Last Tuesday this newspaper published an article by Mr Greg Quinn, a former British High Commissioner to this country entitled ‘Why Guyana should not appease Venezuela and Maduro’. He argues that the time to appease Venezuela is long past and that the Argyle Declaration, which he regards as a case of appeasement, was a pointless process.
The first problem is what he means by the term ‘appeasement’. It is not the cession of territory in this instance, because as he has stated Guyana has not agreed to cede land. What he says is: “History shows that appeasement doesn’t work. Personally I believe that sitting down and talking to Maduro about something which was clearly settled in 1899 suggests there is something to discuss. There isn’t, period – especially if a process is ongoing at the ICJ.”
This is not quite accurate. It has to be stressed that Guyana has always refused to discuss the substantive border with Venezuela, including at Argyle. What has gone to the ICJ is the ‘controversy’ over the validity of the 1899 Award. As it is Mr Quinn has misunderstood the context of what happened, and a full understanding of that goes back to Geneva. The meeting there produced an infinitely more sophisticated document than what emerged from St Vincent, but nevertheless it was signed in circumstances which had one or two parallels with the case of Argyle.
Geneva arose because there was no agreement after two days of talks held in London between the British, Venezuelans and what were then British Guianese in December 1965. While it is true that the British were concerned about an economic boycott directed at them if there was no agreement, they also had a reason which was of more concern to the Guianese, and that was the possibility that Venezuela might invade if no document emerged which might save that country’s face. As one senior official in the Foreign Office noted, once the Venezuelans go in to Essequibo, it will be very hard to get them out again.
Britain was anxious to get what it regarded as a troublesome colony off its hands and was not prepared to leave troops, but at the same time like the Guianese, it was not prepared to cede territory either. The threat of an invasion became all the greater after a date for independence was announced, with a political campaign on the part of parties like COPEI either to secure land in a peace deal or else seize it by force. As it was, Geneva managed wording which the Venezuelans accepted, with Foreign Minister Iribarren Borges claiming in the press that Britain had changed its position in Geneva, which it had not done. This perhaps represented a milder foretaste of what was to come at Argyle.
Whatever its shortcomings Geneva provided an umbrella against outright invasion for this country. That the Venezuelans felt thwarted in this regard was soon demonstrated after they invaded Guyana’s portion of Ankoko five months after independence, and then were complicit in the abortive 1969 coup in the Rupununi. Geneva hasn’t stopped them from all kinds of other aggressive acts, however, as well as systematic moves of various kinds to hinder this country’s development.
That the Venezuelans would insist on a different interpretation of Geneva from the Guyanese was clear as early as the failure of the Mixed Commis-sion to come to agreement. The Commission was set up under Article 1 to seek “satisfactory solutions for the practical settlement of the controversy …” The Venezuelans maintained the Commission could “discuss only practical proposals for the satisfactory solution of the controversy”, and not the validity of the Award. Guyana’s position, in contrast, was that “it was not possible to consider the territorial issue without first examining the question of the alleged nullity of the Arbitral Award.”
Not only has Venezuela held to its position down the decades, it has also added some other novel misinterpretations of Geneva, including that it requires Guyana to come to the table to discuss the border on a bilateral basis, which both Nicolás Maduro and Delcy Rodríguez have been insisting on.
Which brings us to Argyle, the background to which as mentioned is not entirely dissimilar in some respects from that of Geneva. While by implication Mr Quinn dismisses the possibility, it was nevertheless a response to a possible invasion. The author seems to think that it was the tensions ratcheted up by the referendum, etc, which caused some regional leaders, particularly PM Gonsalves, to push for talks between Presidents Ali and Maduro, but that is not quite how it happened.
In the first place, the talks were arranged by Brazil, which certainly seems to have been of the view that an invasion might be imminent, and which used Mr Gonsalves and some members of Caricom to bring President Ali to the table. It had moved some troops nearer its border with Guyana, and at some point had indicated it would not allow any invasion of this country through its territory.
If Mr Gonsalves and company delivered Presi-dent Ali to the table – and the truth of the matter is he had little choice but to go given the amount of diplomatic pressure he was under – it was Brazil which brought the Venezuelan head of state there. Brazil was probably the only country which could have done this owing to the relationship between Presidents Lula and Maduro. Without the influence of Brazil being exerted, what reason did the Venezuelan head of state have to attend?
The face-saver for Venezuela backing off from invasion was that Maduro could tell the public that Guyana had met the demand under Geneva to meet face-to-face to discuss the border. This account was repeated when Guyana’s Foreign Minister Hugh Todd met his Venezuelan counterpart Yván Gil early this year in Brazil. The latter called the meeting a diplomatic victory for Venezuela since it marked the reopening of bilateral negotiation on the controversy, which of course it did not. Mr Todd was clear that the controversy would be resolved in the ICJ.
While Mr Quinn is technically right that there is no point for Presidents Maduro and Ali to ‘talk,’ because apart from anything else, as was the case in London in Geneva and in the Mixed Commission, there is no convergence of views. But Argyle, like the more professional and carefully constructed Geneva was about something else: creating an international framework to keep the bully at bay. Geneva did it more-or-less successfully for several decades, although how long the Argyle face-saver will spare Guyana from an incursion into its Cuyuni-Mazaruni mining areas remains to be seen. As Mr Quinn has rightly noted, the Argyle meeting has not stopped Maduro from breaking the terms of the Declaration.
What the President of Venezuela decides to do will largely depend on internal politics, but our problem will be whether Brazil can exercise the same influence over him that it did last year, in circumstances where the government in Brasilia says it will not recognise him as the winner of July’s election until the tallies demonstrating this have been produced. In the end Argyle unfortunately will have nothing like the potency of Geneva.
It is true as Mr Quinn states that Mr Maduro cannot be trusted and his promises cannot be believed. But Guyana does not trust him and certainly does not believe his promises. That said, Argyle was only a “pointless process” if one is convinced that Maduro had no intention of invading. Brasilia was clearly not so convinced, and Guyana has to be cautious and pay attention to better-informed neighbours. Governments should not take risky gambles on two-thirds of their territory.
