| In 1949
Judge Otto Schoenrich of the U.S. law firm of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost,
Colte and Mosle published a memorandum in the American Journal
of International Law. The memorandum had been dictated to
him by his law partner, Severo Mallet-Prevost five years earlier,
with instructions that it was not to be published until after
the latter's death, and even then, only at Judge Schoenrich's
discretion. Mallet-Prevost, who had acted as a junior counsel
for the Venezuelans at the Paris tribunal, died on December
10, 1948, and his memorandum appeared in print some six months
or so later. Perhaps
this document would have remained little more than a historical
footnote, had it not been for one thing. In 1962 at the
United Nations, Venezuela questioned (among other things)
the validity of the Arbitral Award of 1899, which had established
the boundary with the then British Guiana.
She claimed
in front of the seventeenth session of the UN General Assembly
that Venezuelan rights to territory had been ignored by
the tribunal which had settled the frontier, and that the
whole award had been the result, not of a judicial process,
but of a political deal.
It was
no trivial allegation. The men who had sat in Paris weighing
the conflicting territorial claims of the two sides over
55 gruelling sessions, had consisted of the Chief Justice
of the United States Supreme Court plus another Justice
of that court, two British judges and a Russian jurist of
international repute. These were the men who Venezuela accused
– and still accuses – of chicanery.
And what
was the evidential basis of her accusations? The answer
is, the Mallet-Prevost memorandum.
But was
there any foundation to Mallet-Prevost's allegations, and
was Venezuela really deprived in 1899 of territory which
was rightfully hers? To answer these questions we shall
start the story five centuries ago.
Discovery
The story
begins with the European occupation of the American continent.
It was the Spaniards led by Alonso de Ojeda who arrived
first in this portion of the planet at the very end of the
fifteenth century, but they only came to inspect; they did
not linger. They set up their first permanent, and for 129
years their only sustained settlement in the Guiana region
(that swathe of land lying between the Orinoco and the Amazon),
on the lower Orinoco river.
This was
their little post of Santo Thome, founded most likely in
1595. It was at the best of times an impoverished, under-populated,
ill-provisioned base, more like an outpost than a township.
Under attack from the Dutch, among others, in the seventeenth
century, it shifted location on the Orinoco river no less
than four times. All of Santo Thome's various sites today
lie well within Venezuelan boundaries.
While
they had one or two abortive attempts at colonization, (including
briefly in the Essequibo in the early seventeenth century),
the Spaniards never succeeded in laying down durable settlements
anywhere else in the Guianas until 1724, when they established
a Capuchin mission station close to the Orinoco river.
Other
missions were to follow, many of which were either destroyed
in Carib attacks, or were abandoned owing to epidemics among
their inhabitants. Those which still remained at the turn
of the nineteenth century, were finally annihilated during
the Venezuelan War of Independence from Spain.
The closest
that any of these missions came to our Guyana was that sited
on the Curumo river, a tributary of the upper Cuyuni. Today,
all of these early mission sites lie within Venezuelan territory.
Dutch
Occupation
It was
the Dutch, not the Spaniards who were to establish themselves
permanently in the Essequibo region, and they did this at
a time when they were technically at war with Spain.
In the
sixteenth century the Netherlands had come under Spanish
dominion, and in 1568, the northern part of the country
embarked on a war of independence against the Spanish overlord.
The war was to last eighty years, during the course of which
the Dutch hammered the Spaniards in the colonial theatre
as well as at home, and attempted to set up colonies in
the Americas.
The settlement
of Kykoveral, sited on a rocky islet in the mouth of the
Mazaruni river was probably founded by the Dutch in 1616,
although the date is not absolutely certain. Kykoveral was
more than a trading post; it was the base from which plantations
were laid out on the banks of the three rivers.
In 1637,
the Dutch had a settlement on the Amakura too, while by
1658 they were established in the Pomeroon at Nova Zeelandia.
This latter colony was destroyed twice in the seventeenth
century, but the Dutch continued to maintain military posts
either here or on the Moruka throughout their period of
occupation. They had military posts at one period or another
at various other points in the colony as well, including
the upper Cuyuni river and the upper Essequibo.
For two
centuries, too, the Dutch maintained a close alliance with
the Caribs, who helped defend the perimeters of their colony
against Spanish attacks. The Dutch invested the captains
of the Amerindian nations with insignia of office, and both
civil and criminal cases involving members of these nations
were heard in the Dutch Court of Justice.
In general
one can state that at some periods the sphere of Dutch economic
activity, and by extension, political control, covered far
wider areas than that which constitutes modern-day Guyana,
while at no time from the 1620s onwards did the Spaniards
exercise control of any kind within the Essequibo region
which the Venezuelans now claim as their own.
