Archive for category: Opinions

 The Mirror Doesn’t Lie Either Way

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Kishore Mahbubani–former President of UN Security Council; published an essay this month arguing that the West has engineered its own downfall — not through defeat, but through a refusal to see itself as the 88 percent of the world outside it actually sees it. The West, he writes, looks in the mirror and sees a virtuous civilization generously improving the world. The rest of the world looks at the same reflection and sees a state that photographs its own atrocities as liberation and its rivals’ as war crimes, that narrates every external intervention as necessity and every domestic failure as someone else’s problem.

We are not publishing this editorial to relitigate Mahbubani’s case against Washington and Brussels. We are publishing it because the mechanism he describes — a governing culture that narrates its own conduct in one register and has it experienced in another — is not a uniquely Western pathology. It is the operating logic of the Guyanese state, and we have spent this year documenting it one thread at a time without needing Mahbubani’s help to see it.

His essay did not hand us this thesis. It corroborated one we already had the receipts for.  

THE DIPLOMACY OF THE UNSTATED MOU

Mahbubani’s sharpest point is not about bombs. It is about language — specifically, the word “unprovoked,” which Western leaders reached for reflexively to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while offering no equivalent vocabulary for Gaza. The word does work. It forecloses the question of context before anyone can ask it. Mahbubani’s argument is that most of the world watched this happen and drew the obvious conclusion: the West was not describing events, it was managing a narrative, and everyone outside the room could tell the difference.

We made a structurally identical argument about Guyana’s own posture between Washington and Beijing in our recent series, “The Grammar of Non-Alignment.” Georgetown has never publicly reconciled the 2015 China State Construction pre-feasibility MoU for the Berbice deepwater port with the port’s quiet migration toward Bechtel and Hess. It has never addressed, in the same breath, Huawei’s entrenched position in the country’s regional surveillance architecture and the new US-funded air-domain-awareness and drone-monitoring MoU signed in August. Both tracks exist. Neither has been narrated against the other. The public is left to infer a foreign policy from the gaps between announcements — which is precisely the “diplomacy of the unstated MoU” we named in that series months before Mahbubani’s essay ran.

Mahbubani reads this kind of silence, at the level of the Global South generally, as a coherent and even defensible strategic posture — small states declining to be conscripted into a binary they did not choose. He may be right about the intent behind it elsewhere. But intent is not what a citizenry can audit. What we can audit is whether the public ever gets an accounting, and in Guyana’s case, it does not.

SELECTIVE OUTRAGE, OURS AND THEIRS

The second engine of Mahbubani’s essay is the Ukraine —Gaza asymmetry: the same leaders, using the same vocabulary of atrocity, applying it only where politically convenient. He does not need to argue this. He assembles it from their own quotations and lets the contradiction convict itself.

That is a method, not just an argument, and it is one we recognize because it is the same method behind nearly everything we categorize as a “bite with no teeth” — a government that announces a standard, receives credit for the announcement, and is never held to the standard again. The AI-misinformation penalty review announced and then left to sit. The noise-nuisance task force that re-announced measures first floated years earlier with no evidence either round was enforced. The hinterland airline “ultimatum” issued publicly against operators who had already cut fares years before the ultimatum existed. In each case, the government’s stated commitment and its actual conduct diverge, and the divergence survives because no one is forced to reconcile the two in public. That is Mahbubani’s Ukraine —Gaza mechanism, run at domestic scale: moral language deployed for its announcement value, detached from any obligation to apply it consistently.

Moral language deployed for its announcement value, detached from any obligation to apply it consistently.

EXTRACTION ABROAD, EXTRACTION AT HOME

Where Mahbubani’s essay is most useful to us is where it is least transferable — and the gap is worth stating precisely, because it sharpens rather than weakens our own case.

His argument about the West’s internal condition is that empire abroad hollowed out the middle class at home: productivity nearly doubled while wages crept up by a third, and the surplus went to capital rather than to the people who produced it. Case and Deaton’s “deaths of despair” data is his evidence that this hollowing has a body count. The moral center of that argument is neglect — a state that spent its resources and attention elsewhere and let its own population fray.

