OECS has accepted Venezuela's sovereignty over Bird Island -Ralph Gonsalves
Stabroek News
April 1, 2007
St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves said the OECS had accepted Venezuela's sovereignty over Bird Island and that he would not allow anyone to dictate whether or not he should put pressure on the Government of Venezuela in relation to the issue.
Bird Island is a low-lying, uninhabited islet situated off the coast of Dominica to which Venezuela lays claim. If the island is recognized as Venezuelan, it would potentially permit Caracas to increase the area of her Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) substantially, thereby impinging not only on the EEZ of Dominica but that of several OECS states as well. Up until last year Dominica, supported by the OECS, rejected the Venezuelan claim on the grounds that under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Bird Island was not a true island at all, but an uninhabitable "rock" which could not form the basis for any EEZ claim. Venezuela, however, is not a signatory to the Law of the Sea.
Last year Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit in a break with the traditional OECS position on the status of Bird Island, publicly acknowledged Venezuelan sovereignty over it, and told the media that his government would be entering into negotiations with Venezuela over the matter of maritime delimitation.
Speaking at a press conference at the Caricom secretariat on Thursday, Gonsalves said, "Nobody is going to tell me which questions are important…I am a nationalist and a Caribbean man and imperialism does not define for me those questions which are important for me… I decide those as a democratically elected leader…So whether the OECS was softening its position with respect to the Venezuelan claim for Bird island is something I am not getting into."
Gonsalves went on to say that Britain and the US had accepted that Bird Island was Venezuela's territory following a tribunal award by the Queen of Spain.
The OECS too, he said, had accepted the sovereignty of Venezuela over Bird Island, which was a matter of historical record and something everyone should be clear about. He then added that the issue at stake had nothing to do with the sovereignty of Bird Island, but whether or not the area was a rock or an island in international law. He observed that Venezuela was not a signatory to the Convention on the Law of the Sea.
As far as the ongoing disputes between the US and Venezuela were concerned, the St Vincent Prime Minister made it clear that he would not take sides since he respected and admired the leaders of both countries.
"What I do know is that today in Venezuela there is not a military dictatorship…there is a democratically elected government and that leader has subjected himself to more elections from 1999 to today than any other government in the western hemisphere, and on every occasion Chavez has won," he said.
"That tells me," he continued, "that the man's agenda, the man's programme and his policies are accepted by the people of Venezuela…" He added that this was just "a matter of objective assessment not a question dealing with ideology."
Gonsalves said Venezuela had been helpful to both Dominica and St Vincent and pointed to the fact that the totality of trade between the US and Venezuela had grown tremendously. "Men quarreling but men trading," he remarked humorously.