IT is not the least surprising that APNU, which constitutes the main parliamentary opposition, has found the time to expediently criticise the Guyana Government for exercising its right to abstain from voting on a United Nations General Assembly Resolution which was overwhelming in its condemnation of the Syrian administration of President Bashar al-Assad in the use of military force.
The non-binding Resolution of August 3 was supported by 133 member states; opposed by a dozen, and with 31 others abstaining, among them countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.
Here in Guyana, unlike elsewhere, the APNU opposition, which, like its junior partner the AFC, is deeply obsessed with criticisms against the government as a substitute for constructive proposals and engagement on the way forward, seems to have much time for misrepresentations and political mischief.
First, evidently stung by the response of the Organisation of American States (OAS) to be of assistance to Guyana, following the disturbances in Linden, the opposition parties chose to lampoon Guyana’s representative to the hemispheric body, Ambassador Bayney Karran, for his intervention. The opposition went as far as calling for a withdrawal of statements made by the ambassador.  Is this a case of the truth (by the ambassador) hurting the opposition?
Then came  an APNU broadside against the government for exercising its judgment, through Guyana’s ambassador to the United Nations, George Talbot, in doing what at least 30 other nations opted to do: It abstained from exercising a vote on a Resolution deemed quite “unbalanced” in its text. Others that did likewise included Guyana’s border neigbours, Venezuela and Suriname, as well as CARICOM partners such as St. Vincent and the Grenadines; St. Lucia; and Antigua and Barbuda, and not forgetting also the abstention by India and Cuba.
While no political storm is known to have surfaced  between governments and parliamentary opposition in this and other regions that also abstained from voting on the condemnatory Resolution against the Syrian government,  the local opposition, forever anxious to engage in media-oriented harangues against President Donald Ramotar’s administration, lost no time in coming forward with some very specious thinking. Like, for example, APNU’s Rupert Roopnarine telling a press briefing when commenting on Ambassador Karran’s statement at the OAS about the “precarious” nature of the political situation that emerged in Linden.
For, Dr Roopnarine, as reported on the media event: “Frankly, the abstention of the Syrian vote and the OAS statement should be seen as on-line argument, the line of argument  that has come about because of the activities of the opposition (in both Syria and Guyana)…”
In the case of Guyana, as he reasoned, “since the November elections, we are in a precarious position because the opposition controls the National Assembly…” What infantile thinking from a once eloquent and frontline theoretician and activist of the “glorious period” for the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), now expediently subsumed in alliance with the People’s National Congress (PNC)!
It was good to know that instead of reflecting the historical arrogance of the PNC, from the administrations of Forbes Burnham to Desmond Hoyte for almost a quarter-century, the post-November 2011 Donald Ramotar administration thought it appropriate to explain, for the benefit of Guyanese at home and abroad, why Guyana abstained from that UN General Assembly vote on the civil war in Syria.
Our own hope is that in the face of the daily bloodbaths across the political divide of the  year-old civil war, which is being partly sustained by foreign interventions, and despite valiant efforts of the UN to achieve a truce,  good sense will triumph and soon prevail for an end to the slaughter and enormous sufferings of the Syrian people — irrespective of ideological, religious and cultural orientations.
No people, no nation should have to confront the horrors facing the people of Syria. Iraq and Libya serve to remind us of the horrendous human tragedies that can also occur with foreign interventions in the domestic affairs of a sovereign State.