The Internet news of happenings back home, with sickening repetition, numb the "great Guyanese" pride in me. With predictable regularity the news and chat sites speak about gruesome incidents and how the lives of citizens, in and out of uniform, are wasted like those of hunted animals.

In my travels, I have not met a single Guyanese who is not bleeding for Guyana, fearing that it is becoming a killing field.

Like so many others, I also followed the dismal reports, which led me to a soul-searching retreat into our recent history. There are many positive features to the Guyana life; many pretty stories about development. But we cannot doctor reality, nor deny it by propaganda spins. And though a quiet fury is burning in my breast that I ought to say otherwise, I must admit that in just a single year our history appears to be little less than a register of crimes, grief and terror.

ETHNIC-POLITICAL CONTEXT
I agree with almost all the explanations being offered for the situation and accept, statistically, that we are not the major gangster-land in the world. But as I place our crimes within the context of our ethnic-political situation, Guyana becomes explosive. Crime becomes the off-shoot of a limited but dangerous, armed insurgency.

Let me try to explain this context. In 1992 the PNC was defeated. The chain of stolen power was broken. Most Guyanese were euphoric when Cheddi Jagan became President.

He recognised that a change of government, important for democracy, was only skin surgery. He wanted social transformation, as the real issues were closer to the bone.

Those were, and have been while the PNC held unbroken power, fear of racial domination, racial insecurity and racial discrimination. I can still see him in my mind's eye proclaiming on an historic May Day at National Park, "there would be no discrimination, no victimisation, no recrimination".

That did not deter the loser PNC from upping the racial suspicions, accusing the new government of "ethnic cleansing" of its African supporters. Then it claimed that Africans were "marginalised".

I have no doubt that those ideas of racial subjugation formed the ideology of what started after the PPP came to power as a PNC proxy fight from its African support bases, at first in places like Vergenoegen and Georgetown, and later in Buxton.

COALITION BUILDING
But while Dr. Jagan lived, a lid was placed on open ethnic insurgency. His message of "racial/class/ideological balance", "inclusion and partnership" and national reconciliation was neutralising broader sectors of the society.

This he had worked for since the split in the PPP. And as the PNC grew unpopular, he had held the hope for a significant crossover of Afro-Guyanese to his party. He practiced consensus and coalition building at all levels. He embraced the finest amongst the Africans, notably the late Walter Rodney, and courted them actively to his side.

He canvassed for inter-racial electoral combinations, featuring himself with running mates such as Dr. Clive Thomas, Mr. Ashton Chase and Mr. Samuel Hinds.

He was unabashedly bold when he suggested Dr. Roger Luncheon as a compromise presidential candidate for the 1992 elections. In an abortive bid, I similarly advanced his daring proposal for the 1997 elections to deny the PNC in that election of its race card against the PPP.

After the 1994 local government elections, Dr. Jagan devised what was described as the "Mandela Formula" of power sharing at the municipal level. After his death, those brilliant moments faded.

Those efforts could succeed in uniting Indo and Afro-Guyanese if they could simultaneously decimate the PNC. On the contrary though the PNC lost three consecutive elections, the racial voting pattern was never broken. In the process, however, the PNC became weaker as it lost some influence and control over disgruntled supporters, mostly youths, who gravitated towards new racial messiahs.

I can think of no other analogy than that of the predicament of the USA, displacing the mighty Soviet Union, only to deal with a host of deadly regional conflicts and wars. As one American official admitted: "We have slain a large dragon but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes."

PRESSURE POLITICS
Statesmanship in Guyana since 1997, alternated with savagery. We have witnessed the daily diet of racism, the chronic hatred and, of course, fires and crimes.

The Herdmanston Agreement and the St. Lucia Accord were palliatives not solutions. They gave us time but did not take us over the line of distrust/hostility to tolerance/engagement, much less on the road to reconciliation.

The much vaunted but failed dialogue between President Jagdeo and Mr. Hoyte became a fragile fence nailed together in a high wind of hatred. Past suspicions overshadowed the talks. No one wanted to be accused of giving an inch more than is prudent, to appear weak or, to be guilty of, to use the treacherous word, "appeasement".

