Flight over disputed territory
The Guyanese Foreign Minister (right) delivers the protest note to the Venezuelan ambassador. Photo: DPI Guyana
03/07/2021 | Caracas
Carlos E. Hernndez
The Government of the Republic of Guyana denounced that two combat aircraft of Sukhoi Su-30MK2 since Military Aviation of Venezuela They flew over, on March 2, the community of Eteringbang, located on the right bank of the Cuyuní river, in the current limits that separate the two countries.
According to the official Guyanese version, the fighters, in addition to flying over the town, made a passage at “very low altitude” over the runway, and then “continued in an easterly direction.”
Consequently, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Guyana, Hugh todd, delivered a protest note to the Venezuelan ambassador in Georgetown, Luis Edgardo Diaz Monclus, and expressed “the Government’s concern about the act of aggression” and “affirmed that such action was a clear violation of Guyana’s territorial space, as well as international law and conventions.”
It should be said that the supposed overflight of the Su-30MK denounced by Guyana was on the Essequibo territory, which is the subject of a territorial dispute between the two countries.
Response from Venezuela
In response, the Ministry of Popular Power for Foreign Relations Venezuela, through a communiqué, “energetically rejected the inaccuracies and false accusations” of Guyana, which “seek to manipulate reality to feed a negative matrix against Venezuela in relation to the territorial controversy over Guayana Esequiba”.
He also denounced that, “once again, in a crazy way, the Government of Guyana tries to generate false versions about the regular patrol operations of the Venezuelan borders, carried out by the Bolivarian National Armed Force, strictly circumscribed to the undisputed Venezuelan territory, in order to pretend an alleged ‘act of aggression’ against sister Guyana ”.
Finally, it recalled that, “since there is a dispute over Guayana Esequiba, none of the parties can refer to this territory as their own, under their sovereignty and jurisdiction, as established in Article 5 of the Geneva Agreement 1966 “, and reiterated that” it remains faithful to its position in favor of resuming the spirit and mechanisms to seek a practical, peaceful and mutually satisfactory resolution of the territorial controversy over Guayana Esequiba, while “condemning the attitude of false victim of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana ”.
Territorial controversy
Venezuela claims 159,000 kmtwo of the Territory of the Essequibo, currently in the possession of Guyana, formerly English Guiana, who “inherited” it from the United Kingdom. Venezuela was stripped of that territory, in 1899, by an Arbitration Tribunal, constituted in Paris, whose judges were British, American and Russian, and in which it was not allowed to participate in the deliberations.
In 1966, Venezuela and Guyana signed an agreement in Geneva by which they agreed to seek a solution to the territorial dispute under the auspices of the United Nations. However, in January 2018, the UN, at the request of Guyana, decided to refer the case to the international Court of Justice, an instance that Venezuela does not recognize in the context of the claim, and, in a recent decision, that body admitted its jurisdiction in the Venezuelan claim for the Essequibo Territory, which has aggravated relations between the two countries because it is unilaterally unknown, the Geneva Agreement.
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