Treaty
of Munster
In 1648
peace was made between the Dutch and the Spaniards at Munster,
in Germany, whereby the two sides recognized each other's
possessions in the Americas, among other places.
It is
an important treaty from the point of view of the boundary
story, but what it did not do was delimit the precise boundaries
of the Spanish and Dutch possessions.
Furthermore,
one of its clauses (Article V) was to become the subject
of contention in 1899, the British claiming that it allowed
the Dutch the right of expansion into unoccupied territory,
and the Venezuelan counsel maintaining that under the terms
of the article, the Dutch were not allowed to expand into
other areas.
Suffice
it to say here that when ten years after the Treaty of Munster
had been ratified, the Dutch set up the colony of Pomeroon,
the Spaniards never raised a murmur, although they complained
of Dutch breaches of the treaty in other parts of the world.
During
the course of the eighteenth century the Dutch in the form
of two Remonstrances did state their territorial claim,
the most comprehensive being presented to the Spanish court
in 1769. They claimed up to the Barima, but Spain never
replied. The wheels of the Spanish bureaucracy ground slowly,
and some sixteen years were to pass before finally Spain's
Attorney-General was to recommend to his government that
no action should be taken in the matter of the boundary
until "future events should show what ought to be decided
on."
His recommendation,
i.e. to do nothing, was accepted by the Council of
the Indies which had responsibility for Spanish possessions
in the Americas, and a resolution to the effect was passed.
Robert
Schomburgk
In 1803
the British assumed control of the three Dutch colonies
of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice, a control which was
given international sanction under the terms of the Treaty
of Pare and Convention of London in 1814. As with the Dutch,
British jurisdiction was exercised as far west as the Barima,
although there was still uncertainty about the precise course
of the boundary.
Like the
Dutch, the British appointed Amerindian captains in the
Barima, Barama and Waini, among other places, and unlike
the Dutch they also began establishing mission stations
in the interior. Up until 1850, the nearest Venezuelan post
to Essequibo was thirty to forty miles west of the Amakura.
In 1840
the British Government decided to take the matter of the
border in hand, and employed Robert Schomburgk to make a
provisional survey of the frontiers of the then British
Guiana. The results of his surveys were intended as a statement
of the British claim.
Schomburgk,
a Prussian (German) by birth,¹
was retained by the British on account of his familiarity
with the colony. Between 1834 and 1839 he had been employed
by the Royal Geographical Society to explore Guiana, in
the pursuit of which goal he had made three separate journeys
into the interior.
In 1839
Schomburgk produced a map, showing a boundary line dividing
British Guiana and Venezuela, which had its origins in an
eighteenth century map drawn by a French cartographer. This
line had been copied by subsequent map-makers, among them
Arrowsmith, whom Schomburgk had used as the source for the
line on his map. What these cartographers had done, in fact,
was to divide the two territories by selecting a geographical
line which more-or-less followed the watershed between the
Orinoco and Essequibo river.
At this
point, of course Schomburgk had undertaken no boundary surveys
as yet and was in the employ of the Royal Geographical Society,
and not the British Government. After he had completed some
surveying for the latter, he produced a completely different
line from the 1839 one, which he submitted to Henry Light,
the Governor of the time.
As a consequence
of bureaucratic torpor, this official line was not published
for very many years, and in the meantime, Schomburgk's 1839
line erroneously appeared on colony maps. In 1885, the Colonial
Office awoke from its slumber, and requested the publisher
of official maps to correct the mistake. The Schomburgk
line representing the British statement of claim, therefore,
was not shown on maps until 1887.
This apparent
alteration in the Schomburgk line was to be seized upon
later by the Venezuelans, who were to maintain that the
1839 line was the true statement of the British claim which
had been submitted by Schomburgk. They were eventually to
refer to the "capricious" or "elastic"
Schomburgk line.
Schomburgk
did more than just survey the frontier; he also placed markers.
This was to produce an immediate response from the Venezuelans,
who had won their independence from Spain some years earlier.
The British Government quickly disassociated itself from
Schomburgk's actions, and subsequently removed the markers.
The markers
aside, Schomburgk's boundary surveys on their own account
provoked a reaction from the neighbouring state. In 1844
they made their first official statement of claim to the
Essequibo – that is, to all the land west of the Essequibo
river. Its preposterous nature was not lost on the British
Government – the Spaniards had never made such a claim
and they immediately rejected it, offering an alternative
line which began at the Moruka. This in turn was rejected
by the Venezuelan Government.
In 1850,
in the absence of an agreement about the boundary, the two
sides acknowledged the status quo, and called for the non-violation
of the disputed zone by either of them. |
