Trojan Horse
Editorial
It has been announced that Foreign Minister Rohee will be travelling to Caracas on Thursday, August 24 for talks with his opposite number, the Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel. These talks are being presented as preparation for the meeting of the Presidents of Guyana and Venezuela at the forthcoming summit conference in Brazil. At the same time, as reported in our Sunday issue, Rangel is proposing joint exploitation of some of the resources of Essequibo. Indeed it appears that the proposal may already have been communicated to the Guyana government. There are many who thought that the rush to offer joint exploitation to the Surinamese in the oil rig dispute was bound to have implications for our western neighbour. This has now happened. For a long time it has been claimed that the oil basin slopes into Guyana in the Takutu region. However, there is an immense difference between exploiting the seabed and exploiting a land resource. The crucial difference is that the exploitation of a land resource leads inevitably to the development of a permanent community as happened, to give but two examples, at Linden and at Kaituma in the Barama concession. One must immediately reflect on the likely demographic composition of the communities which will derive from joint exploitation. The movement to date of our people consists of out-migration. The efforts of the previous administration to develop hinterland communities initially at Kato all failed. It is therefore more than likely that the new settlers will come predominantly from one side. This in time could have the gravest territorial implications. The great British jurists and advocates, Sir Humphrey Waldock and Sir Francis Vallat, in rebutting Guatemala's claim to all the territory of Belize, had argued that the right to self-determination of the people actually living in the territory was superior to any other legal claim to the territory. So it is not being unusually cautious to see not too far down the road a situation ensuing from joint exploitation which could put a question mark over Guyana's territorial integrity. Indeed it is not difficult to see that joint exploitation, even if subject to the most careful drafting of legal instruments, will dilute Guyana's sovereignty over the territory concerned. In the case of Suriname the boundary is still to be demarcated. In the case of our Western boundary following the Arbitral Award of 1899 the boundary was demarcated in the first decade of the twentieth century. It should also be observed that any joint enterprise in Essequibo involving the nationals of this country and Venezuela is a situation designed for the creation of 'incidents'. Such incidents could conceivably lead in due course to actions on the part of the neighbouring state to 'protect' its interests and its nationals here. We expect that our Foreign Minister will get the best advice and will be accompanied by appropriate experts on his visit to Caracas. There must be no recurrence of the ambiguities which followed the signing of the much discussed Memorandum of Understanding for an environmental agreement.
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