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Guyana Guyana-Suriname Dispute
Suriname reaffirmed a claim to an area in southeastern Guyana,
the New River Triangle, after achieving independence from the
Netherlands in November 1975. Despite renewed efforts by Guyana and
Suriname to reach an agreement, border incidents occurred
repeatedly in the late 1970s. In September 1977, Guyana seized a
Surinamese trawler for fishing illegally in Guyana's 200-nauticalmile Exclusive Economic Zone. Suriname retaliated in January 1978
when it withdrew licenses from Guyanese fisherman who worked the
Courantyne River, which formed the border between the two nations.
Allegations were made that Suriname also used gunboats to harass
Guyanese loggers on the river. Renewed talks in 1978 resolved the
fishery dispute and led to the Surinamese trawler's return.
In 1979 Guyana's prime minister, Linden Forbes Burnham, and
Suriname's prime minister, Henck Arron, signed an agreement
establishing fishing rights and reopening the border. However, in
1980 a military coup overthrew Arron's government and relations
deteriorated. Although tensions between Guyana and Suriname
improved slightly after Hugh Desmond Hoyte became Guyana's
president in 1985, the border dispute remained unresolved in mid1991 .
In 1992 the GDF remained a small politicized force concerned
primarily with internal security. As the border dispute with
Venezuela edged closer to resolution, Guyana's principal external
threat and the defensive role of the GDF diminished. The problems
facing the GDF in the 1990s were more internal organizational
dilemmas: to define a new mission in a world less ideologically
divided and with less belligerent neighbors, and to deal with the
legacy of ethnic polarization that two and a half decades of PNC
rule bequeathed to the GDF and to Guyana.
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As of mid-1991, scholarly literature on Guyana's armed forces
and other aspects of national security remained limited. Two
excellent sources stand out: Guyana: Politics in a Plantation
Society, by Chaitram Singh, and Guyana: Politics, Economics,
and Society, by Henry B. Jeffrey and Colin Baber. Current
order-of-battle information is available in the International
Institute for Strategic Studies' annual, The Military
Balance. Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner's The VenezuelaGuyana Border Dispute is the definitive reference on Guyana's
primary regional problem. (For further information and complete
citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of January 1992
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