Argument is more about action than intention
As Janelle noted in her story, the government’s attorney, Nicola Cho, declined to speak to the press. Belmopan’s position, however, has been explained numerous times, most recently by Prime Minister Said Musa in an interview with News Five in April. What’s interesting is that the P.M. seems to have little philosophical quarrel with the Toledo villagers. The major problem, it seems, is the chronic gap between government’s words and actions.
Prime Minister Said Musa [April 4th, 2007]
“Let me say, as point one, that we recognise, I certainly do and my government does, that the Maya people are the indigenous people of Belize, at least they are a major part of the indigenous grouping of Belize, and as such they do have certain rights which had not been respected for centuries and in fact they were exploited in the Colonial days.”
“And what we’ve been working on is to determine who among them want to maintain communal land as such and who among them want to get title to their own land. The truth is we have been working and say okay, some of you want this thing to remain in certain villages as communal land we will respect that but there are many among you who want to get their fiat, their minister’s fiat, their title, to their individual twenty, thirty acres of land or fifty acres as the case may be. And the truth is our government has issued hundreds if not thousands of titles to Maya Belizeans as well as other Belizeans in our country so that they have their individual leases or their individual grants to their lands. It’s working through that process where the difficulties have come up and I will be the first to concede that we haven’t work as fast as I had hoped. Why? Because it’s very costly, we have to do a lot of surveys and it’s the survey cost that has held up a lot of the work.”
“Our government is very sympathetic towards recognising the need for us to uplift the standard of living of the Maya Belizean as indeed other indigenous groups because that is where we have the serious poverty problem. We can disagree about how we go about solving this poverty problem but let us at least discuss it and work together. Getting a constitutional case and a declaration against the government, if they succeed, is not going to solve the problem.”
In the event that the Chief Justice finds in favour of the villagers it is not clear exactly how detailed or specific a remedy he would order.
