean and Latin America, who can be asked to stand-in for the team. The Carter Center once had an office in Guyana and it would have had a network of contacts who it can request to observe the recount on its behalf. There are still at least two former Chairmen of the Guyana Elections Commission who are resident and present in Guyana, at the moment who can be asked to fill in for those who have been denied entry.
There are high-level former Prime Ministers and former President and former Foreign Ministers from the Caribbean and Latin America who can be asked to do the same. It should be recalled that the Commonwealth Observer Mission was headed by former Barbadian Prime Minister Owen Arthur and the OAS Observer Mission was headed by former Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding.
When the Carter Center first came to Guyana in the run-up to the 1990 elections, former Prime Minister of Belize, George Price was part of its team. In 2015, former Foreign Minister of Barbados Dame Billie Miller was part of the Carter Center’s Observer Misison. In 2001, former Barbados Prime Minister Erskine Sandiford was part of the team which observed those elections for the Carter Center.
It would be an embarrassment to the COVID-19 Task Force and to the Government were it to deny entry into the country of distinguished personnel from the Caribbean and beyond. The present denial by the government of permission for the Carter Center is likely to be interpreted as it having something to hide or planning to do something which it does not wish the outside world to see.
The Carter Center is not a partisan organization. It is a highly-respected international organization which has observed elections all around the world. It has an excellent track-record in this regard. A government which has nothing to hide would encourage the return of the Carter Center.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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