The WPA celebrates 25 years
Dr Roopnaraine looks back on the struggle against Burnham, the party will be going on a membership drive
Current Affairs August 2004
Stabroek News
August 18, 2004
Twenty-five years ago last month, the Working People's Alliance (WPA) was launched at a public meeting in Georgetown. It fuelled high expectations that it would be a major force in the unseating of the Forbes Burnham administration which it had vowed to do by "any means possible."
Those expectations were fuelled by a number of factors including the successful campaign against the July 14, 1978 Referendum which some PNC supporters would privately admit was hugely successful with unofficial estimates of the voter turnout being put at 13 per cent while the official voter turnout was stated as above 90 per cent. The removal of the unpopular governments in Iran, Nicaragua, Dominica and Grenada and the successful sergeants' revolt in neighbouring Suriname was also a source of hope.
There are a whole host of explanations as to why the WPA failed dismally in bringing people onto the streets in numbers that could have created the groundswell of support against the Burnham administration that could have led to its removal.
There are, too, a whole host of reasons for the WPA's failure electorally at the general elections of 1992, 1997 and 2001 which left them in a mountain of debt and led to their having to sell their headquarters after the 1997 and 2001 elections.
This article explores the WPA's history with Dr Rupert Roopnaraine one of the leading members of the WPA and several former PNC administration insiders who shared their thoughts on condition of anonymity.
The launching of the Working People's Alliance as a party on July 27, 1979 was not an unexpected event for the Guyanese public but for the WPA leaders it was a move that events forced them to make. The launching of the party was the culmination of years of political and ideological work among the masses and protest, Dr Roopnaraine said, going back to 1974 when a number of groups - The Association for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA), the Indian Political Revolutionary Association (IPRA), the Working People's Vanguard Party (WPVP) and RATOON - came together to protest the rigging of the 1973 elections. At those elections, the People's National Congress (PNC) declared that it had won a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.
ASCRIA was then led by Eusi Kwayana who had formerly been a leading member of both the People's Progressive Party (PPP) and the PNC; IPRA by Moses Bhagwan, who was also a former member of the PPP; the WPVP by Brindley Benn, a former chairman of the PPP, and RATOOON, a grouping of University of Guyana lecturers, one of whose leading members was Dr Clive Thomas. Others in the group included Drs Maurice Odle and Joshua Ramsammy.
The protest campaign gained the greatest momentum when it focused on the 1978 Referendum which it dubbed the "Referendum to end all referenda" as they asserted that the government's intention was to amend the constitution so that certain entrenched clauses which could only be altered with the approval of a referendum could in future be amended by a resolution passed in the National Assembly by a two-thirds majority.
According to Dr Roopnaraine, Kwayana had observed that it was the first time since 1953 that the two ethnic masses had taken the same position on a political question. "It was no secret that the boycott of the 1978 referendum was extremely successful. Independent observers had put the turnout at 13 per cent."
Dr Roopnaraine who along with Dr Clive Thomas was at the time in New York, recalled Dr Rodney telling him rather gleefully that "Mr Burnham had invented a new form of election rigging - the recycling of voters by moving large truckloads of voters from one polling station to another. Drs Roopnaraine and Thomas were tasked with writing the party's programme "Towards A Revolu-tionary Socialist Guyana."
Launching of the party
Dr Roopnaraine said that the launching of the party at the time it was done was the response that had to be made to the expectations of the masses in the wake of the killing of Fr Bernard Darke, two weeks before, and the arrests of the party leaders, including himself, Omawale, Karen DeSouza and Dr Rodney, for allegedly setting fire to the Ministry of National Development and the Office of the General Secretary, People's National Congress, then located at 200 Camp Street; they were all taken in during the early hours of the morning after the fire.
"At that time we had not completed our work of the writing of a constitution; we had not completed our work of writing of the party programme. In fact ... we were catapulted into the situation and we began to develop the party after July 1979."
He said from the day of the arrest of the party leaders in July to the day Rodney was assassinated, a period he describes as the period of "civil rebellion", the party was functioning and organised in Georgetown and Wismar, where there was the Organisation of Working Peoples - a breakaway faction from the PNC. "The presence of the WPA on the streets of the city, I would say, was the most dramatic expression of the kind of support the party had."
However, one observer who had been close to Burnham told Current Affairs that, in his opinion, Burnham had overestimated the support the WPA had and so had over-reacted. He said too that the administration had so infiltrated the WPA that it was always a step ahead of it and that this had caused widespread distrust among the WPA leadership.
