Belizeans who are going to vote NO in the referendum on April 10, if the government or the court don’t postpone it, believe, are of the conviction, that if Belize says YES to the Special Agreement we are going to lose either land or rights, or both. They have their reasons for their arguments, how they arrived at their conclusion. This is how they rest, and that is that we are going to regret forever and ever, giving the green light for the judges at the International Court of Justice to consider our border and sovereignty.
Belizeans who are going to vote YES in the referendum on April 10, if it is on April 10, KNOW that Guatemala will get a diplomatic victory over Belize if we vote NO. What they KNOW is that a NO vote will give Guatemala a boost over us.
Many supporters of the NO position say they have no problem with the 1859 treaty, that their problem is with the compromis. Unfortunately there will be no question asking why, for the position we support when we vote in the referendum. So, to the world out there a NO position will be articulated as fear for the strength of the 1859 treaty.
Ambassador David Gibson has suggested that we move immediately toward asking the court for an Advisory Opinion, IF we vote NO. Ambassador Gibson’s call for an Advisory Opinion, I believe, comes from recognizing that a NO vote will rock us from the balls of our feet to our heels, and we will need to move swiftly to not get knocked too far backwards.
Some of the leaders of the Belize Peace Movement have said that their preference is for the referendum to be called off. They understand the full implications of a NO vote. The day Belize’s foreign minister signed the Special Agreement, he locked us in. We don’t know if the foreign minister and his ministry knew that they were binding our hands. If they didn’t then, they fully know now, and that is why they have done a number of unjust things to get a YES vote.
It is good to remember how we arrived here
I haven’t seen the booklet featuring the eminent judge, former ICJ president Stephen Schwebel, but I got the leaflet with the bullet points and one of them made my eyebrows go up. After reading Judge Schwebel’s response to the question, “Is Belize responsible for any breach of the 1859 treaty, for example Article 7?”, I immediately went to Google to find out where he came from, weh ih baan. I could have bet the house and lot that he wasn’t British. I could have bet a couple dollars that he was from one of those rebellious islands that form the United Kingdom along with England, or from that wannabe great USA.
He is American. We are not the only colony that has produced citizens who want to take the British down a peg. Judge Schwebel says (on Article 7) that any obligation which Britain might have (which it denies) towards Guatemala for any breach of the treaty does not devolve on Belize, even assuming the UK could be held responsible. Hmm, I’d better leave the judge alone. He might have made it clear in the booklet that Guatemala’s Article 7 claim is flat out unfounded.
Okay, to a rehash of how we arrived here. After Guatemala denounced 1859 in the 1940s, the British opened a ten-year window to allow for settling the matter in court. The Guatemalans did not take up the offer and so the British ignored them, until the United Nations declared that they had to allow their colonies to become independent.
Wait, let’s do a pause here so I can hib some mud at my economics guru who just can’t resist taking shots at the British. I believe the English devils have sins enough, so it is not right to pile on propaganda. In his article to the Amandala on Friday, Bill Lindo blamed the British for the terrible plight of the Rohingya people in the Far East. The British have a hand in that, but they are not alone.
The British are supposed to have carved up India. That is true, but a big story, a very important story goes with that. See, it was daam nigh impossible for the British to gain control of India in the first place. That happened because India was a very, very divided place. The British came and took advantage of that country’s many, many, many divisions.
Okay. So, the British started preparing to let go Belize. We are a very small country and the very first thing they did was push us towards a proposed organization of Caribbean states called the West Indian Federation. These countries were all small islands, and two sparsely populated British colonies on the main, Guyana and Belize. This led to the splitting of the PUP, and the side that rejected federation with the West Indies, won.
Shortly after, the leaders of the PUP went on a trip to London, and on this trip there was a meeting with a minister of Guatemala, Jorge Granados. In Lawrence Vernon’s book, A Narrative of Political Parties in Belize, there is mention of this incident. The British accused Price and his delegation of listening to proposals to “sever itself (Belize) from the British Crown and become integrated as an associate state of Guatemala.” The PUP leaders were able to satisfy Belizeans that they did not entertain such an offer.
Belize attained self-government in 1962, and the British started to push very hard to get Guatemala to drop their claim. They didn’t want to have to defend Belize forever, so they started making concessions. If you read Assad Shoman’s latest book you will see where the Americans feared (in the 1960s and 1970s) that an independent Belize could fall into communist hands. The end here is that in 1968 we had the Webster’s Proposals, the objective of which was to make us a colony of Guatemala, an associate state, yes.
We have reports that the British tried to give away some of our land, but our leaders nixed that. Our leaders internationalized our situation and we fought off The Heads of Agreement and eventually got independence. After independence we continued negotiating with Guatemala, to get them to drop their claim. There was a time when it looked like we were underway to a sensible agreement. At certain periods our leaders expressed the view that the claim was behind us.
But the Amandala publisher warned them that they were letting down their guard. Bismarck Ranguy, Sr., the author of Toledo Recollections, warned them too. In Toledo Recollections, published in 1999 by the National Library Service, Ranguy wrote: “Guatemala’s unfounded claim to Belize is an old story. In one of my articles to a local paper a few years ago, I told the Belizean people that Guatemala will never give up its claim to Belize until the Judgement Day, I will tell you why.
“In Guatemala, all the Guatemalan school maps show Belize as a province of Guatemala. But there is a much bigger map of Guatemala on the palace grounds in Guatemala City. This map occupies about an acre of ground. Belize is included on this map of Guatemala, all the way up to the New River in Orange Walk District.”
Former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Said Musa, would get the sense about the Guatemala that Bismarck Ranguy, Sr., knew. Remember that our leaders were seeing the end of the tunnel after passing the Maritime Areas Act, after having open discussions about trade and security, and after Guatemala had recognized Belize’s independence and had established an embassy in Belize.
On June 8, 2000, Musa said, in a letter to Guatemala’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gabriel Orellana Rojas: “…in a retrograde step, Guatemala’s claim to Belize was restated in 1994, after Britain, assuming Guatemala’s good faith, retired its defence garrison from Belize.”
In that same letter, Musa said that Guatemala articulated its new position, claiming more than half of Belize on 18th October 1999, and it came “as an intolerable aberration, and is recognized as such by the international community”, and that Belize could not “be expected to even consider the possibility of any land cession.” (notes from Ambassador Murphy’s A Compendium of Relevant Documents — The Guatemalan Claim to Belize)
After the British left, Guatemala started flexing, making life miserable for Belize in the Chiquibul, and this would lead to the OAS increasing their involvement, and confidence-building measures, and adjacency zone, and then the Ramphal/Reichler Proposals, a package which was rejected.
After the Proposals were rejected, Guatemala explained that no negotiations would be successful if we didn’t give them a piece of land, because their constitution said we belonged to them. Of course, from our side, no negotiation can be successful if it includes our sacred land.
And so, in 2008 we got the Special Agreement.