Stabroek News
May 19, 2001

Guyana's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Rudy Insanally is to be sworn in on Monday as minister in the Office of the President with responsibility for Foreign Affairs.

He will be based in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and his ministry will share its Takuba Lodge accommodations with the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation whose Minister Clement Rohee, remains ensconced in the fourth floor office suite.

The fourth floor office has been traditionally occupied by former foreign ministers, including Rohee, who held the post since 1992 until he was shifted to the Foreign Trade Ministry following the March 19, elections. Insanally, a career diplomat, will be accommodated on another floor.

At his press briefing a week ago, Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon, said that the Foreign Ministry would be tasked with dealing with Guyana's border issues and the country's more formal diplomatic relations with other countries. The Foreign Trade Ministry is to be the focal point for supporting the regional negotiating machinery in its relations with other trading blocs and the talks with the World Trade Organisations and for the Free Trade Areas of the Americas.

Questions have been raised over exactly how the portfolio would be divided between the two ministers.

Insanally is the first of four technocrats to be appointed to President Bharrat Jagdeo's Cabinet. The other posts which President Jagdeo said would be filled by technocrats are Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Minister of Tourism and Industry and Minister of Economic Planning and Development. Stabroek News understands that the appointment of another technocrat is to be made next week but government officials remain tight-lipped on which appointment would be made. It was suggested that the post of Attorney General was likely to be filled by a Guyanese resident here rather than one from the diaspora. Trinidad and Tobago-based Queen's Counsel, Dr Fenton Ramsahoye, had been widely tipped for this post.

Insanally, then a teacher at Queen's College (QC), was among the recruits for the Ministry of External Affairs who were sent on a training course run by the United Nations in Barbados in 1963. Among the other recruits on the course were former foreign minister, Rashleigh Jackson, also then a teacher at QC, and former chief of protocol, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Neil Storey.

Insanally is a graduate of Queen's College, the University of the West Indies and the Sorbonne and taught at Kingston College in Jamaica before returning to teach at QC.

Insanally has had the distinction of being elected president of the United Nations General Assembly. His candidacy was supported by CARICOM after the Guyana government withdrew its support for Jackson. Besides serving at the United Nations, Insanally has served as Guyana's ambassador to Caracas and in various posts at Guyana's missions in Washington and New York.