The maritime dispute
A week last Saturday, Suriname gunboats forced an oil rig which had been hired by the Canadian based CGX company and which was operating in Guyana's territorial waters to move. It was a hostile act which was in contravention of international norms and law. In addition, it was an act calculated to cause Guyana - not to mention CGX - the maximum amount of economic damage. The company after all had been granted a licence as far back as 1998, and had explored in the contested area without a squeak of protest from our neighbour. Furthermore, according to CGX, only last year while it was prospecting in the same locale, it had sought and been granted permission by Suriname to turn its ship five miles into that country's recognized maritime zone for a period lasting over six weeks. So much for good neighbourly relations and peace on our borders. It might be noted in passing that oil exploration licences have been issued before by Guyana for what is now being called the area of overlap. In fact there was drilling there in 1974-75, which again produced no protest from Suriname. So what, the Guyanese people must be wondering, has triggered this untoward bout of aggression from our neighbour to the east? In the first instance it has to be recognized that there is no formal treaty covering this border, and it is not, therefore, in quite the same category as the western boundary which was fixed by an international arbitral tribunal in 1899. This does not mean to say that Suriname has right on her side, or even, for that matter, international law on her side, but it does mean that there is wiggle room for dispute. At the bottom of the problem is quite simply that the line accepted by Guyana as dividing the mouth of the Corentyne and the continental shelf between the two territories is not accepted by Suriname, although both agree that the point of departure for their lines is the western bank of the Corentyne river in the vicinity of No. 61 village. Suriname's line runs close to our coast, and it is the roughly triangular space between that and Guyana's line which is being contested. Suriname's line - ten degrees east of true north - has its origins in a draft treaty between the Netherlands and Britain for settling the whole boundary which dates back to 1936. Under the terms of that draft the New River Triangle was to go to Guyana, the whole of the Corentyne river to Suriname and the territorial sea was to be divided on the basis of the co-ordinate cited above. In pursuance of the eventual implementation of this draft treaty, two concrete markers were laid down near No. 61 village. There are problems, however, with Suriname's position. In the first place, the treaty was never signed because the Second World War intervened, and efforts to reach an agreement in the colonial period after the war as well as since independence did not bear fruit. Quite simply, therefore, Suriname's line is a unilateral one. Secondly, the draft treaty of 1936 awarded the New River Triangle to Guyana, but now we have Suriname claiming the whole of the Corentyne, the maritime line of 1936 and the New River Triangle. Furthermore, the boundary experts of the 1930s knew nothing of the concept of what we would now call Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ); considerations relating to the continental shelf were something which were only to be introduced into global maritime thinking after World War Two. The 1936 line, therefore, was intended to apply to a territorial sea of very limited extent. And what about Guyana's line? Guyana's maritime frontier - 33 degrees east of true north - is in harmony with the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention which applies a principle of equidistance where there is no established maritime boundary. According to the Mirror of June 7, 2000, Suriname has rejected Article 15 of this convention, showing "blatant disrespect for international covenants". In addition, the media have been informed about a 1991 Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries, which provides for the exploitation of petroleum resources for the benefit of both pending a resolution of the border dispute, although there are claims from the other side of the Corentyne that this was never ratified by the Surinamese Parliament. Suriname is causing trouble now because she is in a position to do so, and she hopes to gain some economic, if not eventually some territorial advantage out of it. While Guyana has had no official presence on the Corentyne for years, and has demonstrated her inability to protect her interests there, Suriname in contrast has been flexing her muscles on the river. Whether Suriname has overplayed her hand in the long term, however, remains to be seen. A CGX statement issued last Thursday, warned that elements in the international investment community were watching developments closely. If CGX withdraws, and the Corentyne acquires a reputation for instability, investors will be frightened away from the entire river mouth and contiguous zones, and she will end up paying the same economic price as Guyana.
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