The Venezuelan government on Monday said that it would close its embassies in Norway and Australia, and open new ones in Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe in a restructuring of its foreign service, after weeks of growing tensions with the US.
The closures are part of the “strategic reassignation of resources,” Venezueland President Nicolas Maduro’s government said in a statement, adding that consular services to Venezuelans in Norway and Australia would be provided by diplomatic missions, with details to be shared in the coming days.
The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it had received notice of the embassy closure, but no reason for the decision. Norway does not have an embassy in Caracas and handles local affairs through its embassy in the capital of neighboring Colombia.
Photo: EPA
“This is regrettable. Despite the fact that we have different views on several issues, Norway wishes to keep the dialogue with Venezuela open and will work toward that,” a ministry spokesperson said.
The announcement occurred just days after the Nobel Committee in Oslo announced that Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado had won the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting for democracy in the South American nation. Machado dedicated the prize to US President Donald Trump.
“The Nobel Prize is independent of the Norwegian government and when it comes to questions about the prize, we refer to the Nobel Committee,” the ministry spokesperson said.
Kristian Berg Harpviken, secretary of the award body, said that the Venezuelan embassy’s closure was not an issue for the committee.
“For the committee, the task at hand is to select the right Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Maria Corina Machado is certainly a worthy winner,” he said.
The Venezuelan embassy in Oslo did not immediately reply to an e-mail request for comment. Phone calls to the two numbers listed on the Venezuelan embassy’s Web site, made outside of normal business hours, did not ring and were not answered.
Caracas said it was instead setting up new embassies in “two sister nations, strategic allies in the anti-colonial fight and in the resistance against hegemonic pressures.”
It added that these new embassies would serve to launch joint projects involving agriculture, energy, education, mining and other common interests.
The embassy closures with the two US allies followed weeks of escalating tensions between Caracas and Washington.
Venezuela has called on the UN for support over several deadly US military strikes on vessels off its Caribbean coast, which Washington alleges were carrying drugs. Some US allies on the UN Security Council called for de-escalation and dialogue.
‘TERRORIST ATTACK’: The convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri resulted in the ‘martyrdom of five of our armed forces,’ the Presidential Leadership Council said A blast targeting the convoy of a Saudi Arabian-backed armed group killed five in Yemen’s southern city of Aden and injured the commander of the government-allied unit, officials said on Wednesday. “The treacherous terrorist attack targeting the convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri, commander of the Second Giants Brigade, resulted in the martyrdom of five of our armed forces heroes and the injury of three others,” Yemen’s Saudi Arabia-backed Presidential Leadership Council said in a statement published by Yemeni news agency Saba. A security source told reporters that a car bomb on the side of the road in the Ja’awla area in
‘SHOCK TACTIC’: The dismissal of Yang mirrors past cases such as Jang Song-thaek, Kim’s uncle, who was executed after being accused of plotting to overthrow his nephew North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has fired his vice premier, compared him to a goat and railed against “incompetent” officials, state media reported yesterday, in a rare and very public broadside against apparatchiks at the opening of a critical factory. Vice Premier Yang Sung-ho was sacked “on the spot,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said, in a speech in which Kim attacked “irresponsible, rude and incompetent leading officials.” “Please, comrade vice premier, resign by yourself when you can do it on your own before it is too late,” Kim reportedly said. “He is ineligible for an important duty. Put simply, it was
SCAM CLAMPDOWN: About 130 South Korean scam suspects have been sent home since October last year, and 60 more are still waiting for repatriation Dozens of South Koreans allegedly involved in online scams in Cambodia were yesterday returned to South Korea to face investigations in what was the largest group repatriation of Korean criminal suspects from abroad. The 73 South Korean suspects allegedly scammed fellow Koreans out of 48.6 billion won (US$33 million), South Korea said. Upon arrival in South Korea’s Incheon International Airport aboard a chartered plane, the suspects — 65 men and eight women — were sent to police stations. Local TV footage showed the suspects, in handcuffs and wearing masks, being escorted by police officers and boarding buses. They were among about 260 South
A former flight attendant for a Canadian airline posed as a commercial pilot and as a current flight attendant to obtain hundreds of free flights from US airlines, authorities said on Tuesday. Dallas Pokornik, 33, of Toronto, was arrested in Panama after being indicted on wire fraud charges in US federal court in Hawaii in October last year. He pleaded not guilty on Tuesday following his extradition to the US. Pokornik was a flight attendant for a Toronto-based airline from 2017 to 2019, then used fake employee identification from that carrier to obtain tickets reserved for pilots and flight attendants on three other
RSS