Dear Editor,
It seems I am the proud new owner of the ‘sea lane’ proposition, gifted by Neville Bissember who purports ignorance of the Hoyte Administration’s original offer through our Good Officer Barton Scotland C.C.H. in 1990 and, seems to suggest in a missive that it is an offer I am making to Venezuela. I say ‘purports’ because, if memory serves me correctly, Bissember was Legal Counsel at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the time of Scotland’s proposition, if Bissember had been kept out of the loop of the decision makers, then he should have done the research before he apportions ownership.
I fail to see a difference in my conclusion “Had this ‘agreement’ occurred, we (Guyanese) would be in our local vernacular ‘gool’ (i.e.) our land borders would be settled” and Bissember’s “if international relations was so simplistic and an aggressive and more powerful neighbouring country would settle for a sliver of waterway ‘in exchange’ for 160,000 square km of resource-rich land that it has been illegally claiming for 60 years now, then we can all head to the bar to celebrate” the fact is the offer was made and disregarded, thereafter, the Hoyte administration and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have gone to great lengths to disavow knowledge of this ‘sea lane’ proposal. When it was mentioned in 2015 by Bharrat Jagdeo, it became Jagdeo’s ‘treasonous offer’. For eight years, Bissember and others of Takuba were inexplicably silent. I reiterate that if the offer had been accepted and the land borders settled in exchange, we would all be sleeping easier and regardless of who made the offer, it would have been celebrated as a triumph of diplomacy and certainly not treasonous.
Bissember and I differ greatly however, when he says “Moreover, we are dealing with a country which has disowned the 1905 Agreement and the settled map which depicted the 1899 Arbitral award; disavowed the 1966 Geneva Agreement; and shown disregard for both the UN Charter and the Statute of the International Court of Justice.” Venezuela has not disavowed the Geneva Agreement in the slightest; its 2019 Memorandum to the ICJ relies heavily on the Geneva Agreement. The submission of the Memorandum confirms Venezuela’s recognition of the ICJ, the ICJ Charter, and Venezuela’s participation in the case before the court. I am baffled by Bissem-ber’s assertion of ‘disregard’ for the ICJ.
Editor, it seems that we are caught in a circular argument on the Geneva Agreement which Bissember characterizes as “the sole existing legal basis which either Guyana or Venezuela can utilize for a full and final third-party settlement of the controversy” but which I contend created the controversy to be settled in the first place. The Venezuelans rely on the Geneva Agreement as the basis for their claims, and the Guyanese refuse to admit it was a mistake by Forbes Burnham to open a settled border for discussion (now a full-blown controversy); this is all academic at this point, as we are fully committed to the ICJ; However, Guyanese must learn from this episode in our short history, but if the best arguments by former Foreign Service Officers are founded on emotional outbursts on ‘patriotism’ I would suggest we have to do our research and draw conclusions free from their cliquish protectionism of the People’s National Congress, its ineptness and its multitude of missteps beginning in 1966.
Sincerely,
Robin Singh