Guyana’s condition is not neglect. It is a live, ongoing act of construction. This is not a historically wealthy country whose returns are being siphoned abroad and whose middle class is eroding as a byproduct. It is a country with a historically flat, working-class social structure — the closest thing this hemisphere has had to an accidental egalitarianism; that is now watching a distinct wealthy class be built in real time, in the oil era, for the first time in its national history, out of wealth that never left the country at all. Mahbubani’s West failed to share gains it was still generating from elsewhere.

WHAT WE ARE NOT BORROWING

We want to be exact about what Mahbubani’s essay licenses and what it does not.

It does not license the conclusion that because the West has behaved badly, any government positioning itself against the West, or hedging between it and China, is thereby vindicated. That is the trap built into his own argument — he asks searching questions of Washington’s conduct in the Global South and asks none of Beijing’s, even though our own reporting on Chinese state-linked construction, quarrying, and equipment transfers in this country gives us no reason to believe Chinese conduct here has earned a pass any more than American conduct has. An accountability press that borrowed his blind spot along with his method would not be doing its job.

What we are borrowing is narrower and, we think, sound: the observation that a governing culture’s self-narration and its lived effect can diverge for years without correction, because the people best positioned to notice the divergence are the ones with the least power to compel an accounting — and that when an outside observer, working from entirely different material, arrives independently at a pattern we have been documenting story by story, that convergence is itself a form of evidence.

Mahbubani was not writing about Guyana. He did not need to be. The mechanism he found in Washington and Brussels is the same mechanism we have been finding, months at a time, in Georgetown.

— The Board

 The Vacuum Where Vetting Should Be

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Former President Donald Ramotar wants the third-country deportee agreement made public. He has called it, in terms that will not please the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an attempt to re-colonize Latin America and the Caribbean. Strip away the rhetoric and what remains is a narrower, harder question the government has spent six weeks declining to answer: on what legal basis, and by what named authority, were the six people who arrived on September 4 actually screened?      

Guyana is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol. There is no national asylum law. There is no statute defining who qualifies for protection, what a fear-of-persecution claim looks like in a Guyanese proceeding, or which institution has jurisdiction to hear one. When the Government’s September 5 statement invoked a “right to seek international protection,” it invoked a right that exists nowhere in Guyana’s own codified law. It borrowed the vocabulary of a framework the country never adopted.

This is not a technicality. It is the whole of the problem.

A vetting claim requires three things to be checkable: a standard, a process, and a name. Minister Persaud has offered the first, informally; non-criminal, “highly skilled” — in a January interview, months before the framework existed in any public form. No government statement since has named the second. No official document, briefing, or press release has named the third. Not Immigration. Not the Guyana Police Force. Not a joint mechanism with the Department of Homeland Security. Six weeks after arrival, the public does not know who looked at these files, against what checklist, or whether anyone did.

Ramotar’s call for disclosure is not a partisan gesture. It is the only available mechanism left for establishing whether any standard was applied at all — because no domestic legal standard exists independently of whatever sits inside that undisclosed diplomatic note.

The United States side of this arrangement fares no better on examination. On September 18, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled that the Department of Homeland Security’s standard third-country removal procedure; the guidance under which these transfers are generally carried out — fails to guarantee migrants effective notice or a meaningful opportunity to raise a fear-of-persecution claim before removal. This was not a finding about one case. It was a class-wide ruling about the process itself, brought and decided as a challenge to DHS’s guidance rather than to any single removal. Courts do not typically adjudicate the individual paperwork of thousands of migrants one file at a time; they rule on the policy that governs all of them. The reasonable inference — not proof of any individual case, but a sound inference about a standardized bureaucratic process — is that the deficiency the court identified was not confined to the plaintiffs in that courtroom.

Put the two halves together and the picture is not ambiguous. On the sending side, a process the courts have now found procedurally deficient. On the receiving side, no legislation, no named vettor, no disclosed criteria, and no parliamentary record.

