Two of Belize’s leading attorneys—one of them a legal advisor of the Dean Barrow administration; the other an ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs—have gone on record to say that Wilfred “Sedi” Elrington, the current Attorney General and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, was wrong in calling Belize’s border with Guatemala “artificial” in the context of the ongoing territorial dispute between the countries – a dispute that the Organization of American States (OAS) has recommended should be settled at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Elrington made a comment, published internationally, describing Belize’s border with Guatemala as artificial, when Belize and Guatemala met in Washington, DC, USA, on Wednesday, December 16, at the headquarters of the OAS at a meeting called to diffuse flared tensions between Belize and Guatemala.
While Elrington himself has been intractable in the face of calls for an apology, a retraction or his resignation, some notable Belizean minds have gone on record to condemn his statement, some of them continuing the call for him to issue a correction for public release to the OAS—and if he does not make amends, they call for Prime Minister Barrow to remove him from Cabinet.
Apologize, retract, resign or be removed
Lois Young, SC, one of government’s legal advisors, went on record on the KREM WUB Morning Vibes today to call on the government to “officially retract” the declaration made on December 16 by Foreign Minister Wilfred Elrington that Belize’s border with Guatemala is artificial.
The Minister has gone on record to say that all he meant was to say that the border is “man made.” However, the Minister did not explain the misapplication of the term “artificial” to Belize’s southern border with Guatemala at the Sarstoon River, a natural border enshrined within the Constitution of Belize as the demarcation of the two territories at the southern frontier of Toledo.
Senior Counsel Young, via KREM’s airwaves, called on the government to issue an official retraction to the Organization of American States (OAS) and have them issue a press release.
A member of Elrington’s delegation to the OAS in December, Senator Eamon Courtenay (former Minister of Foreign Affairs and representative of the Leader of the PUP Opposition), said on Channel 5 this week Elrington was “flat wrong” to call Belize’s border with Guatemala artificial—and Guatemala will use it against Belize if the territorial dispute ends up in the ICJ.
“From a legal point of view, let us have no doubt about it: the Guatemalans are going to use it when we come to court. They are going to cite something as we currently cite statements made by foreign ministers of Guatemala back in the thirties and other times…” said Eamon Courtenay, SC, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Senator. “Similarly, when the Foreign Minister of Belize makes a statement, he is speaking not personally but for Belize and, therefore, Guatemala is going to no doubt seek to use it.”
Within the current state of play, Lois Young agrees, if Belize and Guatemala were to end up in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), “everything that you say will be used as evidence.”
Guatemala could say that Belize’s Foreign Minister conceded that it was an artificial border.
“The Foreign Minister refusing to retract is detrimental to us,” Young said.
Courtenay, however, opined that Elrington’s statement would not prejudice Belize’s case at the ICJ.
“For us, and I believe for all Belizeans, we have a border and that border is real. Anybody who characterizes it as artificial is flat wrong, and there can be no compromise on that issue,” Courtenay added.
For his part, Elrington has claimed in a prior interview with Amandala that his statement was misunderstood and blown out of proportion by those who want to persecute him, accusing the Kremandala media enterprise of making the personal attacks against him:
“I am saddened by the fact that such a simple word used in that context, was misconstrued in that way by a media house.”
Elrington went so far as to say on Wednesday on Channel 5 that those making his statements an issue are seeking the launch of a third party on the Belize political scene.
While the Minister has pointed his fingers at Kremandala, there are those clearly outside of Kremandala who have argued that their concerns over his statements are well founded.
Attorney Lois Young reiterated her public call for the retraction, saying that if the Minister fails to do so, Cabinet itself should issue a retraction and have it officially recorded.
Young went on to express her surprise that a Minister of the Barrow administration, Elrington, would have appeared Wednesday morning on the television station owned by the person (Lord Michael Ashcroft) Prime Minister Dean Barrow declared in his New Year’s message to be “an enemy” of Belize.
“Whose side is he [Elrington] on now?” Young questioned.
Even though Elrington claims his comment was harmless and well-meaning, Senator Courtenay told Channel 5 News this week that “…the statement by the Foreign Minister is to be condemned.”
“If the Foreign Minister made a mistake he must say so and state the position officially, clearly for all,” said Courtenay.
However, Elrington continues to hold his ground, boldly repeating on Channel 5 Wednesday that he did not realize so many Belizeans did not know that “artificial” also means “manmade.”
