Hands Off Venezuela!
President Nicolás Maduro addresses a mass rally, April 6, 2019,
congratulating the Venezuelan people on their defence of their
motherland.
With the continuing failure of the U.S. to bring its
coup d'état against the government of the Bolivarian Republic of
Venezuela to a successful conclusion in spite of the dirty
multi-faceted war it has been waging for that purpose, it is going to
new extremes to try and legitimate its illegitimate activities and
shore up support internationally for the hapless self-proclaimed
"president" Juan Guaidó.
On April 9 at an extraordinary session of the Permanent
Council of the Organization of American States (OAS), requested
the day before by seven Lima Group members including Canada, a
resolution was approved by a simple majority of 18 votes[1] that
called on the OAS
to accept an individual designated by the disempowered National
Assembly as Venezuela's permanent representative to the OAS,
"pending new elections and the appointment of a democratically
elected government." The resolution further instructed the OAS
Secretary General to transmit the text that had been approved to
the Secretary General of the United Nations, in keeping with the
concerted effort of the U.S. to get the Security Council to act
against Venezuela.
It was pointed out emphatically by the representative of
the
Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and others who voted against the
resolution, and even by some who abstained, that the Permanent
Council had no authority under the OAS Charter to determine who
should represent any of its member states, that this was a
decision belonging to the member state itself.
Sir Ronald Sanders, Antigua and Barbuda's Ambassador to
the
OAS pointed out that "in international law and practice, who
represents a state is based on the test of "who is in charge of
the country, who administers its affairs, [and] who controls its
borders." Given that a fictitious parallel "government" headed by
a self-declared "president" without any real power obviously does
not fulfil these requirements, he said that essential test of
international law had been ignored, and requested that his
remarks be included as a footnote to the resolution.
The response of Venezuela's representative Asbina
Marín
Sevilla and of certain others who objected to the resolution also
appeared as footnotes to the resolution that appeared on the OAS
website. In her remarks Marín Sevilla stated:
"The only measure provided for in the rules of the OAS
is the
suspension of a member state, decided on at a special General
Assembly by a two-thirds vote of the foreign ministers. There is
no other way. The power to withdraw recognition does not exist,
much less the power to change governments. Any improvisation or
manipulation that allows other actions to be taken by a lower
body and with a voting threshold below two-thirds is illegal....
We are thus facing two coups d'état: one committed against all
the principles of the OAS, and another committed from within the
OAS against a state that is facing intervention and upon which a
representative is being imposed from abroad."
The OAS "has been turned into an empty shell, powerless
to defend its own principles," said Marín Sevilla, proving that
her government's decision to withdraw from it was correct. Venezuela is
due to leave the OAS on April 27, two years after giving notice of its
intention to do so.
Ambassador Jorge Lomónaco of Mexico who voted
against
the
resolution called its adoption "a pyrrhic victory for a group of
countries, without real effect." Saying the decision had been
taken "irresponsibly and without legal grounds," he expressed
concern about its implications. Similar concerns were expressed
by representatives of countries that abstained on the vote as
well, including Nicaragua and Guyana.
Caracas, Venezuela, April 6, 2019.
At the UN Security Council
On April 10 the U.S. moved its regime change sideshow to
the
UN Security Council where it demanded that an emergency session
be convoked allegedly to consider the "humanitarian problems" in
Venezuela -- the third such meeting it has forced in less than a
year.
The meeting began with reports by the UN
Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock,
the Joint Special Representative of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for
Migration for Venezuelans, Eduardo Stein,[2] and Dr.
Kathleen Page,
a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine who
reported on a study carried out by her university in conjunction
with the U.S. government-financed agency Human Rights Watch. All
of them painted a dire picture about the "humanitarian situation"
in Venezuela without mentioning a single word about the role of
the economic war the U.S. has been waging aimed precisely at
creating a crisis in the country.
 Pence then took the floor
in the style of a self-appointed prosecutor, calling Venezuela a failed
state and its government "illegitimate," making sure to include that
Venezuela represented "a threat to the peace and security of the
region," emphasizing that it was time for the UN to "act" -- a
dishonest attempt to make the case for an eventual military
intervention like the U.S. has been threatening, and which Pence made
sure to say was still "on the table." He announced that the United
States was drafting a resolution calling for the UN credentials of the
Bolivarian government to be revoked and assigned instead to the coup
forces it sponsors, and called on all states to support it, presumably
at a future meeting of the General Assembly even though not even a
third of its members have recognized its puppet Juan Guaidó as
Venezuela's president.
After issuing his uncouth threats and demands at the
Security Council, Pence made a show of walking out of the meeting, not
bothering even to hear what Venezuela or other members of the Security
Council had to say in response. Speaking to reporters outside he
blustered impotently, "This is our neighborhood and the president has
made it clear that whether it be Russia, or whether it be other
nations, that they need to step aside. They need to cease efforts to
stand in the way of economic and diplomatic pressure, and they need to
cease supporting the Maduro regime."
At a press conference he held after the meeting,
Venezuela's
Permanent Ambassador to the UN Samuel Moncada said it is no
secret that the U.S. has been running a high pressure campaign
for some time to try and get more of the 193 UN members to buy
into its regime change agenda by recognizing its puppet Guaidó
as
the legitimate president of Venezuela. While that might work in
the OAS, whose Secretary General openly calls for war against
Venezuela, he said, it's not the same at the UN which is not just
"a corral of the U.S. and its friends." Moncada said Venezuela
had also been engaged in a vigorous campaign with members of the
Non-Aligned Movement for the last six months to counter U.S.
attempts to unseat its delegation at the UN and that this would
continue.
Notes
1. The resolution was
approved by Argentina, The Bahamas, Brazil, Canada, Chile,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti,
Honduras, Jamaica, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Saint Lucia and
the United States. Nine countries voted against it -- Antigua and
Barbuda, Bolivia, Dominica, Grenada, Mexico, Saint Vincent and
the Grenadines, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela, and six
abstained -- Barbados, El Salvador, Guyana, Nicaragua, Saint
Kitts and Nevis, and Trinidad and Tobago. Belize was absent.
2. Eduardo Stein is a former vice
president (2004-2008) and foreign minister (1996-2000) of Guatemala. He
currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Washington-based
Inter-American Dialogue. Of note is that Stein was a member of the
International Commission on State Sovereignty and Intervention (ICISS)
established by Canada in 2000 after NATO’s precedent-setting bombing of
Yugoslavia. The Commission came up with "the responsibility to protect"
(R2P) to justify foreign intervention against sovereign states -- a
violation of the UN Charter. In its report to then-Secretary General
Kofi Annan the Commission recommended the UN adopt R2P as official
policy. Stein is said to remain an advocate of that imperialist
doctrine which the likes of Luis Almagro and members of the US-financed
opposition in Venezuela have called for utilizing today against
Venezuela.
This article was published in
Volume 49 Number
13 - April 13, 2019
Article Link:
Illegal
Manouevres
and
Impotent Demands to Support Regime Change Rebuffed
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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