Recalling the disaster of Jagdeo’s personal summitry

Sep 06, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

(Kaieteur News) – Ray Chickrie’s latest letter, published in the Kaieteur News of September 1, 2026, is an interesting exercise that should trigger a recollection of the failure of Bharrat Jagdeo’s ‘personal summitry’. His letter dealt with Guyana’s surging Middle Eastern relations.

In a much earlier letter published by Kaieteur News in June 2011, Chickrie had explicitly acknowledged that Guyana’s engagement with the Middle East predated the PPPC administration by decades. He wrote then that Guyana’s ties with Iran, Libya and Syria went back to the anti-colonial struggle and that Forbes Burnham, after becoming Prime Minister in 1 966, “boldly embraced the Middle East,” championing the Palestinian cause, supporting the Arab oil embargo and establishing Guyana’s embassy in Baghdad. Burnham, he noted, also travelled to Algiers, Cairo, Somalia and other Arab capitals.