Guyana yesterday blasted Venezuela for the “vituperative” statement it issued on the 117th anniversary of the 1899 Arbitral Award, which was observed on Monday.
While Guyana commemorated with a booklet detailing the award, a press release from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, Venezuela was engaged in “a frenzied display of ill temper.” It noted that history has caught up with Venezuela, “revealing the tangled web of falsehoods on which [its] specious claims to Guyana’s Essequibo were built.”
The release said, “Guyana continues to uphold and respect the Arbitral Award of 1899. It will defend its validity in the world’s highest courts and expose Venezuela’s sordid efforts to besmirch Guyana’s development agenda.”
Calling Venezuela’s statement unworthy of a law abiding member of the international community, the release it was “a reaffirmation of Venezuela’s disrespect for the rule of law among nations.”
The statement to which the ministry referred was publicized on Venezuela’s Foreign Affairs Office’s website and reported by that country’s local media outlets. A translation read: “117 years of the fraud suffered by our republic, executed by the action of imperial agents that stripped us of part of our territory, consisting of nearly 160,000 square kilometres that form indivisible part of our Guyana Essequibo. We express the deepest outrage at how this nefarious date has marked the history of world diplomacy, which showed the vilest face of systematic depredation that British Empire perpetrated against the territorial integrity of many nations of the world…”
Referring to Essequibo as its own, the Venezuelan government stated that it wants Guyana to go to a Good Officer process to settle the controversy.
“The current govern-ment of Guyana, motivated by dark transnational interests and imperial favour for corporate centres, has taken an arbitrary, illegal and unilateral action by attempting to rebut the Geneva Accord and try to wriggle out of the Good Officer process,” the statement read. It added, “Venezuela has requested the Secretary-General of the United reactivate the process of good offices…”
However, noting that the Good Offices Process had failed to resolve the controversy, Guyana has been pressing since last year for a juridical settlement, which will be final and binding. A proposal to this end was made to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last year following the issuance of an objectionable decree by Vene-zuelan President Nicolas Maduro laying claim to most of Guyana’s Atlantic waters. The Venezuelan decree had followed closely on the heels of an announcement by US Company ExxonMobil of a significant oil find in Guyana’s waters off the Demerara coast.
Meanwhile, according to the Foreign Ministry release, Guyana believes that the release of the book, The New Conquistadors/ Los Nuevos Conquista-dores, will show not only an account of the Tribunal’s Award and Venezuela’s 60-year recognition of and respect for it, but evidence of its commitment to peace . “The New Conquistadors offers to all the world the true account of these events and illustrates the urgency of the need to bring this egregious Venezuelan misconduct to an end as the international community grapples for the supremacy of law and order worldwide,” the ministry said.
It added that the false claims in the Venezuelan government’s missive, “perpetuates the falsities that have marked its predatory campaign and have continued in relation to Guyana’s maritime space. Its greed for territory has added a new dimension of Guyana’s maritime resources.”
