While the local political scene is in turmoil, President Donald Ramotar is enjoying a respite away from it all at the United Nations. Apart from his address to the UN General Assembly he also spoke at the Global Initiative on Education meeting. At the General Assembly, of course, he is just one of 190-odd heads of government or state to give speeches, the overwhelming majority of whom would not have had much of an audience. It’s the heavyweights, such as President Obama, and the leaders of countries in crisis zones such as the Middle East, who pack the house, and are accorded the privilege of their five minutes or so on CNN.
As such, therefore, no doubt there are those who would argue that it really doesn’t matter very much what the President says, since the world really isn’t listening. But Mr Ramotar is representing his country, and what he has to say is for the record; it is not something which will dissipate in the cold October air once he steps down from the podium. Apart from anything else, the public at home wants to know what he has to say, and whether it accords with stances taken in our own patch of the woods.
Apart from the regular call for reform of the Security Council, the compulsory comments on the situation in the Middle East and the plight of the Palestinians (among other things), the President did touch on the “rapid descent into barbarism” in Iraq and Syria and did, like his fellow heads, condemn terrorism. If his remarks on Ukraine were a little on the Delphic side, and perhaps not altogether suggestive of a full grasp of the issues at stake, what he went on to say about peace and development was far more interesting from the Guyanese point of view.
According to the news item issued by the UN on Friday, the Guyanese Head of State told the General Assembly that the most important precondition for development progress was peace, and that unresolved border issues, “are often used to retard the development of countries, preventing them from improving the quality of life of their own peoples and the promotion of the welfare of the regions to which they belong.” This sounded altogether much closer to home than the comments on the Middle East, and in its edition yesterday, the state newspaper amplified this by reporting the President as going on to observe that Guyana is not unaffected by unresolved border issues.
That this should be said at an international forum is interesting, implying as it does that the relationship with our western neighbour in respect of boundary matters is not as warm as it was touted to be when Mr Maduro swanned in here in August last year making soothing utterances – or so it seemed to his Guyanese listeners – about Venezuela’s recognition of the land frontier.
Of course that was before the Venezuelan navy arrested the oil survey ship the Teknik Perdana in Guyana’s waters last October. The vessel was collecting seismic data on the seabed in a concession granted by this country to the US company the Anadarko Petroleum Corporation. Following the seizure of the boat, it was agreed by the Foreign Ministers of Guyana and Venezuela that technical experts would meet in four months’ time to discuss maritime delimitation; those talks never happened, initially because of the protests in the neighbouring state earlier this year.
Since then, nothing has been heard about maritime delimitation on this side of the Amakura, although the foreign ministers have met. In addition to this the Good Officer in the controversy, Prof Norman Girvan died unexpectedly in April this year following an accident. No one else has been appointed to replace him, although whether that is because the two nations (or one of them) have allowed the matter to slide, or whether it is because they cannot agree on a candidate is simply not known. A third possibility is that non-appointment is simply a means for Caracas to postpone delimitation negotiations.
In the meantime, of course, the opposition in Venezuela has been active in relation to the claim, and one presumes that President Nicolás Maduro is so weakened by the earlier protests and the current economic crisis, that he has no intention of confronting the matter of maritime delimitation at this point.
It might be noted too, that one segment of the Venezuelan opposition has been insisting there can be no settlement of the maritime boundary without the land border being addressed. This is because the terminal point of the territorial frontier – Punta Playa – will be the commencement point for any maritime boundary, and since the opposition regards the “Atlantic Front,” ie, the coastline up to the Essequibo River as Venezuelan, they would not accept Punta Playa as a starting point for negotiations. Guyana’s position is, and always has been, that the 1899 Award handed down by a tribunal sitting in Paris, represented a full, perfect and final settlement of the land boundary with our western neighbour. Any deviation from a Punta Playa starting point for a maritime border, therefore, would undermine the 1899 Award.
Which brings us back to President Ramotar and his address to the General Assembly. Why did he pick so public a forum to make his reference, unless there are difficulties being encountered behind the scenes to which the public is not being made privy? Casual remarks on such a sensitive issue in an international setting are never recommended, so one imagines that the Government of Guyana has hit a stumbling block, and President Maduro’s appeasing comments of August 31 last year, have been overtaken by a more intransigent posture on the part of Miraflores. Having spoken to the world, perhaps President Ramotar would now like to take Guyanese into his confidence, and let them know in suitably diplomatic language, what the situation is.
