“They vomit all over our shoes”
Freddie on Monday
Kaieteur News
July 19, 2004
Edward Clay has earned a positive reputation for himself in the world of human rights. In the world of diplomacy, however, Mr. Clay hasn’t achieved open accolades but no doubt, he has been given such by secret hands.
Why would he receive secret respect? In the corridors of diplomacy there is no room for bluntness but Mr. Clay is more blunt than diplomatic. When diplomats resort to frank language, they get themselves in trouble.
In Guyana we have two situations, one public, the other yet to be made known. There has been an announcement that the Government of Guyana wants the UNDP representative recalled. The government didn’t like the diplomat’s pronouncement on the need to have a transparent, impartial inquiry into Minister Gajraj’s alleged administration of an extra-judicial force that hunted and killed suspected and wanted criminals.
According to the thinking of the leadership of the government, the diplomat could only interfere in the internal affairs of the country if the government of that state is not an elected one.
If the country is a practicing democracy, with an open, transparent electoral system, no foreign government or international organization can voice even an opinion on the domestic affairs of a democratic, sovereign state. The PPP would argue then that when the UN, American senators and other world leaders demanded free and fair election under the Burnham and Hoyte regimes, that was a legitimate human rights request coming from the international community based on absolute human values.
An absolute human value is the right of a citizen to choose his/her leader. And the Burnham and Hoyte Governments were not legally elected administrations.
According to the persons in the Guyana Government who want the chief of mission of the UNDP recalled, the right of the citizen to be treated fairly and justly is not an absolute value in the social contract between the Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes’ term) and his subjects, but even if it were so, then an external, diplomatic agency cannot comment on that because in so doing, the sovereign status of the independent state would have been insulted.
This is the gist of the quarrel between the Guyana Government and the UN.
Well, well! Look at the unpredictability of life! Look at the uncertainty of life! Look at the surprises life hold for us! Here is the government now locked in dispute with the UN, the very UN that was instrumental in the PPP coming to power in 1992. But history shows that life is not surprising after all.
An American once asked, “Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?” Who would have believed that the UN that did so much to help the PPP come into office in 1992 has now been castigated as an ‘infringer’ of Guyana’s sovereignty?
Peeping Tom is out to prove Jerome Khan right. Khan said that the peeper is a PPP propagandist. The peeper wrote in his column last Friday that the UN should have recalled the diplomat. Where did the peeper get his interpretation on the work of the United Nations from?
A government requests that a UN diplomat be sent home and the UN quietly acquiesces. Sorry, peeper that is not how the UN operates. The UN right now is in touch with the Guyana Government over the Gonzales affair. Dr. Gonzales’s wife has written to the UN asking that the government here to allow her Cuban husband to live and work in Guyana and grant him Guyanese nationality. The government replied asking that the UN ceases its involvement. The UN has refused to do so.
The other situation not yet clarified is that the government may have insisted that a certain High Commissioner be sent home but the diplomat’s country, like the UN, has rejected the appeal.
But what has all of this to do with Edward Clay and why did Mr. Clay receive secret congratulations? Edward Clay is the British High Commissioner to Kenya. He and his government were instrumental in getting the present coalition government in Kenya into power after decades of authoritarian rule, a situation very similar to Guyana in 1992.
Mr. Clay is not a person made of clay. He is so mad at the unprecedented corruption he has seen in the present government in Kenya, a government that promised so much, a government whose ruling coalition during the election campaigned on good and clean rulership, that he lost his cool and his nerves in a speech to a private gathering and said that the Kenya Government is stealing the aid money that it gets.
He went on to say that when they finish emptying the treasury, the government comes back begging for more. He used crude, undiplomatic language to describe the corrupt nature of the governing coalition in Nairobi. He said that they eat like gluttons, then “they vomit all over our shoes”, meaning, those from whom they want more aid.
This was indeed an undiplomatic plunge and the British Government has chastised Mr. Clay for conduct unbecoming but Clay has won appreciation from many observers worldwide, because he spoke the truth about the reality of the post-colonial world.
Some top diplomat had to say it and one day it had to be said and Edward Clay has stepped forward. It is doubtful that the British Government will sack him.
In Guyana, the World Bank and the IMF have insisted on legislative changes that have taken out of the hands of the Cabinet, the power to grant concessions to businessmen and remigrants. The procurement process has also been strengthened to reflect a more transparent and fair process.
Why has this happened? Because of widespread abuse of the system in which corrupt officials used their power to grant concessions and contracts.
Look at the recent remigrant scam. Duty free cars were shared out like a teacher giving away biscuits to schoolchildren. All the requirements were tossed aside and a corrupt system replaced the legal procedure.
The state lost a huge amount of revenue that could have gone into the treasury to make the lives of the poor more bearable.
The anger of Edward Clay is the anger of a majority of people in Pakistan, Guyana, Kenya, Trinidad under Panday, and so many other Third World countries. The pain, torture and violence these countries endured under authoritarian rule forced the international community to intervene. And look what the reality is today. Mr. Clay is so right.
When the stolen aid money is finished, they go back to the international community and like the undignified beggars you find on the streets of Calcutta, they vomit their request on the shoes of the givers.