No other country in peacetime in the world is as Dostoyevskian as Guyana. It is a sad country with cascading tears that portray the traumas in 18th Century Russian novels. A departing woman goes up to the immigration counter and her passport is requested. What follows is a Dostoyevskian train of events. In trying to come to grips with these events, one must bear in mind that this lady was in one of the most security sensitive areas in the entire country.
No one can be seen loitering around the departing area at the airport. It is sealed off for officials and passengers who are leaving. The lady gives her passport to an official. He/she can do one of two things with it; checks it with the data in his/her computer and if there is no problem, the passport is returned immediately. Or the passport can be taken into a private room where its legal validity can be ascertained if there was doubt in the first place.
It is not possible in that private room for the passport to be lost; because the immigration official will have it in front of him/her checking the computer or a print out that he/she has in front of him/her. How can the passport be lost in those circumstances? It is virtually impossible. The only scenario that is possible is that the officer went somewhere else with the passport, and it got lost. But that sounds crazy.
Why would the officer take the passport out of the room and go wandering about in another section of the airport? Immigration officials do not behave like that. Most definitely, he/she would not leave their station to go to the washroom because the immigration check out point has its own washrooms. We come now to the lady herself. Suppose she is lying and she never handed in a passport? Right there and then wouldn’t she be interviewed by the police. Crazy people do crazy things but sane people do not accept the crazy things mad people do.
When you go to the immigration counter, there and then you have to produce your passport. There and then, a non-passport holder would be under question. Suppose this insane, non-passport holder made a fuss about submitting the passport for scrutiny but never did so. There are security cameras in that section. Once the police are called in and they look at the tape and see no passport was tendered that person would be under arrest
Let’s assume that this out-going passenger did hand in her passport, wouldn’t the cameras pick up the act? The answer is yes. Wouldn’t the cameras also pick up the action of the officer when he/she took the passport and left the area? There is something deadly, sinister and horrifying about this incident. I honestly feel that such macabre happenings can only occur in Guyana. It may occur in a country that is in the throes of civil war or victim of a terrible earthquake. But in peacetime in Guyana, a lady hands a security official her passport as she is about to board the plane as required and in minutes it disappears.
Can any politician that is part of the government that administers this country not be ashamed at the bizarre things that go on? Isn’t this disappearing passport something you see in a comedic spy movie? Does it happen in real life? It does but only in Guyana. If the passport is an American document, the US Embassy should press the police force for an investigation. Now the sensitive question – was the passport stolen? I don’t know but this I know; – the passport could not have been lost in the manner in which it was taken from the lady.
Tracing the movement of that passport should be extremely simple. Where did the official take it? The answer has to be in a room to check it. What is inside that room to cause it to be lost? Let us say the room was filled with tons and tons of papers and thousands of bogus passports and lots of carton boxes. But where would the passport be placed for it to get lost among the other passports?
It had to be at the top of the pile since the officer would have taken it to the computer to be checked. This is a frightening incident that should scare every person that has to pass through immigration as they leave. But this is Guyana. People will shrug their shoulders and carry on with their individual lives.
