British Withdrawal Leaves Belize Fearful Of Uncertain Future

BELIZE CITY - Queen Elizabeth II is too genteel to speak so bluntly, but the message accompanying her arrival in Belize yesterday might as well be: Buck up! Be self-reliant!

The small independent nation of Belize is losing a bit of its innocence.

Belize must now protect itself. British military forces are packing up and going home at a rapid clip, taking the feared Gurkha soldiers, the Puma helicopters, the Harrier jump jets and the artillery.

On Jan. 1, the British forces handed off duties for defending the country to the 1,000 members of the Belize Defense Force, leaving Belizeans deeply unsettled about neighboring Guatemala's longstanding claims on their country, a British colony until 1981.

Anxiety pangs are rippling across the country.

"They can't just pull out and leave us with nothing," said Kenrick Jones, a building contractor.

"How can 1,000 men defend a country against an aggressor that has 75,000 men?" he said.

The Guatemalans, he added, "could overrun Belize in a day."

One of many changes

Losing the British defense guarantee is only one of many changes roiling Belize, which looks out on the peaceful Caribbean but remains anchored in troubled Central America. Crime, drug trafficking and gang violence are growing, and vast immigration from as far as China is altering the face of the nation of about 240,000.

The British withdrawal, which will be completed Oct. 1, seems to have catalyzed uncertainty among Belizeans about their future.

"I can understand why they are fretting. It's another step forward. It's another responsibility to shoulder," said Brigadier Iain Johnstone, commander of the British garrison.

The message from the British, though, is "stiff upper lip."

The Queen made no public mention of the British withdrawal when she arrived from Guyana, although her visit coincides with the transfer of a British military camp to Belize.

Rideau Camp, an infantry base near Punta Gorda in the south, will be handed over to the Belizeans Monday, the second of four British camps to change hands. A third, Holdfast, will be transferred at the end of March.

When the withdrawal ends, only 100 or so British soldiers - from a high of 1,800 - will remain in Belize to run jungle training courses.

Belize's army chief, Brig. Gen. Alan Usher, chides his countrymen for failing to believe in his army.

"Belizeans are spoiled. They have been spoiled over the past 50 years with a (British) defense guarantee and little or no personal effort of their own," he said.

"One of the reasons people hop up and down is because they don't know about our military. . . . I won't boast, but many of our military officers are trained at Sandhurst, the British royal military academy."

Usher said his forces are small but scrappy.

"We reckon that we'd have a pretty good chance of giving any enemy a run for his money if he came ashore here," he said.

Fear of the Guatemalans is not easily assuaged, however.

Britain first beefed up its military presence in 1977, in what was then known as British Honduras, when Guatemala began massing troops at the border.

Many maps of Guatemala still show Belize as part of its territory, although tensions eased in 1991 when Guatemala offered diplomatic recognition of its neighbor.

That helped sway Britain to announce the withdrawal of its forces and the handing over of defense duties to Belize, Johnstone said.

`Almost unthinkable'

"An invasion is almost unthinkable in the world context," he said, adding that the withdrawal decision came after a "very pragmatic re-evaluation of our defense commitments."

Still, some Belizeans accustomed to the sophisticated jets and helicopters of the British forces scoff at their own army's two Islander twin-engine airplanes and say the military is not prepared to assume the nation's defense.

"We need more weapons. We need more experienced men," said Ursula Smith, a cashier at City Hall.