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Sir Ronald Michael Sanders, Antiguan Barbudan diplomat and the current Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United States and to the Organization of American States (OAS) says “There is no role for CARICOM in any of this (Guyana/Venezuela border controversy); they may be invited to play because this is an issue between two sovereign nations, between Guyana on the one hand and Venezuela on the other, and the matter is in the court, the highest court in the world (International Court of Justice), and he believed that “anything that Guyana does or Venezuela does will be prejudicial to those court hearings.”
Ambassador Sanders was at the time speaking on the Morning Point Show and took on frontally comments made recently by Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley about “noise” being made by Guyana and Venezuela regarding the historical border controversy. The PM and UN Secretary-General hopeful said at the time “I hope that the rhetoric and the noise between Venezuela and Guyana does not turn our Caribbean into anything that is not a zone of peace because it matters to us that this Caribbean remains a zone of peace”, while addressing the Barbados Labour Party.
“When Prime Minister Mottley calls for a peaceful settlement, surely that is exactly what’s happening now. By going to the International Court of Justice and putting the matter before the highest court in the world on international law, the body that has all the competence to settle this matter peacefully, that’s precisely what is happening. That’s what’s happening at least on the Guyana side. And as for the noise that Prime Minister Mottley referred to, I have to assume that she’s talking about the noise coming out of Venezuela. Because it is Venezuela, which has called for a referendum within Venezuela on somebody else’s territory.”
The Venezuelan December 3rd referendum, which will take the country to the polls, as viewed by Guyana, seeks the annexation of more than half of the country’s land and natural resource-rich region. “The only way you can get territory is one of two ways: either you go to a court and establish a case that the territory is yours, and the court awards it to you… or you can take arbitrary action. It is the latter that’s happening here.” The diplomat added, “The matter is before the court, and the people [ are putting soldiers on the border are not Guyana right now. Soldiers are going on the Venezuelan border, and you have that is a sinister move because the army and military equipment of Venezuela is far superior to anything that Guyana could mount. So the noise, I think, is being mistakenly saying that it’s a noise between; the noise is only coming from one place.”