The observer also told Current Affairs that the Burnham administration even shared intelligence with the WPA's ally the PPP about its activities among the sugar workers and so was able to thwart any inroads it could make among its supporters in the sugar belt.
Another also shared the view that there might have been moles from the PPP in the ranks of the WPA.
Pre-launch activities
But before 1979, Dr Roopnaraine said that the WPA had been intensely concerned with two issues - the campaign for a fair trial for Arnold Rampersaud which Rodney spearheaded and the defence of the Dayclean for the publication of which Kwayana and Bhagwan had been placed before the courts.
He noted too that the WPA actively participated in the 135-day strike which the Guyana Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU), as it then was, had called in the sugar industry, "working for strike relief and generally giving solidarity to the GAWU strike."
He recalled that it was very important to the WPA to involve itself in that strike because of the way the strike was being portrayed by the administration at the time. "The entry of the WPA into the ranks of the opposition created a new situation for the Burnham administration because it made it very difficult to do what it had been always doing and that is to label the opposition as a racial opposition."
PNC must go by any means necessary
At the time of the launching of the party in 1979, Dr Roopnaraine said "it was a period that encouraged the kind of direct action on the streets and we saw ourselves as part of a kind of democratic upsurge that was taking place in the region, on the continent and in far away places like Iran and so on."
He said too that the party had even labelled 1979 as the "Year of the Turn" and really felt that it was important to keep up the struggle to get the "PNC to go" and that they must go "by any means necessary."
About those times too Dr Roopnaraine said that it was not exactly a secret that the WPA had to build essentially a cadre of self defence units since street executions were not unknown though not as common as they have now become.
Then he said there was Rodney's execution on June 13, 1980, "the first time in the English-speaking Caribbean that a political leader had actually been removed by assassination."
Rodney's death
Dr Rodney died as a result of an explosion of an explosive device believed to have been concealed in a "walkie-talkie" allegedly given to him by Gregory Smith, an ex-sergeant of the Guyana Defence Force.
Smith, Dr Roopnaraine said, had been recruited as an electronics expert to handle a variety of telecommunications equipment and to be part of the network of clandestine units the party had established to protect its members and to prevent the disruption of the party's public meetings. These units, he said, had to be equipped and "this was also period when a number of people were breaking away from the military and the official forces and coming to the WPA and offering their skills, These people were being recruited by us. The party needed their skills and techniques."
He asserts, "I do not believe that we should be afraid now after all these years to admit that we were very busy in trying to declare some kind of insurrectionary activity against a regime that had closed the doors against constitutional change."
Dr Roopnaraine pointed out that the organisation had been targeted by the state and it was happy to have the means to listen into army and police bulletins and messages as it had an interest in keeping one step ahead of them.
Observers, among them CLR James, have questioned the wisdom of the leader of the party being engaged in a task that someone lower down the hierarchy of the party should have been carrying out. Some observers believed that it was due to the leaders being unable to trust their cadres that the leadership decided to take on these tasks themselves.
Not so, said Dr Roopnaraine. He explained that Dr Rodney believed that the party was operating in a situation of clear and present danger and he could not ask the cadres to do things that the leadership was not prepared to do.
Dr Roopnaraine explained too that because of the nature of the times, those army officers who had hardware to pass insisted in doing so only to the top leadership. The former PNC government insiders said that Burnham was aware of the disaffection of some of the officer corps and that this had led to a "non-Queen's College old boy" being made Chief of Staff and the reassignment of a number of officers.
The truth about Dr Rodney's death
There is still some mystery shrouding the circumstances in which Dr Rodney died. There is no doubt that Dr Rodney collected a device from Smith. It is the nature of that device that continues to be a mystery.
Dr Roopnaraine says that he had hoped that the full truth would come out and that the WPA went to great lengths after 1992 to get a commission of inquiry set up. But, he said, such an inquiry required Smith to be present and to testify. Smith has since died in French Guiana as the government was in discussions with the French government to extradite him from Cayenne to which he had fled or been assisted in escaping to, according to some WPA activists.
The request for Smith's extradition followed the private charge of murder laid against him and the arrest warrant issued by then Chief Magistrate K Juman-Yassin in 1994. Attorney General Doodnauth Singh SC, then in private practice was the special prosecutor.