Two governments, each capable of pointing to the other’s silence as sufficient reassurance, and neither required to produce anything in writing.

This newsroom has documented the pattern before: framework announced by press release, never tabled in the National Assembly, no Hansard record, no ministry willing to speak to specifics. What is different about Ramotar’s intervention is that it reframes disclosure as a matter of self-determination rather than only accountability — the question of whether a small state can set its own terms for who crosses its border, or whether it simply processes what a larger power sends.

Whatever one makes of that framing, the underlying demand is not extraordinary. It is the minimum a country owes itself before absorbing people it has never screened, under a law it has never written, through a process no official will name.

Publish the agreement. Name the vetting authority. Table the instrument in Parliament. Until one of those three things happens, “vetted” is not a fact about these arrivals. It is a word the government has asked the country to accept on faith, in the continued absence of anything to check it against.

— The Board

Guyana must not confuse access to Trump with protection from Trump

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026 

Trump’s UN threat against Iran exposes the peril of diplomacy by domination

Donald Trump’s appearance at the United Nations was not an argument for diplomacy so much as a demonstration of its inversion. From a podium built for the language of peace, cooperation and international law, the US president presented Iran with a choice: accept terms set in Washington or face national destruction.

The provocation matters not only because of its target, but because of its setting. The UN general assembly is often dismissed as ceremonial theatre, yet its central premise remains that even bitter adversaries must be addressed through rules, negotiation and mutual restraint. Trump’s message suggested something very different: that military supremacy confers the right to decide which states may survive, prosper or rebuild.

President Irfaan Ali may believe that closeness to Donald Trump offers Guyana strategic cover at a perilous time. With Venezuela’s claim to the Essequibo still unresolved, a larger US security presence can appear not merely useful, but essential. Guyana has every right to pursue defence partnerships, protect its territorial integrity and seek international backing against Venezuelan aggression.

 Donald Trump came to the United Nations with a message that inverted the purpose of the institution whose podium he occupied.  

“I have a big decision to make,” Trump told the General Assembly. Iran, he said, could be permitted to rebuild into a “far greater country” — or the United States could destroy the Islamic republic before it had another chance to threaten its neighbours.

It was a remarkable formulation even by Trump’s standards. The General Assembly is a forum created from the ruins of world war, designed to give states, large and small, a place to settle disputes without submitting them to force. Yet the most powerful military leader in the room used its stage to speak of erasing another country.

That does not make the Iranian government beyond criticism. Tehran’s repression at home, its treatment of women and dissidents, and its role in armed conflicts across the region have rightly drawn international condemnation. But a US president’s threat to drive an entire nation “into hell with no chance of survival” is not a strategy for protecting civilians or securing peace. It is collective punishment dressed up as resolve.

Trump’s speech also revealed a world view in which power is both the instrument and the reward of foreign policy. While presenting Iran’s future as a choice to be granted or denied by Washington. The language is transactional, but its logic is imperial: resources, security and sovereignty are treated as possessions to be bargained over by the strongest state.

He celebrated American military action in Venezuela as a means of expanding US access and control over that country’s oil reserves. He hailed himself as a peacemaker in Gaza even as Gaza remains shattered and the political conditions for a durable settlement remain absent.

That approach carries consequences well beyond Tehran. America’s allies have long tolerated; and at times enabled — Washington’s inconsistencies. But Trump’s open embrace of coercion poses a more fundamental question: whether the United States can still be relied upon as a partner bound by commitments, rules and predictable interests, rather than the personal impulses of its president.

That should trouble Guyana.

Guyana’s case against Venezuela’s claim to the Essequibo is rooted in law, history and the 1899  Arbitral Award. It is before the International Court of Justice, and Guyana should continue to insist that the border controversy be settled through international law, not intimidation, military threat or political theatre. The country needs friends. It needs defence capacity. It needs intelligence cooperation, regional solidarity and an unmistakable deterrent to adventurism.

