Politics in a divided land
Freddie Kissoon Column
Kaieteur News
February 10, 2007
An edited collection of essays under the direction of the late Dr. Cedric Grant, Foreign Affairs advisor to the late President Hoyte and UG lecturer, Dr. Mark Kirton will be available in the next two weeks. Below is a summary of my article in that book.
Guyana is caught in the throes of an expanding ethnic conflict in which the only parallel one can think of in contemporary Guyanese history was the pre-independence period in the sixties when internecine, racial strife led to the loss of hundreds of lives, the victims coming from both major races – African and Indo-Guyanese.
The lowest point in that conflict was the violent expulsion of Indians from the mining town of Linden .
One of the casual factors in that tragic altercation was the covert and overt involvement of the American government against the communistically sympathetic government of the People's Progressive Party (PPP) led by Cheddi Jagan.
It can be argued then that the ethnic bitterness was partially engendered from outside and if this exogenous factor was not there, then maybe the mayhem would have been less intense and brutal.
British military intervention and changes in the electoral system saw a coalition government coming to power in 1964. This anti-Jagan grouping of a Portuguese-based organisation, the United Force and the major political party of African Guyanese, the People's National Congress (PNC), eventually gave way to the domination of the state by the PNC from 1968 until the tenth month in 1992.
From 1964 onwards, ethnic conflagration was almost absent from Guyana 's political configuration, the reasons for which do not concern us here. But the long rule of the PNC had done nothing to erase the deep and acerbic psychological mistrust on the part of Indians for the leadership and membership of the PNC and by extension African-Guyanese in general from which the PNC drew its support.
The worst outburst of racial animosity since the fateful sixties occurred after the general election of 1997. All the victims were Indians. There were sporadic attacks on the commercial centre of Georgetown before the polls closed in the 1992 election but they were quickly extinguished through the exertion of pressure by ex-President Jimmy Carter on the then government of Desmond Hoyte to restore order.
The post-1977 ethnic attacks on Indians were dwarfed in its implications when compared to the attacks Indian citizens suffered after the results of the 2001 elections were made known. Individual Indians were robbed and beaten and Indian stores were looted and burned.
The period from 1997 through the 2001 election up to this moment in time, that takes in the assassination of “Sash Sawh, has witnessed a crescendo of African extremism that today threatens the social fabric of Guyana .
It may be more correct to say that the social fabric has already been severely lacerated and hangs in the balance at the present time.
By extremism, we refer to a certain emotional approach to political discourse in which violent propaganda, race hate advocacy, extra-parliamentary machinations and psychotic violence, form the agenda of African based organisations that openly seek to remove the PPP government that they consider discriminatory, racist, corrupt, incestuous and beyond the politics of compromise.
The essay in the book looks at the main organisational structures of this African extremism.
These include the post-1997 ideology of the PNC; the changing personality make-up of Desmond Hoyte after he lost the 1997 poll; the violent, racist advocacy of the PNC aligned television station, HBTV, Channel 9; the African response to the Buxton conspiracy and Keane Gibson's book, “The Cycle of Racial Oppression in Guyana” and the new, racially infused, political culture of the Working People's Alliance.
We will attempt to show how it came about, how it continues to evolve and the factors responsible for its consolidation and its relentless restlessness.
In arguing for the existence of an African extremism in Guyana today, the study will also examine the claim that the emergence of this African extremist activity is a response to an entrenched Indian authoritarianism in the state structure in which anti-African antipathies, power domination, party paramountcy, political incestuousness, and ubiquitous corruption are impossible to root out given the particular electoral demography.
In other words, we are dealing here with a chicken and egg dilemma.
Did the decayed state of the political culture of the ruling PPP bring into being an African extremist response or is the inexorable drive of the extremist forces forcing the PPP to adopt protective measures which conflict with good governance?
A caveat is in order here. This paper identifies three types of African extremism. Separate analysis has to be assigned each one of these phenomena because their continued existence is derived from different sources in each of the three cases.
One is coming from the African middle class both inside and outside of Guyana , and strongly associated with ACDA and certain Black business groups.
In this category, I will situate the Desmond Hoyte remnant in the PNC as distinct from the mainstream PNC. The second one is embodied in the new personality of the PNC, of which the best examples are the alienation of Raphael Trotman and Stanley Ming.
And thirdly, there is the traumatised, angry politics of the Working People's Alliance . This then is essentially the broad picture of my essay.
But in this summary, crucial points have been left out for reason of space. I hope you buy the book and read about Guyanese politics. It is entitled, “Governance and Conflict Resolution in Guyana .”