Under Hoyte there had been a Coroner's inquest which declared that Rodney's death was due to misadventure but a delegation from the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) found that several defects marred the inquiry and recommended that Donald Rodney's appeal against his convictions should be heard. One of those defects was the failure to call Donald Rodney.
The ICJ sent the delegation to Guyana to prepare a report as to whether an inquiry into Rodney's death was required after Rodney's son Shaka fasted for several days outside the Attorney General's Chambers.
Donald Rodney was reportedly sitting with Walter Rodney, his brother, in the car at the time of the explosion. He was the only one charged and convicted in relation to the June 13 incident. He was charged with being in unlawful possession of explosives. More than two decades after the appeal is still to be heard. Current Affairs understands that the files are still to reach the Chief Justice's desk so that it could be scheduled for hearing!!
Dr Roopnaraine says that he finds it a bit of a mystery that the PPP which had been its ally over a number of years moved as sluggishly as they did with the result that Smith died of natural causes thereby bringing an end, not closure, to the possibility of an inquiry and the whole truth of that period to be fully known.
Other events besides Rodney's assassination of that period which cry out for explanation were the treason charges brought against Sobrian and Tikaram who was picked up and beaten by the Police.
Rawle Farley
One of the reports that was current during 1979 particularly around July of that year was that the WPA, after taking over the government, was to have installed Prof Rawle Farley, then teaching at Stonybrook University in the United States as Prime Minister. Prof Farley had been a chairman of the PNC and reportedly challenged Burnham for the party leadership. It was also reported that the burning of the Ministry of National Development was to have been the beginning of a series of raids which would have seen the WPA taking over the radio station and other key government installations.
Dr Roopnaraine said that he knew nothing of such a scheme and that it was not something that had been mentioned at any forum at which he was present. "We had had no discussions about radio stations ... we were concentrating on putting bodies on the streets and confronting the regime more along the lines as they had done in Dominica (against the Patrick John administration)."
And in indirect reference to an observation by Ravi Dev, the leader of the ROAR that all three parties - PPP, PNC and WPA - had a military past, Dr Roopnaraine pointed out "All of our violence in 1979 was confined to (government) installations. There was never any anti-personnel violence. The WPA, I think, is unique among the paies of that period!"
The ad hominem attacks on Burnham
Some observers have advanced the thesis that the launching of the personal attacks on Burnham that Rodney engaged in calling him "King Kong" and other derogatory names was perceived by some of African masses as going beyond the pale and so foreclosing the opportunity for compromise. Reacting to this, Dr Roopnaraine said that while he never heard that himself he could see how it could have been said.
He explained that a part of what Dr Rodney was doing at the public meeting "was attempting through the instrument of laughter and mockery really to tear down someone who had elevated himself to point of absolute kingship where you were dealing with a person who was projecting himself as the "Maximum Leader" ... in a manner almost North Korean."
However, he said that it was true that in using mockery to puncture the Burnham mystique it might have been a step too far and had elicited the response from Burnham that they should 'make their wills' and avowing his intention to 'match their steel with more highly tempered steel'. The 1979 post-Congress rally speech at the Square of the Revolution was, according to Dr Roopnaraine a most intemperate speech and drove the WPA into its clandestine mode.
The WPA after Rodney
There have been observations made that the Walter Rodney image of the black afro and upraised hands in a kind of black power salute was not the sort of image with which the professionals and middle classes were comfortable and that the urbane, articulate Dr Roopnaraine more fitted their image of the person with whom they would like to be associated.
Though he said that he had never heard them before Dr Roopnaraine said he could understand that unease with Dr Rodney's command of the masses and the ease with which he was able to move the working people to such loyalty.
However, he noted that in that period from that middle-class stratum did come to the movement the COMPASS group which was made up of trade unions and the professionals. "Of course after the assassination they were the first to disappear. The assassination of Walter came as a great shock to all classes of the society but I think the middle class was traumatized because, after all, Walter was an international figure ... not the son of one of the working class. The fact that he could have been mowed down in the way that he was left them more traumatised than the working people."
About the effects of Rodney's assassination on the party, Dr Roopnaraine explained that it is a widespread belief that the party went into decline and he understands the sentiment when a party loses a leader of the capacity of Dr Rodney but he said that the reality was exactly the opposite.
