At the end of last month, officials of the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC), travelling in a boat in the Cuyuni River, Eteringbang area, reported that Venezuelan soldiers from their “bank” of the river, fired shots at them which luckily or deliberately missed. Guyana immediately lodged a protest to which the Venezuelans responded three days ago, rejecting the charge.
“It is important to note that the investigations carried out by the Venezuelan military authorities have not reported of any incident in the above mentioned area and our military units confirm not having carried out any military exercise in that location,” the statement from the Venezuelan Embassy asserted.
This incident is only the latest in a series of confrontational moves by Venezuela towards Guyana during the past year and Guyanese need to keep focused on the pertinent issues so that the interests of our country and nation are safeguarded. The bottom line for us is Venezuela unilaterally created a controversy in February 1962 when at the UN they disputed the “full and final” Arbitral Award made in 1899 that settled the border between Venezuela and Guyana.
As a prerequisite to granting independence to Guyana in 1966, Britain as the colonial power participated in a three-way conference in 1965 that produced the “Geneva Agreement” outlining the procedures that must be mutually agreed to for the Good Office of the UN Secretary General to address the Venezuelan controversy.
After following two approved methods for the last half century, Guyana has proposed that the controversy be placed before the World Court for a full and final juridical decision. As part of the Geneva Agreement both parties were instructed not to enlarge their claims.
In March 2015, after the US oil giant ExxonMobil had been requested to begin drilling for oil in the Stabroek Block off the Essequibo Coast, Venezuela wrote the company objecting to the move. Guyana protested this interference in its internal affairs. Back in October 2013, the Guyanese Government had hired the oil drilling company Anadarko to conduct studies for future oil concessions in the Roraima Block off Essequibo’s coast, where it was concentrating on petroleum exploration. The Venezuelan Navy intercepted the ship and forced it into a port at Venezuela’s Margarita Island. The captain, a Ukrainian national, was charged with violating Venezuela’s Exclusive Economic Zone while the rest of the crew were released.
In the subsequent effort to deal with the matter, the Foreign Ministers of Guyana and Venezuela met on October 2013 in Trinidad and hashed out an agreement that a technical team would meet within four months, “to explore mechanisms within the context of international law to address the issue of maritime delimitation”.
As Foreign Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett noted at the time, both sides restated that their individual and contradictory claims were valid, but in an evident coup for Guyana, the maritime demarcation was delinked from the fallacious claim Venezuela had been making for Essequibo.
However almost immediately after the ExxonMobil rig struck oil in May 2015, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro issued a presidential decree, No 1787, and published in their Ordinary Official Gazette No 40,669, dated May 27. The map claimed Venezuela’s sovereignty of all waters within the 200 miles range hence blocking Guyana’s access to resources in that area of the Atlantic Ocean. Guyana and Caricom protested this decree when it was uncovered in July 2015 and Venezuela withdrew it and replaced it with one that did not mention coordinates.
The point to be made is while Venezuela has complained that the US is behind the heightening of present tensions, the Maduro administration has taken initiatives to raise its border controversy independent of that country and its obvious strategic concerns over the Venezuelan oil reserves.
While there is a dispute over facts in the latest skirmish at Cuyuni, the border controversy must be settled through a judicial settlement.
We are heartened the government has hired two high-level legal experts in this area.
