…a Non-Aligned Horse
Your Eyewitness was a tad surprised, to say the least, when he read that our Foreign Minister Carl Greenidge had addressed the “Non-Aligned Movement” (NAM) at the UN. “NAM’s still alive?” he reflexively asked himself. NAM, he remembered, was that large grouping of underdeveloped states from back in the day, which tried to steer a course between the two contending superpowers coming out of WWII – the USA and the USSR.
Starting out in 1955 with a meeting of Nehru, (India), Sukarno (Indonesia), Nkrumah (Ghana); Tito (Yugoslavia) and a host of African and Asian leaders at Bandung in Indonesia, they giddily vowed to chart a “third way”!! They didn’t appreciate in the realist school of international relations, the guiding principle was “if you aren’t my friend, then you’re my enemy” – until proven otherwise!!
The members of NAM became in fact, the site of a whole number of “hot wars” as they became proxies for the two superpowers. Nkrumah of Ghana was overthrown; Lumumba of the Congo was assassinated and his country plunged into conflicts they still haven’t recovered from, etc. In Guyana, Jagan was ousted because he was adjudged a “fellow traveller” of Moscow. Burnham, represented the dominant reality in NAM by being an active member – even while it was fundamentally aligned with the US.
But with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the USSR threw in the towel by vowing not to interfere with its Eastern European “satellites” in what they wanted to do domestically or internationally. In fact, the USSR fell off the Berlin Wall and broke into pieces that was never going to be put back together again!! So with one superpower left standing, what was there to be “non-aligned” between? Even in the Guyana footnote, the leftist Jagan was facilitated back into office.
At the time one Harvard wonk – Francis Fukuyama – even wrote that with the Cold War over, it was now “The End of History”. With no competing ideology to struggle against, Liberalism – whether in its ole or “neo” – variation would now rule the thinking all governments and guide them in their political, economic and cultural endeavours. Happy days were here to stay!!
But since then, several of the card-carrying members of NAM – notably China, India have moved on to “almost superpower status”. So what can the NAM do for us after Greenidge’s speech? Well, bureaucratic institutions almost never go into the night quietly!! Kicking and screaming, it seems NAM is fighting for relevance by pushing “multilateralism” in global affairs. The UN, of course, was founded precisely on that principle.
The US, however, has now shown proclivity for a bilateral approach.
So is Greenidge spitting into the wind?
…a whodunnit
Another news item that intrigued your Eyewitness was the “break-in” at the Finance Ministry. Now your Eyewitness was steeped from an early age on the “whodunnit” genre starting from the Hardy Boys (and, he confesses, quite a few Nancy Drews also!) before graduating to the hard-boiled detective variant like Mike Hammer, etc. So he figures he knows a thing or two about crimes in general and break-ins in particular!
First of all, there’s the questions of “means, motive and opportunity”. Now, since it was stated unequivocally there were no signs of forced entry and the Police could only speculate about a “possible” open window – there can’t be any doubt this was an “inside job”. As to “motive”, we can quickly eliminate all of the “known characters” who’re usually hauled in for quick results. Those fellas wouldn’t take “documents and data drives” if they were dropped in their laps!! Samsung Galaxies and I-phones, yes…but not financial data.
Gotta be some insiders shredding files to cover “misconduct in public office”!
And they certainly had “opportunity”!!
…a dead man
Your Eyewitness saw a pic demonstrating the Guyana Police Force’s technique in dealing with a murder crime scene. One Policeman over the Kitty sea wall, clinging with one hand to a rappelling-like rope and dragging an evidently murdered rapist with the other!!
