MR ROGERS:
Mr Chairman, Your Excellencies, Gentlemen: I wish to thank you for those kind remarks and to say that we come very close to agreeing with them.
I am instructed, Mr Chairman, to convey to you and to Lord Carrington and members of the staff of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office the personal greetings of Premier George Price, who regrets that he has been unable to be present today for this opening ceremony and he has authorised me and my colleagues to proceed with our business confident of the Government of Belize's backing for the decisions taken here today.
It
Our task, Mr Chairman, which begins today is to agree the system of Government for Belize as an independent nation, and that is an issue which has preoccupied the minds of Belizeans since 1963. was in that year, that we last came together to discuss the consitution of Belize and agreed then to a self-governing con- stitution. At that time we all hoped, and our decisions were predicated on that hope, that within another two or three years our efforts would have culminated in the passing of the residue of power still vested in the United Kingdom into the hands of the people of Belize.
It is a tribute to the wisdom of the decisions we then took, that despite the awkward interval of time which has elapsed, Belize has enjoyed good, stable government. It is our hope that we shall now pursue the task before us with equal wisdom and perception so that the chain of democracy shall not be broken and the Belizean
people will continue to be as well served.
The abnormal situation to which I have referred, where constitutional advance has been denied the Belize people for so long is the result of neither the unwillingness of the United Kingdom to complete the decolonizing process in the case of Belize, nor the unwillingness on the part of the Belizean people to accept the mantle of responsibility which complete liberation brings.
In fact, emancipation of Belize has been our joint objective for some years now and we have been forced to pursue this goal, with the help and
2/1