The Permanent Representative of Venezuela to the United Nations, Samuel Moncada, presented a letter this Thursday to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, expressing the Bolivarian Government’s rejection of the repeated biased statements made by his spokesperson regarding the US military deployment off the Venezuelan coast.
The letter denounces the Secretary-General’s ignorance on the matter, stating that he has been privately notified on several occasions about these actions. The Venezuelan official declared that the letter seeks to make the denunciation public “in the hope that this practice will end once and for all.”
The Venezuelan government’s letter rejects the comments made this Thursday by the spokesperson for the Secretary General, Stéphane Dujarric: “the biased comments of your spokesperson when addressing issues related to the escalating situation off the coast of Venezuela, as a result of the increasing US military deployment in the Caribbean Sea and the perpetration of extrajudicial killings in international waters.”
The condemnation of the spokesperson’s statements comes after the call for “de-escalation” unexpectedly directed at the United States and Venezuela, a statement they consider “a serious distortion of the facts and an immoral equation between the aggressor and the victim.” The matter had been discussed previously in a meeting between Samuel Moncada and the Secretary General, where the response received alluded to a “standard diplomatic response” to an unexpected question.
“It is not the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela that is carrying out hostile actions, provocative and intimidating maneuvers just a few kilometers from the territory of the United States of America, with B1-B bombers flying directly into U.S. airspace,” the Venezuelan representative stated in the letter.
Samuel Moncada detailed each of the military actions carried out in the Caribbean Sea, near the Venezuelan coast, which threaten the sovereignty of the Bolivarian Republic and the Latin American region through the deployment of military equipment near the region’s shores. The diplomat highlighted the attacks on vessels in which “more than 70 civilians have been subjected to extrajudicial executions,” which he alleges is a technical term for murder.
The Venezuelan representative pointed out that defensive actions carried out within Venezuelan territory in response to an “explicit and imminent foreign threat” are a right they possess under the Charter of the United Nations. These exercises cannot be compared to the offensive exercises carried out by the United States, and therefore it is not the Republic of Venezuela that is exacerbating the situation in the region.
Samuel Moncada stated that equating the two nations would be tantamount to acknowledging the conflict sought by the U.S. government through aggression and questioning the defensive preparations undertaken by the Venezuelan government within its borders.
The spokesperson’s repeated statements regarding aggression reflect a consistent pattern of ignoring the true situation on the ground, which consists of “the illegal and coercive actions of the United States government, as part of an exercise aimed at destroying our republican form of government and imposing a puppet regime.”
According to the letter, these statements violate Article 100 of the Charter of the United Nations, “by dangerously abandoning the neutrality, impartiality, and rigor expected of an international official.” The call for a “de-escalation” by the spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General is a breach of his duty to uphold the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, specifically the prohibition against the use or threat of force against the integrity and political independence of any territory.
The letter calls for immediate and public action to “clarify the situation, unambiguously identifying the source of the escalation and condemning the provocative US military deployment in the Caribbean, off the coast of Venezuela.”
The letter also calls for “urging the government of the United States of America to immediately withdraw its military assets from the region, cease its threats of the use of force against Venezuela and its policies of extrajudicial killings, and embrace diplomacy and cooperation as the only way to address issues of containment.”
Finally, the Venezuelan representative calls for ensuring that the spokesperson’s future statements are impartial and do not equate “the victim of aggression with the aggressor.” Samuel Moncada noted at the end of the letter that this matter “is directly related to preserving the integrity, neutrality, and independence of the United Nations as an international organization.”
IMAGE CREDIT: Venezuela’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Samuel Moncada, has repeatedly criticized the biased statements made by the UN Secretary-General’s spokesperson regarding US aggression in the Caribbean Sea. Photo: EFE.
[ SOURCE: teleSUR ]
