Reckless with national interests in Barbados

THE EDITOR: It was a catastrophic national disgrace in 2003 when former prime minister Patrick Manning allowed former Barbados PM Owen Arthur to unilaterally haul TT before an international tribunal that adjudicated on and established our bilateral exclusive economic zone maritime boundary.

In the process the tribunal ignored compelling legal precedent and allocated almost half of our legitimate and previously claimed maritime space to the exclusive jurisdiction and expanded maritime patrimony of Barbados in perpetuity.

But it is a further tragedy that in 2020, some 14 years after this 2006 debacle that zone-locked and cut off our traditional continental shelf and high-seas access to the Atlantic forever, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley proceeded to Bridgetown to add the final nail in our watery coffin.

Having proclaimed at the Energy Conference that TT would apply to the UN for its maritime borders to be extended to the cretaceous rocks underlying the Guyanese offshore zones, that I consider to be a legal and physical impossibility, given, inter alia, our zone-locked position, why will you want to give official recognition to the potential hydrocarbon-bearing blocks proclaimed by Barbados by prematurely concluding a TT/Barbados cross border unitisation agreement?

Are the interests of oil companies superseding that of TT?

That agreement imposes a caveat on and bars TT from making any proposed east-ward maritime extensions beyond the current boundary handed down by the tribunal in 2006.

That action is inconsistent conduct at the sub-regional level that makes us further a laughing stock to the conceited Bajans who will realise that we are not Law of the Sea savvy at all.

The late Lennox Ballah will be turning in his grave at this subjugation of TT to Bajan diplomacy courtesy of our PM.

Secondly, why will you tell the Bajans that there is no geological break/barrier or discontinuity in our intervening seabed when Barbados has in fact no continental shelf in a geological sense that it can claim as its natural prolongation into the sea?

Thirdly, why will you commit TT to operationalising joint diplomatic missions/plural representation with Barbados when this is a failed and discredited unworkable model rejected by Caricom countries a long time ago? This is also diplomatically impossible because TT and Barbados together do not constitute a sovereign state in international law that is conditional for such an arrangement to be possible.

Fourthly, TT and Barbados are contenders for:

* Offshore oil and gas exploration companies and oil markets.

* Tourism arrivals.

* A determination to become the transportation hub of the Eastern Caribbean.

* Diplomatic capital of the Caribbean.

* Hosting and administering CWC cricket tournaments that boost tourism arrivals and cricketing status much to the detriment of the Queen’s Park Oval and the Brian Lara Cricket Academy.

That is an unmitigated misfit thanks to a Prime Minister unleashed in Bridgetown.

STEPHEN KANGAL

Caroni

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"Reckless with national interests in Barbados"

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