Rodrigues hints Guyana’s abstention on Syria prescient

In her response to the UK government regarding Guyana naming a date for elections Foreign Affairs Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett remarked on various threats by the UK including “when Guyana voted a particular way on an issue at the UN. Of course we were vindicated on the latter with recent developments”

Guyana has gone its own way recently in voting at the United Nations, for example on March 27 2014, when it came to Crimea and the resolution that affirmed the United Nations commitment to recognize Crimea within Ukraine’s international borders and underscored the invalidity of the 2014 Crimean referendum. In this case Guyana abstained along with 58 other countries.

But we strongly suspect Rodrigues-Birkett is referring to the May 15 2013 Syria resolution (A/RES/67/262) which “strongly condemned the Syrian authorities’ continued and escalating use of heavy weapons, ballistic missiles and cluster munitions, including indiscriminate shelling from tanks and aircraft, against population centres. It also demanded that all violations of international humanitarian law cease.” (UN press release).

The UN General Assembly approved the resolution by a vote of 107-12 with 59 abstentions (see voting record). Guyana was one of them arguing that Syria had a right to self determination. What Rodrigues-Birkett is implying today is that given the rise in the radical group Islamic State that has become far more a regional threat than the Syrian government, Guyana’s decision to abstain was prescient.

Of course former President Bharrat Jagdeo had visited Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in March 2009, when the Arab Spring was still years off, so this might have had some influence on the current government’s decision. Rodrigues-Birkett was in that delegation to Damascus.