The Government of Guyana is in order to reject the decree promulgated on 7th January 2020 by Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro claiming exclusive sovereign rights in the waters and seabed adjacent to Guyana’s coast, west of the Essequibo River. Guyana’s territorial sea has been settled in the 1899 Arbitral Award between the two countries. Our exclusive economic zone, which as prescribed by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, is also not a matter of dispute.
President Maduro is looking to provoke a confrontation with Guyana ahead of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Case Management on 15th January. The ICJ on 18th December 2020 ruled it has jurisdiction to hear the case on the border controversy. Legal recourse, not internal interference, still remains one of the best approaches to resolving Venezuela’s false claim to two-thirds of Guyana when the matter was settled more than a century ago.
On the border controversy Guyanese stand as one. President Irfaan Ali is assured that in pushing back against Venezuela’s aggression his government has the support of all Guyanese, irrespective of our politics, race and whatever superficial difference may divide us from time to time. As one Guyanese will resist any overture by this foreign power to take from us what belongs to us. As famed Dave Martins in ‘Not of Blade Grass ‘ intoned, “we ent giving up what belong to we.”
That being said, the Government must rethink its foreign policy with Venezuela. It is of concern to Guyanese and the Caribbean Community that Guyana has been meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs, and at the behest of the United States (U.S) during the administration of Donald Trump. It should have been no business to Guyana that the Trump administration desired to remove Maduro, at all cost, and install the Opposition Leader Juan Guaidó as President
It had to have been careful thought and shrewd foreign policy for Guyana since independence to adopt a non-aligned policy with the world’s super-power(s) and of non-interference into the internal affairs of sovereign nations. This has served us well in the past and as they say if something isn’t broken don’t fix it.
What the Ali administration has done, no doubt as a reward for the Trump administration interference during the 2020 General and Regional Elections, is to place the sovereignty of Guyana into the U.S’ hand. This not only resulted in Guyana publicly called on by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo to support the Trump administration’s desire to remove the Maduro government, but the government also bent over hand and fist in the Payara deal.
Try as they did society was not fooled by Secretary Pompeo’s visit, the sending of Dr. Vincent Adams, Executive Director of the Environmental Protection Agency on leave, and the haste in arriving at an agreement in his absence for the Payara Project. Last month at the U.S’ behest Guyana voted at the Organisation of American States not to recognise Venezuela Parliamentary Elections. Venezuela’s decree to claim our maritime space comes on the heel of this .
The cozying up with the Trump administration to do its bidding with Venezuela is undoubtedly against Guyana’s national interest. Little Guyana has been acting like Trump’s puddle, barking and yapping at a more ferocious and vicious dog.
The power in the U.S has changed. Trump is on his way out and the incoming Joseph Biden administration has not declared a position of hostility towards Venezuela. According to the Bloomberg online story of 18th December 2020, ‘Biden Seeks Negotiated Solution in Venezuela to End Crisis,’ a Biden administration prefers “negotiations with Nicolas Maduro’s regime in Venezuela in an effort to end the Western Hemisphere’s worst economic and humanitarian crisis, … [and] intends to push for free and fair elections, offering sanctions relief in return.”
The diplomatic shift by the U.S exposes not only the Government’s precarious position but the folly of a policy that puts Guyana’s national interest at risk. It is not too late for President Ali and his advisers to acknowledge this folly and recalibrate for the good of Guyana.
