TT, Barbados model for regional disputes

THE ONGOING Trinidad and Tobago-Barbados maritime boundary dispute has inadvertently served as a model for other nations in the region to settle their own maritime disputes. Barbados is claiming that a 1990 Maritime Delimitation Treaty signed between TT and Venezuela is harmful to its own maritime interests. Last week, Barbadian Attorney-General Mia Mottley revealed that maritime energy reserves, not fishing, was her country’s bone of contention with TT. She said the matter was being referred to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Prime Minister Patrick Manning said the TT-Venezuela Treaty could not be rejected unilaterally without severe diplomatic fallout from Venezuela and other Latin American nations.

Yesterday, Guyana invoked Article 287 of the UNCLOS to settle a longstanding dispute with Suriname regarding the Corentyne River and Guyana’s New River Triangle.  UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Caricom Secretary-General Edwin Carrington have been informed of Guyana’s action. In a Stabroek News report yesterday, Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo admitted that his country’s actions were guided by those of Barbados.  “Fortunately, as the Government of Barbados has recently demonstrated in its dispute with TT, such means are at hand in the forum of procedures available under the UNCLOS to which both Suriname and Guyana are parties. These procedures allow for fishing disputes relating to maritime boundaries between adjacent states which are parties to the treaty to be submitted for bringing resolution to an arbitral tribunal established under the treaty,” Jagdeo said.

The Guyanese president added that his government’s action was taken “as a last resort as Suriname continually frustrated any attempt to resolve the dispute.” The Barbadian government has similarly accused its TT counterpart of dragging its feet on a fishing agreement between the two countries. Reports in the Barbados Advocate and Daily Nation newspapers on Wednesday revealed that Barbados and Guyana secretly signed an Exclusive Economic Zone Cooperation Treaty on December 2, 2003. Both governments claimed this treaty does not infringe any third states’ maritime rights under international law. Only last week, Jagdeo and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez held talks in Georgetown and access to petroleum supplies was one of the items discussed. At the end of those talks, Chavez said Venezuela would not prohibit oil exploration in the disputed western Essequibo region but it was not dropping its claims to those lands. Guyana’s energy exploration has been hampered over the years by maritime disputes with Venezuela and Suriname.

Last August, TT and Venezuela signed a Memorandum of Understan-ding (MOU) to develop cross-border maritime energy reserves. In May 1996, Barbados granted a licence to US oil company Conoco to explore in waters between TT and Barbados but that exploration was halted when the then UNC government protested that the activity was occurring within TT’s EEZ. On Wednesday, Energy Minister Eric Williams said the Barbadian government could not claim ignorance about the MOU because all the details of that agreement were made public. The Canadian and US governments have stated that none of their energy companies operating in local waters have curtailed their activities due to the TT-Barbados dispute. This has been reinforced by the latest analysis reports from the US Central Intelligence Agency and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.