'Threats' to Venezuelan minister provoke war of words with US
After Hugo Chavez's combative speech at the UN one might have thought that the US would want all the Venezuelan team out of the country as soon as humanly possible. However, that wasn't the way things played out as the Venezuelan delegates attempted to leave New York's John F Kennedy international airport.
Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, has said that his diplomatic immunity was breached and that police attempted to search him as he tried to fly home.
The delay meant that the Venezuelan Foreign Minister missed his flight home and prompted him to return to the UN where he immediately called a Press Conference and derided his hosts as having attempted a "flagrant violation of international law" and "a deliberate attempt to provoke us".The State Department said yesterday that the incident had been "regrettable" and that it had apologised. But Mr Maduro was not be mollified. "We were detained during an hour-and-a-half, and threatened by police with being beaten," he said. "We hold the US government responsible," he declared, rejecting the apology as insufficient.
The new spat between Caracas and Washington has capped an incendiary week which saw the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez describe President George Bush as "the devil" from the rostrum of the UN General Assembly, before telling passers-by in a Harlem street that the US leader was "a sick man" and "an alcoholic".
According to the Foreign Minister, the airport authorities at one point ordered him and other members of his delegation to spread their arms and legs and be frisked, but they flatly refused. "They tried to put on some handcuffs," he said, but "they would have had to take us out of that airport dead if they tried to touch us."
Quite why the US authorities would have wished to flout international law and disregard Mr Maduro's diplomatic status is a mystery.
Are they really so petty as to have been seeking revenge for the "devil" comments made by Chavez from the UN's podium? And how seriously are we to take Maduro's claims that the US authorities threatened to have him "beaten"?
In a country where George Bush now seeks to legalize torture are we seriously to consider the possibility that visiting foreign dignitaries who speak ill of their hosts may be "beaten" at the airports as they leave?
The dreadful truth is that, the further George Bush takes the US from it's traditional place as one of the world's most civilised nations, the more anything seems possible. And the longer he remains in power, the more the US takes on the attributes of a Banana Republic.
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2 comments:
He is or not the devil? i thnik yes in irak think yes in Afganistan too, but not in halliburton.
Are they really so petty as to have been seeking revenge for the "devil" comments
Yes. Yes they are. Don't doubt for a moment the pettiness that police can harbour. And don't forget this is an administration that was caught spying on UN officials in the leadup to the Iraq invasion. I put nothing past them.
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