Dear Editor,
This letter is in two sections and is inspired by an article online I heard on the issue of Venezuela’s claims against Guyana. I hope the letter will draw some attention from both decision makers and citizens in Guyana and across the Caribbean.
In the Caribbean there are two main burning issues. The first is the issue of Haiti which was pushed into a certain position by the so-called Core group of leading countries in the Western hemisphere.
They have had an agenda for Haiti and insisted there must be a foreign occupying force. That force has been in Haiti for some months, and nothing spectacular has taken place except war, mayhem, and death. In all of this, I don’t hear as a citizen in the Caribbean any call for any reporting or accountability of the Core group.
The Core group is unaccountable. There should be a report of the Core group which pushed Haiti into the transitional government under certain conditions, that this government must accept a foreign occupying force. The Core group does not report periodically, and should report, to any department to the United Nations that the public knows about.
These reports should be public and evaluate what has happened since the Kenyan police force have been introduced into Haiti to justify the action. It has been a totally unaccountable action that goes on and on and all we hear is of more death and dispersal of the population of Haiti. That cannot go on. There must be accountability at the highest level.
The second issue, that must be addressed is Guyana’s new oil wealth, and the attractiveness of all of this to Venezuela, that is claiming the oil and wishes to bait Guyana, using their allies. Guyana has one professed ally: the neighbour to the North with a long history in the hemisphere, and as far as some of us are concerned is not proactive enough on this matter to safeguard the interests of Guyanese.
The review article which I referred to explored various ways in which Venezuela, in the short and long term, can come into possession of Guyana’s territory. This is a world question in which the so-called and self-styled revolutionary government of Venezuela has become to me Napoleonic in its ambitions. It is trying to straddle Guyana and block its development.
I will make a simple suggestion.
In the Caribbean we have the CSME (the Caribbean Single Market Economy). It is one of the means that can resist the takeover of Guyana’s oil. The former Trinidad & Tobago prime minister Keith Rowley had offered in the past to refine Guyana’s oil and gas. But there seemed to be no public response consistent with a serious attitude to regional economic integration consistent with a single market economy.
Something in the present atmosphere internationally reminds people of my age of 1939 when the Second World War broke out. I am thinking in particular of the aggressiveness of neighbouring Venezuela in its territorial claim against Guyana. This is a very dangerous moment for all of us.
I think of Andaiye, George Lamming and Walter Rodney and their contribution to humanism in the Caribbean and elsewhere. And if they were all alive, I would appeal to them to use their influence to organise a peace conference on this question of Venezuela’s claim to Guyana’s territory, which in the first place was indigenous territory and then colonised.
It only became an independent country after a process of international socialisation that we cannot deny. A peace conference, a United Nations type conference in the hemisphere, would call upon Venezuela to desist and to renounce all claims of ownership of the Essequibo, which is one of the most irresponsible claims I have heard.
I don’t know where the energy to organise such a conference will come from, but it is necessary. In this case, we have Venezuela having no cultural connections to Essequibo at all, electing a government and carrying out all types of acts of provocation. It will take the Caribbean and hemisphere further in opposing those who grab territory
Let those who grab territory continue their dirty work, if they must but let Bolivarian and other nations that fight for their own freedom bring something of a new element to international life: peace, friendship among nations, and respect for countries, great and small. Without this shift, CARICOM risks becoming irrelevant.
Yours truly,
Eusi Kwayana
