October 16 should be circled on every Bahamian’s calendar. That is the day when our man to the UN will decide which fence he will perch the Bahamas on when it’s time to vote for a Latin American state to fill a vacant Security Council seat for two years.
It is the day on which Foreign Affairs Minister Fred Mitchell will either cast his vote with the non-aligned states for Venezuela or American-backed Guatemala. His only other alternative would be to abstain.
However, although the voting is secret – each member casting his vote individually instead of in a bloc as in the past – Bahamians will expect Mr Mitchell to report to them how he voted. After all he has been hired by Bahamians to represent them, and so it is to them, through their elected government, that an early report will be expected. No one is going to tolerate the shadow-boxing to which they were subjected when Mr Mitchell last cast his UN ballot. Under him, our voting record at the UN has created a certain tension with our neighbour to the North.
“All of us as Bahamian citizens,” Mr Mitchell told Bahamians in 1988, “must become more aware of our nation’s foreign policy, particularly as it relates to the United States of America.
“Bahamians generally,” he said, “want to travel to the United States. We want free access to its facilities, its goods and services. That means that in our relations with them we are at a comparative disadvantage. It means that our foreign policy has to be that much more skilful.”
Mr Mitchell spoke these words when he headed his own political party in opposition to, the Pindling government. Today, as he packs his bags and prepares his brief for the UN, we would remind him of those words. They are as good today as they were then.
The October 16th vote is important. For most of this year Washington and Caracas have been busy jockying for allies to give them the two-thirds majority to fill the Latin American seat. In July Hugo Chavez undertook a whirlwind tour to gather support for Venezuela, stopping in such countries as Iran, Belarus, Russia, Vietnam, Mali, Benin and Qatar.
The UN Security Council is made up of 15 member states, five of which are permanent members – China, France, Great Britain, Russia and the USA – and 10 are non-permanent. The 10 are elected for periods of two years by the UN General Assembly. The procedure is that five non-permanent members are elected each year so that the composition of the Security Council changes every year. The 10 non-permanent members are made up of three African states, two Asian states, two Latin American states, two West European and other states, and one East European state. This distribution assures nations that each region of the world is represented.
The Security Council’s primary responsibility is to maintain international peace and security. It carries out its mandate on behalf of its members.
If this is the Council’s mandate then Venezuela, under the leadership of Hugo Chavez, is the last country to which this mandate should be entrusted.
If Chavez’s rambling, vitriolic; threatening, terrorist-sounding speech to the UN on September 20 is any measure of the man, then the world should tremble. It sounds as though he plans to rule the world. He has proposed that the UN be moved to Venezuela.
Bahamians would have every right to be annoyed if Mr Mitchell should vote for a man who, on the floor of the UN, would call the President of the United States a “devil” – Chavez told the General Assembly that after the president had addressed it the previous day, “it smells of sulfur today.”
He said that “the UN system, born after the Second World War, collapsed, it’s worthless.” Among the other priceless gems to fall from his boastful lips was his statement that he had not recognised the new Mexican government and that he would stand by Iran “at any time and under any conditions.” At a meeting of oil producers in June he referred to Carlos the Jackal, calling the Venzuel-born terrorist who once took hostages at an OPEC meeting, “a good friend”. After telling British Prime Minister Tony Blair that he had no morals, he dismissed him with the words – “Go to hell jerkface, ﾠMr Blair…” In November last year he told a group of business executives that “the people of the United States are being governed by a killer, a genocidal murderer and a madman,” as for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice she is illiterate. And because she is a single woman, lewd suggestons followed. And, of course, he wanted everyone to remember that President Bush is an “asshole.”
He certainly speaks like a jungle-reared “diplomat.”
We could continue with quotes from the speeches of this crude, megalomaniac, but these few should be sufficient to alert our foreign minister that if relations with the US are presently tottering on a high wire, they will break completely should the Bahamas align itself with this man.
There will be no peace in our time, if Chavez, who now heads a great country, is given any more power. Certainly don’t let it go down in history that the Bahamas was one of those that helped give him a leg up.
Editorial from The Tribune