"But the fact of the matter is that the party's organisation by 1983, which he describes as its high point, had built party groups in the Corentyne, Georgetown, and along the East and West Coasts Demerara. We were working actively with sugar workers at Leonora and Uitvlugt and on the Essequibo. We had become a far more organised political party in 1983, so much so that we could have conducted a national strike against the food ban, recalling the days of rest called by the party which resulted in shutting down the particular activity against which it was called."
Far from going into decline, Dr Roopnaraine asserted that the part was in a position to contest the 1980 elections which it boycotted and provoked one of the many quarrels it had with its ally at the time the PPP which participated in it and was given a share of the seats.
Dr Roopnaraine said that the WPA believed it was necessary to sustain the rebellion on the streets and to bring that kind of mass pressure rather than participate in another farcical election.
The containment of the progressive forces.
He said that the period between 1980 to Burnham's death in August 1985 was a period of considerable repression of the popular movement with a lot of action being taken against the progressive forces - more control of the media and the growth and proliferation of para-military organisations. "The regime had evolved into a repressive mode and at the death of Mr Burnham we were on the "Walter Rodney Long Walk to Freedom" when a number of party activists walked from Charity in the Pomeroon all the way to Crabwood Creek, (Corentyne) and then we took the walk into Linden. "
Dr Roopnaraine said that the walk took 20-odd days to complete as "we would walk through the villages and hold meetings in the evenings and continue to mobilise for the elections campaign."
Guyana under Hoyte
With Burnham's death and Desmond Hoyte's accession to the Presidency, Dr Roopnaraine recalled that there was an attempt at reforming the economy, "which by then had been reduced to an absolute shambles."
"Hoyte carried out what I believed were very bold and brave economic reforms, overturning the command economy on its head, opening up the economy, encouraging investment. We did get some investment but we got them at great cost because as a country we were not in a position to bargain very hard."
The investments that came in were Omai Gold Mines Limited, Demerara Timbers Limited, Barama Company Ltd and Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Limited.
About the political reforms Dr Roopnaraine said that unfortunately the reforms of the economy and the economic system were far more successful than the political reforms. "He did remove the most brazen and outlandish of the abuses by removing the overseas vote, the postal vote and the proxy vote but the central abuse which was the control of the elections through control of the Elections Commission - having the elections being run by essentially a party minister ... these remain central to the rigging machinery."
He said that it seemed as though Hoyte who was leading a reform movement of the state at the time could not get very far with the electoral reforms and as a consequence the 1985 elections "were pretty appalling". "We did participate in those elections and Bro Kwayana was our first member of parliament."
The WPA in Parliament
Kwayana, according to Dr Roopnaraine, was able to set a very extraordinary standard for the WPA parliamentarians who followed him into the National Assembly. Drs Thomas, Matheson Williams, and Roopnaraine and presently Sheila Holder are among the standard bearers who followed Kwayana into the National Assembly.
He said that Kwayana displayed a vast knowledge of parliamentary practice and behaviour and how to conduct a parliamentary struggle. "I think it was the single occasion when there was actually a Private Member's Bill that was brought to the National Assembly by Kwayana."
He said that Kwayana was extremely creative in a parliament that was neither democratic nor fair and once made use of a device,the petition, for which he was able to gather some 30 000 signatures which he placed on the Clerk of the Assembly's table, which had never before been used nor has it been used since.
But he stressed that there had been more Private Members' Days in the Hoyte parliament than there were to be in the PPP parliaments that followed.
The 1992 elections
The 1992 elections are considered to be the elections that were free of the abuses of the process that occurred at previous elections in independent Guyana. That is not to say there were not problems but these did not conspire to prevent the results from being an expression of the will of the people. In those circumstances, it was widely expected that the WPA would have fared better than the two seats it won which were filled by Dr Thomas and Williams, the party's first Amerindian Member of Parliament.
Some observers said that they failed because they had no real base, they had no constituency. They point to the poor showing at the 1992 elections and those of 1997 and 2001 to justify the validity of their thesis.
To this Dr Roopnaraine responded that as long as elections remain ethnic censuses as they are in Guyana "a political party like the WPA that takes great pride in the fact that it has no favoured race will always suffer."
He explained that the constituencies in Guyana are ethnic constituencies and the constituency that the WPA were trying to build was really a multiracial constituency in an attempt to break down the walls of the racial groupings. "We were the least dogmatic of the parties. Our party grew and flourished as a result of the plurality of views it encouraged. The single dogma we had is that Guyana is not going to be set on a road to recovery and reconstruction until we heal the breach between the working people which are the two major ethnic groupings in the country and, in healing the breach, we can turn our attention to the real racial abomination in the country which is the continued marginalisation of the Amerindians."
