To the Editor:
In early September, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar professed her “love” for
Venezuela’s acting President, Delcy Rodríguez, whose government had only recently
declared her persona grata. By the end of the month, on the sidelines of the United Nations,
the acting President returned the sentiment, declaring her own “love” for the Prime Minister.
It is a remarkable turnaround.
Not long ago, our Prime Minister was persona non grata in
Caracas, branded “drunk” and a “vassal of U.S. imperialism.” Today she is welcomed as a
sober statesman acting in the best interest of her country.
Both leaders addressed the 81st Session of the UN General Assembly, and both cut a sorry
figure. Acting President Rodríguez spoke from a world stage only a short distance from the
New York jail where her own president, Nicolás Maduro, is held after being seized by U.S.
Special Forces in the dead of night, in what many regard as an unlawful act against a sitting
president of a sovereign nation.
She did not even utter his name once! This is the same
Delcy Rodríguez who, since the Chávez era, has denounced U.S. aggression and
hegemony against her country and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. She has worn the
Palestinian keffiyeh as a symbol of solidarity and has condemned Israel’s continuing
genocide against the Palestinian people.
Yet at the UN, while most world leaders
condemned that genocide, she said nothing. It took Russia’s foreign minister to call Maduro’s
abduction an act in violation of International law and demanded his release. Her script could
easily have been written by the U.S. State Department.
So could our Prime Minister’s. Both addresses were hollow, short on political substance and
aimed chiefly at pleasing the President of the United States.Both sailed to UN on a U.S.
“Love” boat, locked in a love only found in arranged marriages.
In fairness, Mrs. Persad-Bissessar deserves some understanding, even credit and applause.
She reads correctly our country’s place in a shifting geopolitical order and understands how
vulnerable we are, militarily, economically and politically, next to a superpower.She is
pragmatic. Pragmatism, broadly defined, is the doctrine that ideas are valuable according to
their practical consequences, with results serving as the test of their validity.
Acting President Rodríguez is also pragmatic, but her case is different. The Venezuelan
people will not forget or forgive her regime: the dismantling of democracy, the repression
and suffering inflicted on millions, and the hundreds killed for opposing it since 1998.
Pragmatism, however, has limits. Stooping to conquer the Dragon gas does not require
grovelling before the world. When a leader grovels, it is the people who absorb the
humiliation. President Trump had barely finished suggesting that “artificial intelligence” be
rebranded “super intelligence” when our Prime Minister committed the entire nation to it.
That is grovelling at its lowest.
Consider Barbados. Prime Minister Mia Mottley governs a smaller, poorer and far more
vulnerable island state, yet in her address on September 24 she pressed for reform of the
UN’s power structure, not just its administration, pointed out that Africa has no permanent
seat on the Security Council, pushed for fairer climate financing for vulnerable states and
warned that artificial intelligence must not deepen inequality. She condemed the genocide in
Gaza. She made her case on her own terms, with no need to flatter a superpower, and
Barbadians could hold their heads high.
There is no excuse for the leaders of small and medium-sized states, in the face of the
tectonic shifts now reshaping global politics, to grovel and let their nations lose their self-
respect, dignity and integrity. Greater empires have fallen before, and history is repeating
itself. A small nation can steer carefully through rough waters without surrendering its
dignity.
Dave Persad
Attorney-at-Law
Former T&T High Commissioner for India