Yet Guyana must be careful about the kind of friendship it embraces, and the price that may eventually be demanded for it.

The United States has strategic interests in Guyana that go beyond defending democratic values or supporting the rule of law. Guyana possesses rapidly expanding offshore oil production, sits on Venezuela’s eastern flank, and has become an important piece on the strategic map of the Caribbean and northern South America. Those interests may overlap with Guyana’s own security needs. They do not automatically become identical to them.

Trump’s glorification of US control over Venezuelan oil should be read in Georgetown not as a distant episode, but as a warning.

If access to another country’s resources can be presented as the fruit of military intervention, then oil-rich small states must ask hard questions about the character of the power whose support they seek.

A country may welcome investment, security assistance and diplomatic solidarity while still guarding against dependency, unequal bargains and arrangements that erode national control over its wealth.

Guyana cannot afford a foreign policy built on flattery, photo opportunities or personal warmth between leaders. It needs a policy grounded in national interests, parliamentary scrutiny and clear limits. Any security agreement with Washington must preserve Guyanese command of Guyanese territory, safeguard the country’s decision-making authority and be disclosed sufficiently for citizens to know what commitments their government is making.

This is especially urgent because the boundary controversy is real. Venezuela’s threats cannot be waved away. President Nicolás Maduro’s government has repeatedly sought to use the Essequibo controversy for domestic mobilisation and geopolitical advantage. Guyana’s government is right to demand international support and to strengthen its defences. CARICOM, the Commonwealth, the Organisation of American States and Guyana’s international partners have all played important roles in reinforcing the principle that borders cannot be altered by force.

But partnership must not become subordination.

A small state survives in a dangerous neighborhood by widening its circle of friends, not by placing its fate in the hands of a single powerful patron.

Guyana should deepen ties with CARICOM, Brazil, the Commonwealth, Canada, European partners, the United Nations and countries across the global south. It should sustain relations with the United States, but not make Washington the sole pillar of its security or diplomatic strategy.

There is also a larger moral issue. Guyana cannot credibly invoke international law to defend the Essequibo while remaining silent when powerful states threaten to destroy weaker ones, seize their resources or bend sovereignty to their will. The rules that protect Guyana are the same rules Trump mocked in his threats against Iran and his celebration of US power in Venezuela.

The Ali administration should remember that a handshake from a superpower is not a guarantee. Today’s strategic partner can become tomorrow’s demanding patron; today’s security commitment can become tomorrow’s leverage over oil, contracts, ports, airspace or foreign policy.

Guyana should engage the United States confidently, respectfully and pragmatically. But it must never confuse being useful to Washington with being safe from Washington.

A DEAL SHROUDED IN SECRECY

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Guyana’s Third-Country Migrants and the Silence That Surrounds Them

On September 4, six migrants — Cuban and Afghan nationals — landed in Guyana under a newly finalized migration cooperation framework with the United States. The Government of Guyana confirmed their arrival the following day, in a press statement carried in full by local media. What the statement did not say has since become the more important story.

No vetting authority has been named. No accommodation site has been disclosed. No legal basis under Guyanese or international refugee law has been cited, because none exists: Guyana is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, and has no domestic asylum legislation. And the framework itself — the instrument governing who arrives, under what conditions, for how long — was never brought before the National Assembly. There is no Hansard record. There was no debate.

This is not a story about six people. It is a story about a government that entered a binding arrangement with a foreign power, over the movement and custody of human beings onto Guyanese soil, without informing the institution constitutionally charged with scrutinizing it.

WHAT WAS CONFIRMED 

Senior officials have, when pressed by wire services, offered fragments. A 12-month initial term. A cap of 12 persons per month, with no roll-over. Costs of “receiving, housing and supporting” arrivals borne by the International Organization for Migration. Assurances — offered, not demonstrated — that only non-criminal, “highly skilled” individuals denied asylum in the US would be accepted, and that Guyana retains a right of refusal.

