Senator says GOB needs to officially clarify “artificial border” statement
Godwin Hulse
Another issue that was on the minds of the protestors was the Foreign Minister’s ‘artificial border’ comment made to an Organization of American States reporter in mid December last year. Though Wilfred Elrington has come under plenty fire and has gone to lengths to define and explain what he meant, many feel that he needs to do more. A well known face at Saturday’s march was Senator Godwin Hulse. He felt that that the government still needs to issue an official clarification about the comment, since it was picked up and placed on the O.A.S. website.
Godwin Hulse, Senator
“The OAS is the one who issued the press release. They thought it important enough to extract from the minister’s casual conversation, those words and make them into a press release. That has gone all over the world. It has gone over this side of the world. I think a clarification needs to be made by the government to say look, what the minister said, this is a clarification; not to scold the minister, not to make the minister look ashamed, not to put him down, to clarify to the OAS so there is no doubt whatsoever that because in the context of the international discourse, artificial has a specific and significant meaning. It’s not a loose term.; it has a specific meaning. One needs only to go and look up the articles and the study that was done by a group of professors charged with doing this by the US Department of Research and you would see what they described as artificial borders. Ours doesn’t fit into that description and so you can’t have that floating out there. What the minister has said will give credence to Guatemala’s campaign and argument and I can’t support that.”
Jose Sanchez
“Do you think that the size of the crowd will send the message to the policy makers?”
Godwin Hulse
“I think if it was two people, two people. I know that politicians move on ground swell and they are always tending to ignore small groups, but if you look through history, you can see that small groups sometimes have ballooned into massive groups. The message only needs to get out there. So I don’t have a difficulty with the crowd.”
I really expected Godwin to be well read. I read the Belize news every day and if he has a comment on a topic I usually read his but I wish he would give this “artificial”. Hey Godwin per Webster’s II New Collegiate Dictionary (copywrite 1999) the word artificial means 1) “made by human being rather than occuring in nature”; 2) “made in immitation of something natural”.
So here is the deal: 1) boarders are man made. This meets the first definition of artificial; 2) Seeing that it is not someting natural (by nature) can it be immitated? We do not even know or we can’t even agree where exactly the boarder is for this reason there is an adjacency zone. We can all agree it is in that zone some where: now if this is not a situation that the word artificial describes accurately! So you have milked this for all it is worth! Give it up for heavens sake! Employ this same sort of deligence in the efforts of crime fighting.
Please educate the populace and let them know that this word is not a one dimentional word, and neither is it limited to the conotation you assigned to it, then let’s move on to crime, let’s find the other 15 grenades or how ever many more are missing. Let’s educate the youth so they can become more patriotic and civil!
By the way Godwin I still remember the nice milk popsicle your dad use to sell.
I,agree with senator Hulse 100% because yes it gives a upper hand to Guatemala’s campaign and argument home and abraod.I live in California and when I encounter a Guatemalan and he/she ask me where came from and I tell Belize they say oh Belize is for Guatemala and then we start an argument. So my friends I myself do not support that quote of artificial border.
i come in contact with Guatemalan citizens all the time here in New York,our relations are always cordial,and i always tell them that” Guatemala es para belice”