It is difficult from the perspective of only one week to uncover the significance of last Wednesday's events the opening of the Caricom Summit and the storming of the Presidential Secretariat with the accompanying disorders. The latter event certainly overshadowed the Summit in regional and international news coverage.
Listening to the speeches at the Summit's opening session one felt that while there were important insights and proposals, there was still insufficient realisation that the overarching issue was how to cope with the hostile or indifferent international environment so as to ensure survival as viable states.
But for Guyana in the retrospect of history the storming of the Presidential Secretariat will certainly be seen as a turning point at which action towards reconciliation can no longer be avoided or evaded without incurring the most appalling consequences. The act itself and the death of two persons left Georgetown and the nation stunned and shuddering and in fear as witnessed next day by the hushed and empty streets.
The deaths were tragic. Certainly grave criminal offences were committed. But the persons who rushed into the compound had been "worked up" and incited. Had the so-called leader gone in with them, he might have been able to restrain them. However, he chose to maintain his personal safety by staying outside on the road from whence a quick exit could be made. Yet this is the man who the BBC (Caribbean Report, Evening Edition, Friday, July 5) is portraying as a charismatic leader of the people, of whom people are "talking more than they are of Jagdeo or Hoyte."
Horror and dismay have enforced a kind of pause. It is essential that this pause should be utilised with a sense of urgency to take steps, however tentative, towards reconciliation - a wider process than the solution of the immediate issues in conflict.
The Government has been quick to see in it confirmation that the violent overthrow of the Government is planned, a conviction which will now inevitably shape and harden attitudes. But Government should also be pondering how easy it is for extremists to ignite uprisings and the incapacity of the disciplined forces in coping with them.
For the Opposition the incident should have brought home forcibly the risks of association with extremists capable of sidelining the official leadership. Riding a tiger now as always remains a hazardous exercise. The disorders have brought upon the Opposition national and regional censure and the real possibility if not threat that there could be international remedial intervention even including military intervention.
Now, as already noted, there is an overwhelming national sense of urgency that the political impasse must be brought to an end as the void which it leaves is being filled by extremism, criminality and disorder tending towards anarchy.
But there is no easy way forward. The labelling as terrorists has led to a demand for retraction as a precondition and this has been promptly rejected. There seems to be little room in the immediate future for movement on either side. Declarations of willingness or calls to resume dialogue miss the point and may well be ignored.
The only way forward may lie in third party mediation to break the current dangerous logjam through the exercise of persuasion and moral pressure and the introduction of new ideas. What is profoundly disturbing is that no new ideas or proposals are being put forward from any quarter.
The questions are where could such mediation come from and what are the issues to mediate.
The apparent issues in conflict are well known, namely the need for timely implementation of agreements reached in the dialogues and the impasse over the appointment of parliamentary committees a situation whose wider implications for constitutional reform are precipitating a constitutional crisis. There are additional troubling concerns not limited to one side.
However, it is abundantly clear that the immediate sources of conflict are only the immediate occasions of conflict and not the deep causes of conflict.
The deep sense of alienation of Afro-Guyanese has already been identified editorially. The roots of alienation lie deep in structural poverty and joblessness which affects all sections of the Guyanese society, both rural and urban, but falls heavily on the urban poor. In terms of immediate history the situation is compounded by a sense of outrage at being displaced and dispossessed. For a long time the belief was fostered that the PPP would never be allowed to hold power. Rigged elections had the acquiescence if not blessing of the hemispheric power. (Who would have believed that the day would come when a former head of the KGB would become the close ally of a US president.)
Moreover, internally in those years the nationalised industries and new state agencies and the GDF provided expanding, easily available job opportunities. There is now little understanding or acceptance even at the highest level of the trade union movement that state industries can no longer be maintained in terms of the diktat of the powers that dominate the international system.
In the case of the governing party, the PPP, the pervasive sense of insecurity which evidently shapes decision making or its absence and which keeps policy largely unresponsive to new ideas derives from its history of being removed from power and kept from power for three decades through rigged elections and more recently being pressured into early elections. Political insecurity is enhanced by the personal insecurity of its supporters; in the spate of recent killings the large majority are Indo-Guyanese. Coping with such historic baggage is not a matter for negotiation. But if the immediate conflicts are resolved one can begin to think in terms of longer term nation building processes. Moreover, if the economy is given a breathing space in which to grow and develop, prosperity is the one sure solvent of most problems.
Over the years we have had several mediation efforts from overseas-close to home there have been Caricom's several efforts, the electoral audit, the facilitation of talks, the Herdmanston Accord, the St Lucia Summit - all leading to the holding of early elections. Early elections seem to be the preferred Caricom option, as it was also recommended for St Vincent and the Grenadines where it produced a change of government.
Then there is President Jimmy Carter's several missions. He is presently engaged next door in a somewhat similar situation in Caracas.
But everything points at least first to the practicality and necessity of a local initiative. In this connection the initiative of the Civic element in the PPP is an imaginative and courageous step as it will not be easy to disengage mentally from entrenched partisan positions. As a first step should they not consult with the Reform elements of the PNC?
Then there is the interesting proposal of the Private Sector Commission which is reported to be willing to ally itself with all nongovernmental organisations, churches and nonpolitical groups "so that the stakeholders can reach conclusions to save Guyana from such a cancerous malady." Such an alliance should aim primarily at generating new ideas and providing a basis for persuasion.
All such proposals should be welcome as the first steps in what should become a national process of reconciliation. It should also be recognised, given the depths of bitterness and division, that initiatives will have to be sustained over a long time, in the teeth of much discouragement and breakdown. Any continuation of the present situation of deadlock will further rapidly destroy such social cohesion as is left, threaten interracial conflict at village levels, spread further the roots of criminality and stultify for a long time into the future possibilities for economic growth.