President Irfaan Ali gave his Independence Day address in Essequibo this year, and appropriately enough selected Guyana’s border with Venezuela as one of his topics. After all this is the county which our neighbour has had in its greedy sights for the past sixty years, in addition to which the boundary is virtually the only subject on which all our fractious politicians can agree. “We must continue to stand united in defending our motherland from external fronts,” he told his audience. No Guyanese would disagree with that.
He did assure his listeners that Guyana would not abandon the judicial path it had embarked upon as a means of resolving the controversy with Venezuela, a slightly baffling statement in light of the fact that nobody for one moment had any fear that he intended a change of approach. However, the occasion did provide him with an opportunity to remind everyone in an oblique sense that Guyana had filed an application with the International Court of Justice to confirm the validity of the 1899 Award which settled the boundary between this country and our western neighbour.
As an initial stage the ICJ had first to decide whether it had jurisdiction to hear the application, but on December 18, 2020 it found that it did. Venezuela did not take part in the process because it does not recognise the jurisdiction of the Court to hear the matter, although it did participate in the case management process.
While no one would quarrel with what the President had to say on Wednesday, perhaps he could be persuaded to be more adventurous the next time around and give some very simplified historical background to the present controversy. It is worth remembering that while the political class and older citizens will be familiar with the issues, this is a very young country, and many Guyanese, if not most of them, will really be very vague about how we got here. That aside, they will, of course, have no doubt that all of the 83,000 square miles they associate with Guyana really do belong to this country and not to Venezuela.
They may have heard of the 1899 Award and perhaps of the Geneva Agreement, but they probably could not tell you exactly what these are. And they almost certainly do not know why we have a ‘controversy’ with Venezuela, and not a dispute. Whether the background to the boundary controversy is being taught in the schools yet is uncertain, but if it is one wonders what the texts being used are. And it is the teachers, more than the students who are most in need of accurate information.
The story of Guyana’s boundary going back to the seventeenth century is a very complicated one, but it is only a few of the more recent essentials which the politicians and educators need to concentrate on to give the public and schoolchildren a basic grasp of what is involved, and a notion of exactly how spurious and absurd Venezuela’s claim to our land is. They could start with the 1899 Award, the reference which is so often repeated by public speakers, and on which Guyana’s case is founded.
Schoolchildren, particularly, would be intrigued to know that Venezuela secured the help of the US in what was then a boundary dispute with Britain (Guyana was still a colony), and that President Cleveland strode into Congress and threatened the UK with war if she did not come to the arbitration table. She agreed. A treaty was signed and an international tribunal was set up consisting of two British judges and two US Supreme Court judges with a Russian jurist as president. They met in Paris and on 3rd October, 1899 made the award which delineated our present frontiers.
Furthermore, commissioners from both Venezuela and Britain (British Guiana) demarcated the boundary which had been awarded and in 1905 signed the report and map which they had prepared. They stated that they regarded the agreements as having “a perfectly official character with respect to the acts and rights of both Governments in the territory demarcated.” This is what is known as the 1905 Agreement which Guyana cited in its Application to the ICJ along with the 1899 Award.
It might be noted that for more than sixty years Venezuela had no problem with the boundary, insisting on more than one occasion − such as in 1932 when the tri-junction point with Brazil, Venezuela and the then British Guiana was being fixed − that the provisions of the 1899 Award must be meticulously adhered to. So what changed? The short answer is the prospect of an independent Guyana under Dr Cheddi Jagan when the Cold War was in full swing. There was a confluence of opinions on that subject between President Betancourt of Venezuela and President Kennedy of the US, and the former came up with a proposal which would have deprived Guyana of sovereignty over Essequibo.
The need to revise the Award was first raised by Venezuela in 1962 at the UN and it soon expanded into a rejection of it entirely on the basis of a fantasy concocted by a man who had acted as a junior counsel for the Venezuelans in 1899, Severo Mallet-Prevost. He claimed that the Award was the result of a deal between the Russians and the British, something for which there is absolutely no evidence. He did not want it published in his lifetime, and this was done by his law partner after his death; it still forms the basis of Venezuela’s rejection of the 1899 Award.
And as for the Geneva Agreement, the British wanted this because Guyana was on the verge of Independence and they were afraid of leaving the new nation without any cover against possible Venezuelan aggression. The British, Guianese and Venezuelans had met in London in December 1965, but there had been no movement in the Venezuelan position, and so they met the following year in Geneva. It was made clear in the 1966 agreement between the parties that it was not about a territorial dispute between the two states, it was about “the practical settlement of the controversy … which has arisen as the result of the Venezuelan contention that the Arbitral Award of 1899 …is null and void.”
This is the reason why we have a ‘controversy’ with Venezuela. It concerns the nullity or otherwise of the Award, and does not represent a ‘dispute’ over the boundary per se. As far as Guyana is concerned that was finally settled in 1899. It is the nullity issue which Guyana has taken to the ICJ, and which will be heard by that court. In a legal sense if the 1899 Award is found to be valid Venezuela has nowhere else to go to prove its case.
Venezuela has chosen to seriously misinterpret the Geneva Agreement which is a fairly brief and very clear document; they have never wanted the matter to go to the ICJ because they clearly understand they are unlikely to win their case, but Guyana’s actions are in total conformity with its provisions. Over the decades our neighbours have indulged in all kinds of harassment and aggression, and there is no guarantee, unfortunately, that will cease completely if we do win our case at the ICJ.
It is for this reason, if for no other, that the government should sensitise the population in regard to the history of their boundary, and their unquestionable rights to their land space. The Venezuelans have spent decades misinforming their population that they have some kind of birthright to territory their ancestors never lived in, never worked in and never even laid eyes on. As a consequence, whole generations, including quite educated people, are convinced their country was despoiled. We need to get our message out more, not just here, but beyond our borders as well.
It was a nice touch for President Ali to raise the controversy on the occasion of the Independence anniversary in Essequibo and assure the public his government “will continue to marshal the best diplomatic efforts necessary to ensure respect for all our territorial space.” If unity in this country has any meaning at all, it is in this context.
