Guyana breaks ranks under US pressure

Guyana’s agreeing to the demand of the United States not to hold any US soldiers for turning over to the International Criminal Court for trial for war crimes, while a betrayal of Caricom ideals, is an example not merely of Guyana’s weakness, but one of the bullying tactics of Uncle Sam.

Guyana, a relatively poor Caribbean country, is on the one hand hoping that its action will bring accelerated US private sector investment and US Government aid, while on the other cringingly repaying the US for having saved it in the late nineties from being declared in default. This had happened when the Paris Club, a group of creditor nations mainly West European and including Japan, demanded payment of outstanding loans made to Guyana, had been asked by the US, not only to stay their hands, but to actually forgive two-thirds of the Guyanese debt. I have dealt with this in earlier columns. And understandably, should the United States, with its literal sword of Damocles hanging over the head of the South American country, lift its mantle of protection, Guyana would be once again open to relevant Paris Club nations demanding monies owed them, and risk being declared in default. This would mean that Guyana’s overseas investments and shipments to the value of monies owed, could be seized until the debt is discharged. Guyana’s is a difficult situation. In turn, any lifting of protection by the United States could mean that Venezuela may not only reopen the issue of its claims to a substantial part of the Caricom country, but actually send troops in should it believe that the US would not intervene militarily. Admittedly, this is an extreme position.

The United States’ coercing of Guyana on the International Criminal Court issue is plain bullying. Theoretically, Trinidad and Tobago could exert some pressure of its own on Guyana, which today owes this country somewhat in excess of US$160 million, and may never be able to repay this sum. What if Trinidad and Tobago should give Guyana a time within which to start liquidating the debt or face action leading to its being declared in default? Guyana would be placed in an extremely difficult position. Unfortunately, however, the United States, which sees itself as a ‘friend’ of Guyana, if only to maintain a convenient foothold in South America, and at at the same time keep Venezuela ‘in its place,’ may then move against this country. The US has several options, one of which is to pressure those Paris Club nations to which Trinidad and Tobago owes money, to call in their debts! It can also exert pressure through the Inter-American Development Bank, and through the International Monetary Fund.

I shift gears. Any Iraqis, who are understandably relieved to be rid of their former dictator, Saddam Hussein, and perhaps see the American and British armed forces as liberators, may discover, as the Filipinos did after the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898, that they are there as colonisers and/or exploiters. Emilio Aguinaldo, the famous Filipino patriot, who had at first welcomed the Americans in 1898, hoping that they had come to liberate them from brutal Spanish rule, would later lead the battle for Filipino Independence from 1899 to March of 2001. US President William McKinley’s remark in 1898 that the US was in the Philipines merely “to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilise and Christianise them,” would later be criticised by Mark Twain, whom I quoted in an earlier column, and by the industrialist-philanthroper, Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie, who is best known in this country for his establishing and funding of the Carnegie Free Library in San Fernando, which bears his name, would say with bitterness to the US Government after some 100,000 Filipinos had been killed fighting for their freedom, and effectively subdued: “You seem to have about finished civilising the Filipinos.”

Saddam Hussein’s rule of Iraq was brutal and corrupt, but this is no excuse for the United States and the United Kingdom, which invaded Iraq on the basis of misleading their countrymen/women, and an incredibly large number of other people, to remain on in that country. Iraq, in 2003, is the same as the Philippines in 1898 et sequitur. The US had invaded the Philippines in 1898, not to free the island chain from Spanish rule, but rather to establish a protected gateway to the then rapidly expanding markets of the Far East. Its military intervention in Iraq was not designed to free Iraqis from Saddam, that was incidental. It was primarily to control Iraq’s massive oil reserves and to stop Hussein’s tactic, developed in 1999, of not only having his crude exports to Europe paid for in Euros, but that of encouraging other Middle Eastern nations to trump and follow suit. And with Iraq’s and Kuwait’s oil under control, the aim was clearly to make Israel irrelevant! Meanwhile, the Iraqis appear to have in place a calculating strategy of not killing many American troops at any given time, but rather at an average of one a day. They appear to work on the assumption that killing one US soldier a day would generate a groundswell of parental and otherwise family opinion demanding the return of American troops. The Iraqis seem to accept however, that any large scale slaughter of US servicemen would have the opposite effect, and see a call for tougher measures against any rebellion.