US/Gov’t edge towards deportee pact
Stabroek News
January 26, 2003
The Guyana and United States governments are set to deal with the finer points of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) covering the return of criminal deportees and other Guyanese nationals.
The MOU has been under negotiation for more than a year, and Foreign Minister Rudy Insanally says the process has been drawn out because of an absence of the desired celerity on the part of the bureaucracies of both governments.
He said the issue of such an advisory was a very serious step, and that negotiations had been taking place both at the bilateral and regional levels.
Insanally told reporters last week at a press briefing he hosted at his South road ministry, that the Guyana government was now considering a draft of the document it had received from the US government to see how its concerns had been accommodated. These concerns had been included in the Guyana draft of the document after consultations with various agencies, including the Office of the President and the Ministry of Home Affairs.
Guyana’s concerns, the minister said, related to the procedures for returning criminal deportees to Guyana, and the forms of assistance which could be provided to countries like this one both to monitor and exercise surveillance over their movements and to aid them in readjusting to life here.
“These are the broad areas that must be followed up and negotiated with the United States and ultimately with Canada,” he said.
Owing to the fact that the negotiations were being conducted at a regional level and not just bilaterally, and the CARICOM ambassadors were still engaging the US State Department in relation to a regional framework, Insanally said that of necessity there was much to-ing and fro-ing to see “what we can settle on finally.”
“I am hopeful now that we are at the stage where, having had submissions by all the parties, we can now zone in on those on which agreement can be found.”
About the proposal for the establishment by the US of a regional fund coming from the seized assets of drug traffickers, Insanally said that the CARICOM Secretariat had been informed that the US Immigration and Naturalization Service could find it difficult to launch such a fund - “On that one we would need to go back to the negotiating table.”
In a related matter, Minister Insanally told reporters that his ministry has had no representations from external interests about the wave of violent crime that had engulfed the country for the past eleven months.
“Obviously it is a matter of concern for us who live in Guyana, and I think people wanting to come here - Guyanese who are now resident abroad - would certainly be concerned about the situation.”
However, Insanally observed that as with all countries, we have problems, recalling there was a question being mooted as to whether an advisory should be issued about Guyanese travelling to Venezuela in the light of the situation there.
“These are extreme measures. I do not think while admitting the serious nature of the crime problem now, that we are at that level where we have to face that issue.” He noted that at the time of the CARICOM summit held here in July there were concerns raised in the media as to the government’s ability to host it, but that it had been done successfully.