He said that the members of the leadership of the party were not the only people to have been surprised at its showing at the 1992 elections. "We had expected to do better because we felt that the multiracial mobilisation that we were able to achieve during the civil rebellion and the food struggles would have borne fruit."
In fact, he said that the winning back the right of the people to elect a government of their choice constituted a real step back in the multiracial struggles because when we secured counting of the votes and ensured fairness of the elections, the people retreated back into their old electoral behaviour.
As a result Dr Roopnaraine, recalling an observation by Kwayana that the WPA was the most useful party between elections but at election time they make clear who they want to govern them, pointed out that the PPP and the PNC based as they are in two major racial groupings have long mastered the art of racial mobilisation and were the beneficiaries. Kwayana's observation is an iron fact of Guyana's electoral politics and one against which the party will continue to combat.
The future
About the party's future activities in terms of the national agenda, Dr Roopnaraine said that the party was fully committed to seeing the constitutional amendments fully operationalised. He noted that "five years after the Herdmanston reforms we are still without the Human Rights Commission and we have an Ethnic Relations Commission which is not properly constituted because it doesn't have a member of the Human Rights Commission which doesn't exist; nor a member of the Women and Gender Equality Commission which doesn't exist, and we don't have the Indigenous People Commission. So there is everything still to be done in relation to the operationalisation of those reforms and we remain very committed to seeing those reforms come fully into being."
He said also that the WPA is committed to being some part of a democratic movement to get the reforms as it feels that it is very important that they be accomplished before the next elections.
Dr Roopnaraine asserts that the country made an enormous mistake by going into the 2001 elections at a time when it was not ready for them. He observed that the Herdmanston Accord had said very clearly that the constitution should be reformed and elections held eighteen months after the Constitution Reform Commission report was presented to the National Assembly, with the elections being held under the reformed constitution. "We did nothing of the kind. We rushed into the elections of 2001 and the only element of the Herdmanston Accord that was absolutely observed was the timelines. We observed nothing else."
So the country went into the 2001 elections without the necessary constitutional reform work and Dr Roopnaraine observed that he was "frankly not surprised at the post-elections disturbances we had once again." He said that if the same thing is attempted again "we will be in for a season of extreme instability and possibly violence".
Another item on the WPA agenda, Dr Roopnaraine said, is the issue of the Commission of Inquiry and putting an end to the problem of the death squads and the extra-judicial killings and so on. He said that the party has been working very actively in the People's Movement for Justice helping to define the kind of commission that should be appointed and its terms of reference. He said that the party has a clear position that the commission should not be appointed by one side alone even though the President has the right legally to appoint a presidential commission on his own. But Dr Roopnaraine said that even though he has the right to appoint the commission, to his mind it was an extremely unwise use of that power which flies in the face of the spirit of the constitutional reforms which he said was intended to bring about more inclusion and consultation of the opposition.
"Here you have an incident that has pitched sections of the population against other sections and it would seem to me that in a situation like that you would want to ensure that the commission is not named by only one side and would want it to be created by some kind of consultative process."
About the terms of reference which the President also unilaterally developed, Dr Roopnaraine said it makes no sense as it sets up the examination to exclude any sense of the narrative that led to the emergence of the issue.
And concerning the need for a witness protection programme, he said that the death of George Bacchus pointed up the need for one, even though there is an appreciation of all the difficulties in setting it up. He said that he would be very surprised if there were persons sufficiently public-spirited to come forward and give evidence to the commission in the absence of some credible protection programme.
Another issue on the agenda, he said, was the reorganisation of the party by getting the party groups fully active and functioning again. He explained that the leadership of the party including himself and Kwayana had been absent for some time which resulted in a lot of pressure coming down on a handful of comrades who worked to keeping the party going at the centre - Tacuma Ogunseye, Dr Thomas, Desmond Trotman among others.
"We intend to use the coming period to do a great deal of party reorganisation and ... we are about to hold our second members' meeting in a month to attempt to refresh the party organs and to refresh the party in general. We are about to go on a membership recruitment drive; we are to reprint and circulate the party constitution to members and work towards a full membership conference".
He said that what he has been finding is that the party's activists have not lost their appetite for political work and are eager to get back into political activity.