Editorial | CARICOM's signal on Essequibo

Whatever the arguments made against the accuracy of the voter-turnout for last week’s referendum, it is not surprising that Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly in favour of asserting sovereignty over the two-thirds of neighbouring Guyana claimed by Caracas.

Indeed, this long-standing claim to the 62,000 square miles of territory is perhaps the only issue around which, given the country’s existing political environment, Venezuelans are likely to coalesce, and thereby available for President Nicolás Maduro to exploit. So, in the aftermath of the vote Mr Maduro has engaged in a high-risk game of a kind he often – with justification – accuses more powerful nations of deploying against weaker ones. In so doing, he has ignored the very document upon which Venezuela bases its claim to legal legitimacy for questioning the 1899 arbitration settlement of the existing borders and to negotiate new boundaries. In the process he has raised the spectre of war, further undermined stability in Latin America and the Caribbean, and threatened the development prospects of the Caribbean sub-region, with which Venezuela has generally enjoyed good relations.

But as this newspaper has made clear before, Mr Maduro shouldn’t be allowed to take that relationship for granted. So, while the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) – the 15-regional economic and political organisation of which Guyana is a member – has already declared support for that country’s territorial integrity, it must go further in signalling its backing of Guyana and declaring its opposition to Mr Maduro’s gamesmanship.

EMERGENCY SUMMIT

First, as a follow-up to its previous statements, CARICOM should, both for its symbolic and practical value, convene an emergency, face-to-face summit to restate, and advance, its already declared positions on the matter.

Second, in CARICOM states in where Venezuela has diplomatic representation, those envoys must be called in to be read the CARICOM declaration that emerges from the summit and to be warned of additional measures that might be pursued by the community, which might include a freeze on economic and political agreements, such as proposed Dragon Field gas exploitation and processing project between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago.

Further, CARICOM ambassadors and the United Nations must draft and seek to have the Security Council approve a resolution condemning Venezuela’s declaration implying the annexation of Guyana’s Essequibo region and the dangers this poses to hemispheric security.

Put another way, CARICOM must insist on a reset by Venezuela and insist on its commitment to resolving the territorial dispute in accordance with international law and existing bilateral agreements.

This issue has simmered for generations, first as a sprawling territorial question between Britain, the colonial ruler of what was British Guiana, and Venezuela, which gained its separate independence in 1830, after breaking from Spain as part of a larger unit nine years earlier. Both sides claimed territory that now lies within each country’s current borders. But the 1899 arbitration findings ceded the mineral-rich Essequibo, which accounts for two-thirds of Guyana’s territory, to Britain/British Guiana.

Decades later, Venezuela renounced the settlement, arguing, on a basis of the writings of one of the American lawyers who represented it at the hearings, that collusion between two Americans and a Russian judge on the panel produced perverse ruling in favour of Britain.

On the eve of Guyana’s 1966 independence, the parties signed the Geneva Agreement in which they undertook to establish a commission “with the task of seeking satisfactory solutions for the practical settlement of the controversy between Venezuela and the United Kingdom which has arisen as the result of the Venezuelan contention that the Arbitral Award of 1899 about the frontier between British Guiana and Venezuela is null and void”.

The commission had four years within which to complete its work, failing which the countries were to choose one the the dispute settlement methods outlined in the United Nations Charter, and if they couldn’t agree “refer the decision as to the means of settlement to an appropriate international organ upon which they both agree or, failing agreement on this point, to the Secretary-General of the United Nations”.

Added the agreement: “If the means so chosen do not lead to a solution of the controversy, the said organ or, as the case may be, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, shall choose another of the means stipulated in Article 33 of the Charter of the United Nations, and so on until the controversy has been resolved or until all the means of peaceful settlement there contemplated have been exhausted.”

UNABLE TO FIND RESOLUTION

In the 57 years since Guyana’s independence, both sides have been unable to find a resolution, or agree on what is meant by several statements in the Geneva Agreement, especially the mixed commission mandate of finding “satisfactory solutions for the practical settlement” of the dispute. By Venezuela’s interpretation it means an acceptance of the nullity of the arbitral findings. For Guyana, the dispute to be settled is Venezuela’s claim that the arbitral finding is null and void, which Georgetown rejects.

In 2018, Guyana referred the dispute to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The Venezuelan insisted that the ICJ had no jurisdiction in the matter, which the World Court rejected.

The underlying case is still to be determined. Yet, Mr Maduro started a drumbeat of jingoism resulting in his referendum, with the clear aim of rallying support for himself and his party ahead of next year’s elections.

In the process, he broke faith with the agreement, on which he relies, that “no new claim, or enlargement of an existing claim, to territorial sovereignty in (the disputed) territories shall be asserted while this agreement is in force, nor shall any claim whatsoever be asserted otherwise than in the mixed commission while that commission is in being”.

The right thing for Mr Maduro to do is to retreat and let the ICJ do its job.