PRESIDENT Bharrat Jagdeo will today leave for the high-profile and much-talked-about Fifth Summit of the Americas to be held in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, where he has high expectations that at least ‘a few concrete issues or initiatives’ can emerge out of the long list of pledges currently on the draft declaration to be finalised by the some 33 Heads of State and Government that will be attending the Summit, including the highly popular United States President Barrack Obama.
President Jagdeo, speaking at a news conference yesterday at the Presidential Secretariat in Georgetown, said he will be joining fellow leaders of CARICOM in a series of engagements before the formal opening of the summit tomorrow, in an effort to “concretise positions” that the regional leaders may wish to pursue at the Summit.
A wide-ranging declaration will be issued upon the conclusion of the summit on Sunday, entitled ‘Securing our citizens future by promoting human prosperity, energy security and environmental sustainability’.
The current draft declaration has 66 paragraphs and, according to President Jagdeo, “a whole deal of pledges to cooperate in nutrition, health, housing, education, fighting violence, terrorism and crime, promoting human rights, tackling poverty, advancing our economy, diversifying energy sources, fighting climate change and a hundred other issues that are all part of what we have come to expect as regular communiqués or declarations from these summits”.
“You can see for yourself that it almost touches every issue under the sun; so my expectations and hope is that we can focus on a few issues, very concrete issues or initiatives, that can emerge out of this long list of pledges that we have made but which are often forgotten by the time people leave these summits,” the Guyanese head-of-state told reporters.
Alluding to the fact that the (draft) declaration has already been negotiated, President Jagdeo said the document is written in the “typical language of summits of the past”.
“So I hope that our (Guyana’s) presence in Trinidad and Tobago would add value to the process and would allow us to select just a few of these initiatives that we can actually implement. I think that would be the most useful use of our time,” President Jagdeo posited.
“…these meetings, they tend to follow a format because there are so many countries with so many different positions. There is a long process leading up to the meeting to negotiate the output of the meeting and so often every country wants to add their pet area and this invariably extends the output document, the declaration or the communiqué.
“But from a practical purpose, once it starts getting so big and it covers everything and it is mainly decorative in intent, as a practical plan of action, it is not very useful because people tend to commit and then they move off and nothing happens,” President Jagdeo explains.
It is in this regard that the President said it would be better if participants at the Summit should “extract” some specific and ‘earth shattering’ issues that are really “sector-leading or region-moving initiatives”, and narrow-in on those.
OBAMA WILL MAKE A DIFFERENCE
He also expressed a keen interest in the prospect of, along with other regional leaders, working with United States President Barack Obama, noting that Mr. Obama has an “enlightened approach” on many issues that are before the leaders for discussion at the Summit.
“I think we have a greater chance of succeeding at the region; the situation now is very much different than the time when we had the last summit and this is largely because of the enlightened approach of President Obama on many of the issues that are before us for discussion.”
On this note, President Jagdeo recalled that just about two months ago, he spoke about the differences Guyana had with the U.S. administration over the approach to tackle drug trafficking and the smuggling or the export of small arms from the U.S.
“When I mentioned these things at couple of my engagements here, some people quickly jump on the bandwagon and they said we were against the United States of America and since they were the defenders of American interest here in Guyana, they thought that I was being extreme,” Mr. Jagdeo asserted.
The Guyanese leader said he was “very pleased” that weeks later, both President Obama and Mrs. Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, in relation to Mexico, said almost the same things that he had said on the issue.
“First of all, that the U.S. had to do more at home to fight drug trafficking because the demand was pushing the supply and secondly, that a lot of the financial transactions – this is what President Calderon of Mexico mentioned – arose out of the United States…”
The President said Mrs. Clinton even mentioned that the U.S. needs to do much more to stop arms going into those countries.
“I was very pleased with this changed approach by the U.S. government…it is a very, very positive approach to tackling the issue of drugs and gun smuggling,” President Jagdeo declared.
“President Obama has also replaced confrontation with the offer of dialogue on many issues, even with regimes that the U.S. traditionally had not had close engagements or cooperation with; and I think that would also set the tone for the discussions in this Summit of the Americas,” Mr. Jagdeo posited.
Alluding to the “very progressive policy” by the U.S. on climate change and on diversifying energy sources, President Jagdeo said “with the U.S. coming to the table with that good track-record established by this new (Obama) administration…I think we have the possibility of a much better working environment and I hope that we can capitalise on that environment to solve some of the problems facing our region.”
TROTMAN:
President Jagdeo also noted that co-leader of the minor Alliance For Change (AFC) party, Mr. Raphael Trotman had expressed to him, a desire to participate in the Summit of the Americas.
“I had indicated to him that it is too late and I hope that maybe in the future we can have closer engagements,” the President told reporters.
“I met with Mr. Trotman and he promised that he will send me, in writing, some of his views that he may wish to take to the summit. I have not received that document from him as yet but if it fits in with advancing our country or moving our country forward, I will be prepared to discuss them at the Summit,” Mr. Jagdeo assured.