To those of us who have been following Suriname's claim to New River triangle, about 6,000 square miles of eastern Guyana and seeing attempts to bring closure to the claim frustrated, the move by the Government couldn't come sooner.

Guyanese on the whole are disappointed that their country has had to take such an initiative. Generally speaking, the Guyanese and Surinamese peoples have developed a degree of kinship relations that must be the envy of many nationalities sharing geographic borders.

Suriname offered a refuge for many Guyanese seeking jobs and a source of basic consumer items after the Burnham administration restricted essential imports in the early 1970s.

Some Surinamese, mindful of the political wind that was blowing in their country, predicted that the time was coming when the tables would turn - when Surinamese would have to travel to Guyana to work and live and/or take basic consumer items back home. That prediction came through.

But try as successive Governments in Guyana might, efforts to resolve the boundary dispute at a bilateral level failed.

In a bid to transform poor Guyana partly through oil exploration on the Corentyne, Georgetown sought a settlement with Paramaribo on their offshore boundary "in a context," President Jagdeo said in a broadcast address to the nation last evening, "that has a bearing on our development prospects."

It goes without saying that the discovery/extraction of oil in Berbice has the potential for raising the living standards of the Guyanese people beyond many a dream.

But Suriname wouldn't let that be. On June 2, 2000, Suriname gunboats forced the removal of an oilrig that had been hired by Canadian-based CGX to operate in Guyana's territorial waters.

Suriname claimed ownership of the said area and declared that it was asserting its rights. But it was a hostile act that contravened international norms and law. "In addition," points out an essay on the dispute, "it was an act calculated to cause Guyana the maximum amount of economic damage. The company after all had been granted a license as far back as 1998, and had explored in the contested area without any protest from Suriname. Furthermore, according to CGX, only in 1999 while it was prospecting in the same locale, it had sought and been granted permission by Suriname to turn its ship five miles into that country's recognized maritime zone for a period lasting over six weeks."

In fact, Suriname has been daunting Guyana's efforts to develop its eastern territory since around 1989, the very year President Hoyte paid a State visit to Paramaribo. Guyana has pursued "every avenue of discussion and negotiation with Suriname, bilaterally and in the Councils of CARICOM, to resolve this matter and to allow offshore mineral exploitation to take place, on a basis beneficial to both countries," President Jagdeo noted.

The Suriname Government has apparently been ignoring the fact that in trying to thwart Guyana's development, it is blighting its own development prospects. It had long been anticipated that offshore oil exploration would provide direct job prospects for many Surinamese, especially those living in Nikerie across from the Corentyne, and have a rippling impact on economic development in Suriname in a general sense.

In all that has happened over the years, we see the Government of Guyana having no alternative to seeking recourse to international community intervention.