In our April 5 edition we reported UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw as saying that the matter of British assistance on border issues had been raised in the two meetings he had had with President Bharrat Jagdeo. It is thought that one of those issues involved a request for British assistance in gathering archival material relating to our frontiers, a request which had been made before by Guyana's head of state, and which we had reported. When this newspaper put the question of whether such assistance would be forthcoming to a British High Commission official here, we were told that the UK's public records were open to anyone, and that Guyana could make use of them as required.

Prior to the latest approach to Mr Straw, there had been an Associated Press report based on statements made by Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister Jozias van Aartsen in Paramaribo that the Netherlands would allow Suriname to use Dutch archives to negotiate a border dispute with Guyana. It was a strange report, because the Algemeen Rijksarchief in the Hague normally operates a twenty-year rule: that is to say, documents more than twenty years old are on public access, and Suriname researchers (or anyone else, for that matter) can go at any time to study them. The report would only have significance in the unlikely eventuality that all records relating to the border with Guyana had been closed and the Netherlands Government was deliberately making them available only to Suriname.

Perhaps it was this somewhat puzzling report which inspired Guyana to make another approach about records, this time directly to Foreign Secretary Straw. If it did, then that is unfortunate, since it suggests a complete lack of understanding about what is involved in the documentation of border issues.

The first observation which has to be made is quite simply that gathering archival (and other) material requires research in the first instance. Somebody or some people have to go to the various repositories and do the painstaking work of sifting through records to identify what is relevant. And what is relevant is not always neatly collected together in one file or a single sequence. In addition, and most importantly, the notion of relevance itself has to be decided within the context of a Guyanese-based boundary research programme. So when the British official said that the UK's records were on public access and that Guyana could utilize them as required, that was a more than valid point.

The second thing which has to be said is that the documentation for the border with Venezuela in particular - moreso than Suriname - is very, very substantial indeed. Where our western frontier is concerned, there is possibly no boundary anywhere in the world which has generated so much paper. Furthermore, the records are scattered in a variety of locations, and are not conveniently centred in any one place. If the Government believes, therefore, that all that is required is to send a list derived from an on-line catalogue to the Public Record Office (PRO) in London for photocopying, they are sadly misinformed.

Thirdly - and this is most disturbing - the administration gives the distinct impression that it has no idea about the volume of work which was done in the thirty years or so from the 1960s onward (some of it by the British), or if they have, they are unconcerned about it. Without going into the details of who worked on boundary research and when, and the precise nature of that work, it should be said that there was a documentation programme of one kind or another in operation during the PNC years, and money was allocated to that programme. Are we to infer from the vague request to the British now that the Government is in the process of reinventing the wheel? Has the administration lost the work which was done before, or has it just elected to ignore it?

Even where the PRO specifically is concerned, where work was done in the past, there would be need to update the local collection as sequences become available under the thirty-year rule, or files which have been closed for longer periods are opened to public access. However, even the process of updating presupposes that whoever is researching for the Government knows what has been done already.

In the fourth place, while the plan under the previous administration was to retrieve all relevant boundary documentation in the long term, it did recognize the financial and other constraints inhibiting that process in the immediate term. As a consequence, priorities were set for research, and those priorities related to larger border policy in the first instance, and possible strategies for approaching solutions in the second. In other words, when information was sought it was with a specific purpose in mind. If the Government has not prioritized its doumentation requirements and is making requests for unspecified documents, we must assume that apart from their lack of knowledge of the volume and dispersal of records mentioned above, they simply have no policy framework to guide them in terms of priority areas of research.

For most of their first two terms of office, it is clear that the administration was unconcerned with boundary documentation. What possibly woke them up to its importance was the CGX fiasco. While it may conceivably be that they are now more seized of the significance of records than they were in the past, they are hardly approaching the issue in an informed, professional or systematic way. Starting again from scratch is surely an exercise in futility.

It has to be said again, that creating a boundary policy with all the things which flow from that, cannot be undertaken by the Government alone; they need the input of the opposition. If there is a difference between the Suriname and Venezuelan approach to boundaries and ours, it is in the department of continuity. Changes of government in those two territories do not mean that everything that was done under a previous administration is forgotten; they build on what has gone before, and adapt where necessary. Similarly, research and documentation is something which is built upon over time, and given our current experience, it could be that some framework is required which would place this aspect under a more professional and politically neutral arrangement than the Government up till now has appeared willing to provide.

Lastly, it has to be said that some aspects of the work, such as the maritime boundary, are highly technical fields which will need the input of experts. This will not come cheap; in fact, no research and documentation programme in general comes all that cheap. However, until there is a policy from which is derived a programme of research priorities, documentation and possible reconstitution of records, it will not be possible to cost any overall exercise. And it is only when costing has been done, that an approach could be made to other sympathetic nations or organizations for assistance (particularly financial) in facilitating specific aspects of research.