Raphael John-Lall

Free­lance Con­trib­u­tor

While Exxon­Mo­bil’s pres­ence in Guyana high­lights the coun­try’s oil wealth, se­nior as­so­ciate at the Cen­tre for Strate­gic and In­ter­na­tion­al Stud­ies, Prof Ivelaw Lloyd Grif­fith, is boast­ing that Es­se­qui­bo’s wealth is much greater than that and al­so in­cludes gold and di­a­mond.

He ar­gues that it is Guyana’s vast nat­ur­al wealth that has caused Venezuela to re­open the bor­der dis­pute over the dis­put­ed Es­se­qui­bo re­gion.

“It is not on­ly the size of the Es­se­qui­bo that is of val­ue. You hear in the news that it is rich in oil. Rich agri­cul­tur­al lands are in the Es­se­qui­bo and oil and gas are on the land in Es­se­qui­bo and not on­ly off­shore. In the Es­se­qui­bo, there is gold, there is di­a­mond, there are baux­ite de­posits. There are man­ganese min­er­als and tim­ber of sig­nif­i­cance. You may or may not know that the Es­se­qui­bo has ura­ni­um de­posits found by a Cana­di­an com­pa­ny which start­ed to sur­vey in 2007. It is al­so home to a sig­nif­i­cant bio-di­ver­si­ty,” he said.

Grif­fith made the com­ment dur­ing a we­bi­nar host­ed by the Of­fice of UWI’s Vice Chan­cel­lor in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Fac­ul­ty of Law and Fac­ul­ty of So­cial Sci­ences, at UWI’s Cave Hill Cam­pus in Bar­ba­dos.

He made it clear, how­ev­er, that Venezuela at­tempt­ing to wrest the Es­se­qui­bo ter­ri­to­ry from Guyana was a threat to the very ex­is­tence of Guyana.

“Why is Venezuela’s claim an ex­is­ten­tial threat to Guyana? What is it about the claim and what is it about Guyana that makes this claim by Venezuela an ex­is­ten­tial threat? By ex­is­ten­tial, I mean a threat that un­der­mines the very ex­is­tence of a coun­try called the Co-op­er­a­tive Re­pub­lic of Guyana. There are clear and present dan­gers once an­nex­a­tion is part of the con­ver­sa­tion.”

He out­lined four bases on which the na­tion­hood of any coun­try rests—the land, peo­ple, re­sources and the iden­ti­ty.

“Es­se­qui­bo is not a small piece of land. We are talk­ing about 61,600 square miles of ter­ri­to­ry. This re­gion con­sti­tutes 74 per cent of Guyana. Ja­maica can fit in­to the Es­se­qui­bo re­gion 14.5 times. Bar­ba­dos can fit in­to the Es­se­qui­bo 371 times. Guess what, the Es­se­qui­bo is big­ger than the is­land of Eng­land. In the Es­se­qui­bo re­gion ex­ists more than 100,000 Guyanese cit­i­zens. The es­ti­mate of the last cen­sus of 2012 places the pop­u­la­tion there of over 125,000.”

Speaknig to the geo-po­lit­i­cal im­pli­ca­tions if Venezuela an­nex­es part of Guyana, he said, “Brazil has a bor­der with every South Amer­i­can coun­try ex­cept Chile and Ecuador. Some of those coun­tries them­selves are un­hap­py with their bor­ders with Brazil. That Brazil-Venezuela-Guyana bor­der it­self came out of the 1899 ar­bi­tral award. The Pres­i­dent of Brazil has made it un­am­bigu­ous that Brazil is not in­ter­est­ed in re­vis­ing bor­ders, es­pe­cial­ly un­der the threat of force.”

Unit­ed Guyana

Mean­while, se­nior lec­tur­er in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Guyana’s De­part­ment of So­ci­ol­o­gy, Dr Du­ane Ed­wards, said the Guyanese pop­u­la­tion is unit­ed in their de­fence of the Es­se­qui­bo re­gion.

“The Guyanese peo­ple are unit­ed in the stance that not on­ly Es­se­qui­bo is ours, but that as Pro­fes­sor Grif­fith put it, Es­se­qui­bo is in­ex­tri­ca­bly linked to the very con­cept of Guyana and any an­nex­a­tion threat­ens the very ex­is­tence of what we know as Guyana. Not be­cause of the many re­sources that are at­tached to that plot of land but be­cause of the very his­to­ry of the land and the peo­ple. In­ter­na­tion­al laws and mores are on our side.”

He al­so said the Guyanese pop­u­la­tion is over­whelm­ing­ly in favour of US mil­i­tary pres­ence to help ward off any mil­i­tary ag­gres­sion from Venezuela.

“But a se­ri­ous re­ac­tion to the threat was in­formed by two things. One is the re­peat­ed as­sur­ance of the gov­ern­ment of Guyana that all is well and in­ter­na­tion­al law is on our side. That is the gov­ern­ment strat­e­gy to man­age any anx­i­ety that could re­sult in any dis­place­ment.

“There is al­so com­ing from the so­ci­ety an abid­ing faith in our pre­sumed al­lies, es­pe­cial­ly the US and Cari­com. Cari­com in terms of the moral sua­sion. And the US in terms of the mil­i­tary and eco­nom­ic pow­er that it can bring to bear on these is­sues.”