President David Granger on Tuesday told CARICOM Heads that the threat to Guyana’s territorial sovereignty from Venezuela is as grave as it has ever been and appealed for regional solidarity.
“The threat to Guyana’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and economic development is as grave now as it ever was. Our need for your solidarity is as great now as it ever was”, Granger told the Heads who wrapped up their intersessional meeting in Belize yesterday.
Granger’s statement to the CARICOM Heads cohered with similar presentations in the region and further afield on the threat posed by Venezuela particularly since May last year when Caracas issued a maritime decree claiming almost all of Guyana’s Atlantic waters.
The President’s appeal to CARICOM for solidarity also comes in the backdrop of aggressive lobbying within the regional bloc by Caracas last year. This included visits by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez to Barbados, St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines among other countries. Caracas has used its concessional oil supplies to the region to underpin its lobbying efforts.
Granger in his address to the heads noted that since his last report to them in Barbados in July 2015 much has happened. At that time, he said that Caricom was astonished at the “outrageous Decree – No. 1787 – that had been issued by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela extending its maritime zone into the maritime space of many CARICOM states.
“So grotesque was the Decree that it was soon after rescinded. It was replaced by another decree – No. 1859 – equally objectionable to Guyana”, he stated.
Granger noted that the Caricom Summit was followed, not long afterwards, by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015.
“I had the opportunity there to present Venezuela’s aggression against Guyana and to call on (the) UN Secretary-General to exercise his powers to bring this Venezuelan aggression towards Guyana to an end by process of law. He is empowered to do by the Geneva Agreement of 1966 – the Agreement among British Guiana, Britain and Venezuela which allowed Independence to go forward – Independence which Venezuela had tried to block”, Granger said.
Throughout the past 50 years, the President said that Venezuela made no effort to prove its contention that the 1899 arbitral award that fixed Guyana’s boundaries was a nullity.
Said Granger:
* It chose, instead, a strategy of harassment.
* It chose a course of obstruction of Guyana’s economic development.
* It chose a diplomatic posture of preventing Guyana from membership of the Organisation of American States for 25 years.
* It attempted subversion of our indigenous people.
* It resorted to a strategy of naked naval threat by sending a corvette into our Exclusive Economic Zone in 2013.
“Fifty years of this constant threat to our sovereignty and territorial integrity are too long for any state to sustain. It occupied our entire existence as an independent State.
“Guyana seeks to end having to (live) under constant threat. We seek to allow the rule of international law to prevail. Venezuela, however, reasserted its claim to more than half of Guyana by asserting – as its Foreign Minister did last week – that by the Geneva Agreement, Venezuela’s claim of nullity of the Arbitral Award had been acknowledged, if not accepted”, Granger stated.
He said that Venezuela might have surmised that, what remained was for its so-called `historical controversy’ to be resolved by diplomacy.
“Guyana is convinced that, based on its experience over the past 50 years, this would mean only another 50 years of harassment. Venezuela seems prepared to pursue a programme of aggression under the cloak of peace to avoid a judicial settlement and submission to international law”, the President declared.
He said that the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, in the wake of all that happened last year, has put together Proposals for The Way Forward under the Geneva Agreement, culminating, if necessary, in the International Court of Justice. Granger said that Guyana has been cooperating with him but Venezuela is not. He said that Caracas is instead using its monthly Presidency of the UN Security Council to present itself as an advocate of peace and respect for the Charter. He noted that Venezuela issued two weeks ago through its Foreign Ministry, a document referred to as the Ratification of Venezuelan rights over the Essequibo.
Granger said that Guyana has taken note of these warnings and Foreign Minister Carl Greenidge made a Statement in the National Assembly on 12th February 2016 repudiating these assertions. The statement was circulated for the Heads’ attention.
Venezuela’s issuing of the maritime decree in May last year came just weeks after US oil firm ExxonMobil announced a major oil find in Guyana’s waters. Venezuela’s maritime decree sought to claim this area.