In the end when Hoyte thought that he was empty-handed, he left the table. He became winner in the game of pressure politics, in street fights, or more accurately, fires. Democracy in the meantime took a reluctant retreat.

Dialogue and negotiation had given the people hope. Now, after the failure, it may not be unkind if history were to write about our leaders as people who had missed a chance.

The time has come when we have to let go of the past. It is the past that is intruding in the present and blocking the way to the future.

But I know that there are people around who cannot let the past go. The past wants revenge, like the ghost of Hamlet's father.

SHARED GOVERNANCE
Take for example the issue of "shared governance" or whatever other labels it is given. I am amazed by the summary disposal of this rather old idea in pro-PPP letters that fall short of context or timing or analysis of the mood of people.

Writers are ready to say that it has not worked in the past, and it would not work in the future. No attempt is made to analyse the scope and limitation of the coalition idea in the context of the new body of constitutional changes.

No attention is given to the need in specific conflict situation to allow an opponent to debate changes rather than try to wrest them by other means. It is plain, blunt dismissal of it. It's always about the past, and about selling out.

Power and its manipulation seem to be a life and death game. For some, power has a front door and a back door.

Some reason that the PPP can always come in the front door through periodic elections. It has the electoral arithmetic to ensure this. So, it is being advised to shut the back door lest the PNC sneak into the powerhouse.

No one bothers over such trivia as to what happens if someone desperate enough to get in, decides to break the whole house down!

In our common Guyana home there must be room for everyone. There must be a place for Indians and Africans, and for all other Guyanese ethnic groupings. We have to deal with our present by building structures for the future.

I believe in the power of the future to over-ride the past. The future wants us to bury our failures, our burnt hair and singed minds.

If we can put the past behind where it belongs, we can re-image our country. We can begin to see not its divisions, its hatred and its poverty but its potential for unity and the prosperity of our people in the future.

REDEFINE DEMOCRACY
I believe that though democracy has been restored in a formal sense at the electoral level, something in Guyana has failed, and is failing badly. Since Cheddi Jagan died, we experienced turbulence in the tide of things.

It is with this in my restless mind that I say that our democracy requires a re-definition. The loser in an electoral contest cannot be seen as enemy. We must console and accommodate the loser. The enemy we destroy.

Our democracy must have room, in the context of our ethnic-based voting pattern and political loyalties, for both winner and loser. This makes it an inclusive, national democracy that is, at the same time, participatory and revolutionary.

Multi-party democracy means nothing if only two parties share the electoral power, but cannot work together for the interest and protection of the nation. The essence of our democracy must therefore be bi-partisan, and the approach to major problems must be united and national.

Plainly put, it requires maximum cooperation between the PPP and the PNC. It must not be a piecemeal measure or an opportunistic excursion. It must be an institutional arrangement that brings the parties together and working on a mutual agenda.

I feel sure that the new leader of the PNC would show great vision and would turn the current tide of pressure politics away from confrontation into the healthy stream of negotiation. No issue should be beyond reconciliation.

For example, we ought not war over "Black clothes" policemen. We should agree on what is effective policing. To use the wisdom of the Chinese leader, Deng Xioping: "it does not matter whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice".

The time is now for us to bring an end to our intransigence. We need new thinking and courage to go forward.

For those who want to live in the shadow of Cheddi Jagan, might we not ask: were he alive, would he not have examined broadly all new ideas, even if those ideas are transient, to postpone an alternative that spells catastrophe or to buy time?

Stability for a ruling party is worth buying

Guyana's greatest test is that of leadership. It is the leadership of both the PPP and the PNC sharing a common vision for the good of Guyana. We can debate the facts of who is the better leader and we may not be proven wrong in our conclusion.

But let us be guided, just for now, by Rabindranath Tagore who once wrote: "there runs a current of humanity which overpasses the tangles of facts and leads us to the person who is greater than his deeds and truer than his surroundings".