MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Venezuela and Guyana agree to resume border dispute negotiations under UN umbrella
President Maduro and his Guyana peer Ramotar (L) during the official ceremony 
Professor Norman Girvan to continue as the United Nations Good Officer Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ended a one-day visit to Guyana on Saturday in a move that strengthens the relationship between the two countries that have had a long standing border dispute. The two countries have agreed to ask the Jamaica-born academic, Professor Norman Girvan to continue as the United Nations (UN) Good Officer as they seek to settle their border dispute.
President Donald Ramotar told reporters that both countries have also agreed “to renew the Good Officer process of the United Nations. We think that Professor Girvan has been doing a good job and we agreed that we would make that request to the United Nations to have this process continued”.
The Good Officer will assist both countries in the search for a practical settlement of the controversy that emerged from the Venezuelan contention that the Arbitral Award of October 3, 1899 is null and void, thus claiming a significant amount of Guyana’s territory. Venezuela is claiming 159.500 square kilometres in the Essequibo region, from Guyana’s total area of 214.000 square kilometres.
Girvan, an internationally renowned Caribbean economist, academic and international civil servant, who also served as Secretary General of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), was appointed in 2010, three years after the death of the Oliver Jackman, who served as the Personal Representative of the Un Secretary General Ban Ki-moon from October 1999 to January 2007.
Maduro told reporters that the two countries were committed to the diplomatic and legal measures in settling the border controversy.
“We are ready to work through the United Nations as the sole process,” said Maduro, adding it was now up to the officials from both countries implement the decisions as quickly as possible.
The Joint Declaration issued at the end of the talks said the two leaders “acknowledged the potential cooperation under the PetroCaribe mechanism and the new cooperation initiatives proposed, which include the bilateral drugs agreement, furtherance of the proposals for cultural cooperation and capacity building in the area of Spanish language training for Guyanese and English language training for Venezuelans”
It said that the two leaders “reviewed the achievements of the PetroCaribe mechanism” with Ramotar congratuling his visiting colleague “on the initiative by Venezuelan to establish the Petrocaribe Economic Zone (PEZ), which has been created to safeguard and manage the resources in the region.
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Read all comments“ Venezuela is claiming ***159.500 square kilometres*** in the Essequibo region, from Guyana’s total area of ***214.000 square kilometres***.”
Sep 02nd, 2013 - 05:29 pm 0Aaaaaaaaaannnnnnd we're done.
There really is a point where you just have to sit and look at the size of the chunk of land and just say “No,” plain and simple. This claim and resulting arbitration is over a century old, and most importantly egregiously friggin' huge beyond reason. (And of course now gets trumped by the wishes of the people living there.) It's not even justifiable to use that as a starting point and to then “haggle down” to sound “reasonable.” The “good officer” really just needs to say “No. Work on what you can do together but don't even begin to waste diplomatic or legal time on such an over the top claim.”
Interesting historical footnote that the area was once called 'Nova Zeelandia'.
Sep 02nd, 2013 - 05:33 pm 0Lucky for my Kiwi cousins.
Also the Dutch settlement that started this mess was almost 200 years before Venezuela's independence. As messy as this historical claim is, I find it hard to reconcile fraternal South American words with a country of almost 1,000,000 km2 claiming 74% of a neighbour to leave them with a rump country of only 54,000 km2.
Them there the almost 200,000 Guyanese or 25% of the population that would be transferred to a foreign country.
@2 “Them there the almost 200,000 Guyanese or 25% of the population that would be transferred to a foreign country.”
Sep 02nd, 2013 - 06:22 pm 0Which tells me that just ain't gonna happen, which also tells me that these negotiations should not be wasting anyone's time. But yeah, they are effectively claiming Guyana -- not just “everything to Essequibo,” rather like that sleazy family in Boulder who got their buddy judge to rule to give them a “tiny” sliver of adjoining land on which someone was going to build their retirement home (rending the entire property unusable for nothing but green space - to be sold to them of course, or the city, for a reasonable market price no doubt.). If Venezuela would prevail, what was left behind would not be Guyana in the sense that we know it.
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