We have asked Mr Khemraj Ramjattan and Mr Raphael Trotman, executive members of the PPP and PNCR respectively to do monthly columns for our newspaper on topics of their choice.
The first column by Mr Trotman appeared last week. Mr Ramjattan’s column appears below. Their next columns will appear together in December.
I have been tutored over the years - first, by my father, then by my political and legal elders, and thirdly by life itself - that there is nothing to match the satisfaction of understanding the great questions and issues of the day into which one gets absorbed and out of which one wants to emerge the wiser.
One big question today is why are so many disobeying the State? And by State I mean that impersonal legal and constitutional order which has capacities to administer, control our territory, centralise finance, regulate and legislate behaviour.
Why is this disobedience so violent? Is there not a better way of being against the State?
My pursuit to obtain an understanding took me through many heavy pages and interminably long hours of reading. Many wondrous insights, however, I have discovered.
What I found myself immersed in was a history of political thought - something I once touched at my political science classes at U.G. some 20 years ago - which has as its underlying question over the centuries: “Why should any one obey the State?”
Moreover, I discovered that throughout the ages this question was constantly asked. It is not new. All forms of States - big and small, democratic and autocratic, whether law governed or whimsically commandist - have been opposed from within by oppositionists ranging from the single philosopher like Socrates in Athens, to movements with masses of people like the Bolshevik revolutionaries of Russia, to the terrorist gang of our own East Coast.
My attention however became more focused on the pages which dealt with the question: Why do people take up terrorism? And I was quite startled with what I learnt.
I had known, and anyone could have guessed, that this category of persons who are against the State organises and operates clandestinely with actions deliberately very public with a variety of motives ranging from political, religious, ethnic and with a purpose to frighten a society, to shock and paralyse its population.
What however I soon became aware of for the first time was the following:-
1. The source of terrorists is located in the “disaffected intelligentsia comprised of ambitious idealists without a creative ruling class to follow or a rebellious lower class to lead”. When there is no militant mass party to win the allegiance of this intelligentsia, they turn to violence in a desperate attempt to reconnect with the masses.
2. Terrorists cannot survive for any length of time in authoritarian regimes like that of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Nor can they in a truly democratic society which creates space for all voices. Such a democracy enables dissenting voices to believe activities of theirs will be taken into account and relevant changes made to accommodate them. The type of regime where it flourishes is the democratic one which nonetheless offers people few opportunities to work for significant improvement. The lethal combination of political disappointment as a result of people whose expectations have not been met, and an unaccommodating politics-as-usual mentality of the State officialdom creates fertile ground for a tendency towards terrorism. Some become directly involved in outright terrorist activities and a larger extended section may constitute a support group.
3. Terrorists can draw sustenance from a larger public sentiment which accords with their cause, or their national message which strikes a chord with members of the society. This sustenance quickly wanes when disproportionate violence for a certain purpose or message is executed. The terrorists, as it were, undermine their own cause and forfeit any nobility in the minds of their supporters because the levels of violence become unacceptable and against the conscience of such supporters.
4. The state’s response is never an easy thing. To counter with massive doses of police powers to the exclusion of political initiatives can be destructive of the legitimacy of the State itself. This can play straight into the hands of the terrorists. Martyrs can be produced out of this counter measure, and give a new lease of life to the cause. The answer always, apart from taking the law seriously, lies in politics rather than military retaliation. There must be space for a reconnection of these elements by involving them in movements for change within the national polity. Any genuine self scrutiny by the leadership of the State and its public as to why these people do these things will generally prove some reality or justified perception of alienation.
Guyana is a fledgling democracy.
But it must quickly learn, lest it perishes. In terrible times like these our public must be educated on what the risks are, why our policing must be more intelligence oriented, why a better security may mean some loss of privacy and liberty, and why there must be participation by all to solve this problem in being more accommodating, respectful, civil, law-abiding, and undertaking profound and sometimes even shocking self-examination, and especially for our leaders, being willing to lead the examined life - a most noble Socratic precept.