“I was also somewhat brought up by the fact that there were some people in Belize who genuinely did not know that the word ‘artificial’ meant, among other things, ‘manmade.’”
Mark Espat, Albert area representative and a Deputy Party Leader of the Opposition, People’s United Party (PUP), has said that Elrington should apologize, and went on record to call for his resignation or removal by the Barrow administration.
KREM WUB Morning Vibes, Mose Hyde, also called on Elrington this morning to step down as Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Elrington is clearly confident, nevertheless, that Barrow won’t strip him of the Foreign Affairs portfolio.
He told Channel 5 that, “If he had thought that what I did was wrong or harmful to the people of Belize or to the nation of Belize, he would have had no hesitation to remove me.”
Prime Minister Barrow made that point unequivocally when he appeared on Channel 7 saying that, “I would say quite clearly there is no way in hell I would remove Mr. Elrington for something like this.”
Barrow said Sedi’s removal “would suggest that what is involved is more than some kind of syntactical misunderstanding.
“This would suggest that as a matter of substance, Mr. Elrington’s position as Foreign Minister is untenable. I don’t see that at all.”
“Artificial borders” in context
While the Barrow administration has not ordered at least an apology or a retraction from Elrington, Senator Godwin Hulse, who was the first to call on the Minister and the Government to issue a clarification to the OAS, provided a paper authored by a team of Harvard and New York University professors titled “Artificial States” to Amandala, to explain his view that calling Belize’s border with Guatemala “artificial” is nothing trivial.
“You will note that of the 13 states classified with straight ‘artificial Borders’ which apparently suffered from a dissecting of their nation, Guatemala is one of them,” said Hulse. “This must certainly endear the Guatemalans to hear that the Belizean administration considers the two countries to be the same, save and except for this artificial border drawn by the British.”
The authors of the 2006 paper are Alberto Alesina of the Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; William Easterly of the Department of Economics, New York University, New York; and Janina Matuszeski, Harvard University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“These most artificial states are Chad, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Guatemala, Jordan,
Mali, Morocco, Namibia, Niger, Pakistan, Sudan, and Zimbabwe,” they write.
“Latin America is a lesser known (and much earlier) example of artificial borders drawn by a colonial power, in this case Spain. The Spanish created administrative units (vice royalties, captaincies, audiencias, etc.) in the Americas that had virtually nothing to do with indigenous groups on the ground. For example, the various Mayan groups in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and what became other Central American states were split between units,” the professors say.
The article states that, “Artificial states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground,” adding that, “The bottom line in this paper is that the artificial borders bequeathed by colonizers are a significant hindrance to the political and economic development of the independent states that followed the colonies.”
In the context used by these professors, the term “artificial border” suggests more than it being manmade. In fact, the authors categorically refer to them as “mistakes.”
“The borders of many countries have been the result of processes that have little to do with the desire of people to be together or not. In some cases, groups who wanted to be separate have been thrown into the same political unit; others have been divided by artificial borders. Former colonizers have been mainly responsible for such mistakes, [emphasis ours] but the botched agreements after the two major wars of the last century have also played a role,” said Alesina, et al.
Therefore, the statement made by Foreign Minister Elrington, in its context, including references to “same aspirations and desires,” echoed in the paper above, raises serious concerns among some of Belize’s most educated minds.
“We have to interact to emphasize the view that we are not different from each other; the fact of this artificial border does not make us different. We are still the same people, with the same aspirations and desires,” said Elrington in an official release of the OAS released on December 17, 2009.
Demonstrating how the term “artificial border” means more than just “manmade border,” is another publication our newspaper sourced via the Internet: Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada, a book by Maria Cristina Garcia published in 2006:
“The historical, cultural, and commercial ties between Chiapas [Mexico] and Guatemala made this six-hundred-mile stretch of land an artificial border. Until 1824, Chiapas was Guatemalan territory, and its loss to Mexico wounded Guatemala’s national psyche comparably to Mexico’s 1848 loss of northern territories to the United States.”
Belizeans ignorant, Elrington says
Elrington, who has held the Ministerial post for almost two years, also told the Channel 5 television station that most Belizean people are not educated about the Belize-Guatemala dispute.
“I believe that it is exceedingly important that we start to educate the Belizean people about the Belize/Guatemalan dispute,” said Elrington, “because most people don’t know anything about it.
“You ask the average Belizean to tell you about it and they can’t…”