G.O.B. maps out educational blitz on I.C.J.
Before that referendum is held the government will be undertaking an educational blitz on the I.C.J. and the Guatemalan Claim. The campaign strategy was formulated by the Advisory Council on the Guatemalan Claim, chaired by Dylan Vernon and will be implemented by Bel-Caribe Communications. The countrywide campaign will last approximately seven months, will be bi-lingual, and comprise ads, an interactive website, brochures, and presentations to key members of society. The theme will be: the people of Belize shall decide, to show neutrality and not to sway opinion to go the I.C.J. route, even if government believes it’s the best way to get the issue settled once and for all.
Fred Martinez
“As a Belizean, I would advise you, first of all, to look at the documentation that will be produced in the educational campaign, inform yourself of the pros and cons and make up your mind what is it that you want? Do you want this thing to continue forever and ever, discussions after discussions o do you want to finish this thing once and for all? Knowing, however, if you have looked and educated yourself about the documentation that will be presented and learning as much as possible, knowing that you have a very strong case then why not go to the court or decide to go to the court? I can only give you my personal opinion. I cannot give you the opinion of the government of Belize and I cannot give you the opinion of the prime minister or whoever. My personal opinion is, having lived through the process, having studied the process, we have every reason to believe that we have an air-tight very rock solid case in front of the I.C.J., I have no qualms, I have no worries about that.”
“Should congress approve to hold a referendum, it all depends on how the government of the day in Guatemala and the political parties handle the issue. Clearly, we are talking about fourteen million people being given a special education what is going to court and what it all entails compared to our three hundred thousand people here. So it’s gonna be a very massive scale that they need to go into public education. My concern is how well that will be done, how well the people will be motivated to go to vote, will they have an interest to go to vote because when you live in Guatemala and you realise that it is not the entire Guatemalan populace that believes in the claim, that it is just a smaller percentage compared to the bigger percentage of the population who basically couldn’t care less or may not even know about the claim other than having been educated—the older generation because the new generation has not been educated that way. It all depends on how it is handled by the political parties.”
The campaign is priced at approximately half a million dollars, funding for which will be sought from the U.K.’s Global Conflict Prevention Fund.
