There is no more sinister threat to our immediate existence in the Eastern and Southern Caribbean and coastal Latin America than what is transpiring between Guyana and Venezuela, warns Prime Minister Mia Mottley.
And issue number one must be the preservation of peace, she underscored ahead of travelling to St Vincent and the Grenadines for the highly anticipated dialogue between Guyanese President Dr Irfaan Ali and Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela.
Mottley cautiously spoke on the contentious matter as she addressed Wednesday’s Barbados Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI) business luncheon and discussion at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre.
“Our consciousness has been infused with the presence of war, from Ukraine and Russia to the war in Africa across many different territories, to the war in the Middle East. And the one thing that we have said in this region is that we don’t want to lose the region as a zone of peace,” she said.
Declaring that the time for conversation is never over when it comes to peace, Mottley said, “we hope that we can keep temperatures down,” even as she acknowledged that in every family there are arguments and fights.
“And you have to find ways, even when people are right, to be able to lower the temperature because you don’t want your neighbours to get involved or you don’t want nobody to get hurt by accident,” she added.
Tension has soared between Georgetown and Caracas in recent months over the oil-rich Essequibo region which has been administered by Guyana for centuries and on which President Maduro continues to make a claim.
Earlier this month, Venezuela was ordered by the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) to refrain from aggravating the territorial dispute, ahead of a December 3 referendum in Caracas in which 95 per cent of voters supported declaring Venezuela as Essequibo’s rightful owner.
Ahead of Thursday’s talks, Maduro, in a letter to host Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves, expressed hope that the dialogue “becomes a starting point towards the return of direct negotiations”, while President Ali insisted that the conflict is off the table and the matter will be decided by the ICJ.
Prime Minister Mottley made clear that CARICOM is fully behind Guyana
and that peaceful resolution of the dispute must be through the Hague-based ICJ.
“This is a process where we need to leave all egos on the side and where we need to focus on the big picture, which is peace,” she said. “When the war broke out in Gaza and Israel, I made one statement internationally…and I said simply, ‘the peace will come’. But the question is: at what cost? In other words, how many lives will go, how much damage will be done and will the land be capable of sustaining life again?”
Insisting that she had every confidence that the region wants peace, Mottley added: “We need now to stretch every sinew in our body to ensure that the people of this region do not join the list in the rest of the world that are seeing war and disruption.”
(SD)
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