None of this appeared in a treaty. None of it was tabled, gazetted, or subjected to parliamentary question. The underlying instrument is understood to be a diplomatic note; a category of agreement that, by design, bypasses the ratification scrutiny a treaty would require. That is not an incidental detail. It is the mechanism by which an arrangement of this consequence was kept outside the reach of elected oversight.

THE GUARDIAN’S INVESTIGATION

The scale of what Guyana has joined only becomes legible in wider context. A joint investigation by the Guardian and 23 other media organisations — coordinated by Paris-based Forbidden Stories under the banner of the Deportation Project — has tracked more than 100 flights carrying migrants and asylum seekers to 28 countries under the Trump administration’s third-country removal programme.

More than 25,000 people have been deported to countries that are not their own; over 5,000 of them to nations in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and central Asia to which they have no prior connection

Human rights lawyers describe the practice as a “show of force” — a deterrent theatre staged at the expense of people whose claims to protection had, in many cases, already been recognised by US immigration judges. One Iranian woman interviewed by the Guardian, granted “withholding of removal” after fleeing political persecution, was rearrested within two weeks of her release and flown to the Central African Republic — a country the US State Department itself warns its own citizens not to enter.

The pattern the investigation documents is not unique to Guyana. Peruvians and Colombians have been sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Cubans, a Brazilian and a Cameroonian who refused to disembark in Liberia were redirected to Equatorial Guinea instead. Documents reviewed by the Washington Post as part of the project show that a majority of the 35 countries that have signed third-country agreements with Washington stipulated they would not accept migrants with violent criminal records — the same non-criminal framing Guyanese officials have offered the public, suggesting this is boilerplate language attached to the entire cohort of agreements, not a bespoke Guyanese safeguard.

A RULING THAT SHOULD CONCERN GEORGETOWN

On Friday, a US federal appeals court ruled that third-country removals of the kind that brought six people to Guyana are unlawful, on the grounds that individuals are not given adequate notice to mount a legal challenge before being sent to a country that is not their own. The Trump administration is expected to appeal and to continue the program regardless.

The ruling does not change what has already happened in Guyana. But it confirms, from within the US legal system itself, the precise defect that has defined this arrangement from the Guyanese side as well: people moved, and agreements struck, without the notice — to the individuals concerned, and to the Guyanese public — that due process requires.

THE UNEXPLAINED VISIT

Six weeks before the framework was announced, IOM Director General Amy Pope visited Guyana and met with five government ministers. Every published account of that visit; IOM’s own release, its regional syndication, Guyana Chronicle’s written coverage; describes it exclusively in terms of labor migration, GDP growth, and CARICOM migration governance. None names the ministers involved beyond a group reference. None mentions a deportee framework, then under active negotiation according to Foreign Secretary Robert Persaud’s own January 2026 remarks to iNews Guyana.

No public record shows Pope meeting Guyana’s Venezuelan Ambassador — despite Venezuelans constituting the country’s largest migrant population, and despite that being the obvious counterpart for a visit genuinely centred on labour migration. Six weeks later, IOM was named the framework’s sole implementer for housing and supporting arrivals who are neither Venezuelan nor economic migrants in any sense the public visit’s stated purpose would suggest.

The 592 Guardian does not assert what was discussed behind closed doors in that meeting. What can be stated is narrower and, in its way, more damning: the public record offers no account of Pope’s visit that squares with the role IOM was assigned six weeks later, and no institution; not Cabinet, not the National Assembly, not the ministries involved — has offered one since.

WHAT IS OWED

A government that signs an arrangement determining who may be brought onto Guyanese soil, under whose custody, and at what risk to them if returned to danger, owes the public more than a press release confirming the fact after arrivals have already landed. It owes Parliament the instrument itself. It owes citizens a named vetting authority, a disclosed location, and a legal basis that either exists or is admitted not to.

None of that has been offered. What has been offered is silence — the same silence into which six people arrived, and the same silence in which the terms of their presence, and the presence of twelve  more who may follow each month, remain undisclosed.

— The Board