E- 118/01   June 7, 2001 Honduras and Nicaragua Sign Agreement for First OAS Verification Mission   The Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Honduras and Nicaragua, Roberto Flores Berm�dez and Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, and the Assistant Secretary General of the OAS, Ambassador Luigi R. Einaudi, today signed an agreement at OAS headquarters for the first OAS Verification Mission. The Agreement was negotiated during the recent General Assembly of the OAS in Costa Rica. The document contains technical and operational details for three in-situ verification visits to Honduras and Nicaragua, scheduled for July, August, and October this year.  The first and third visits will be to the land border to verify the number of military and police posts and the number personnel deployed there. The second visit will be to the Caribbean Sea, the original source of the dispute between the two countries. The Mission will include staff members of the OAS General Secretariat and the Pan-American Institute of Geography and History, as well as experts in military affairs from Brazil and Argentina.  Civilian representatives of the Governments of Honduras and Nicaragua will accompany the Mission on both visits to the land border. In the Caribbean Sea, the verification will be conducted by the OAS Verification Mission only, in an OAS vessel.  The mission will be financed by the Fund for Peace, an OAS mechanism for providing financial resources to assist member States with defraying the costs of proceedings previously agreed to by the parties for the peaceful resolution of territorial disputes. “Some of the territorial disputes in the Hemisphere today originated in the European colonization of the continent, but others stem from economic and maritime sovereignty considerations related to the modern concept of the Law of the Sea,” Ambassador Einaudi said.  “Such considerations are important not only for states in the Hemisphere but for the rest of the world as well. The decision taken by the Governments of Honduras and Nicaragua to resort to a multilateral organization, in this case the OAS, for assistance in reaching a peaceful settlement of their dispute sets a clear and positive example for the settlement of other conflicts of this kind,” Einaudi added. The Agreement signed today was drafted in accordance with a joint request from the Governments of Honduras and Nicaragua to the Organization to verify implementation of the confidence-building measures previously agreed upon by the two Governments. # # #