Dear Editor,
After reading your article headlined “President favours truth commission to examine 50s and 60s” (SN, Jan. 17), I am completely blown away by the President’s apparent 180-degree about face as he now appears to be sounding less contentious and more conciliatory to the PNC. What epiphany did he receive?
What doesn’t surprise me, however, is that the President reportedly would prefer to probe the role of the British and American governments in the fifties and sixties in helping jettison the Cheddi Jagan regime, than a probe into the allegations of corruption by the PNC regime between 1966 and 1992.
To me, any probe of the PNC regime’s past could logically lead to a call for a current probe of serious allegations of corruption and international law-breaking against the Jagdeo-led PPP administration, and this is an eventuality this President seems set to studiously avoid at all costs.
Those generations of Guyanese who lived through the fifties and sixties are pretty much cognizant of the role the West played in our local politics and the main reason, basically, was the harsh effects of the Cold War that pitted the American-led West against the Soviet-led East in their bitter fight for world dominance by winning support, fair or foul, from other nations.
And because the late Dr. Jagan was an avowed communist who openly sided with the Soviets, he and his regime became casualties of the Cold War as the West decided to support someone, Forbes Burnham, who turned out to be a skilled opportunist who knew how to play-along-to-get-along. With Indians and Blacks making up the majority of the population, the West simply seized the opportunity to play Burnham and his PNC against Jagan and his PPP, and the rest is history. But it wasn’t that the West didn’t like Indians, so let’s make that plain; otherwise Britain and America (or even Canada) would not now be home to multiplied thousands of Indian Guyanese.
So what exactly does President Jagdeo or his PPP hope to achieve from a commission examining what the British-Americans did to Dr. Jagan and the PPP in the fifties and sixties? Is it to turn today’s Guyanese against the British and the Americans? Or is it to divert attention away from the post-Independence failings of both the PPP and PNC by highlighting what the PPP perceives as a preceding failure by the British and Americans?
Realistically, though, just about every sane Guyanese, at home and abroad, does not believe the President is serious in his call for a probe of the British and Americans, so the only conclusion we can come to is that this has to be one of the silliest propositions in a series of calamitous gaffes by the Jagdeo-led PPP administration as it earnestly tries to defuse growing tensions over the army’s torturing its own members and civilians.
Meanwhile, the President’s other call for a probe into just how many weapons the army issued to the PNC regime’s Ministry of National Mobilization thirty years ago is so fraught with irrational fear-mongering, I won’t be surprised if it ends up hitting a brick wall from the get-go!
As a Guyanese who cares a lot about my country and fellow Guyanese, regardless of race, it probably might help close open wounds and calm ethnic fears if we all knew what actually played out in the fifties and sixties between the PPP and PNC. That’s where our biggest problem lies right now: the PPP and PNC! But since there is no one in the PPP and PNC with an ounce of credibility left, and given the rancor still being displayed today between the PPP and PNC, that particular era of our history is better left unverified.
Nevertheless, there are more recent and current deeply troubling events, void of British and American political fingerprints, that need expeditious resolutions before we can go forward as one people living in one nation with one common destiny. We need thorough investigations to be launched into the 2002-2004 crime waves; the Phantom Squad killings, and the blossoming of the narcotics industry over the past ten years, with its accompanying gun smuggling and money laundering businesses.
Mr. Editor, I never thought that after all Guyana went through under the PNC for most of its 28 years in power the PPP could take over and govern like it does. In barely over half the time the PNC was in power, the PPP has matched and, in some instances, even surpassed the PNC in certain areas of questionable governance. More ironic is the fact that it keeps using the PNC’s past as its own performance measuring rod! No wonder to it, failure passes for success!
And to read that the President also mentioned that if the PPP and PNC ever got into a power-sharing deal they’d first have to trust each other annoys me. We’ve been over this probability in the local news and letters columns only recently, and both he and Corbin vehemently denied that they were having private power-sharing discussions, so why should he now want us to think that the element of trust may be what is holding up the realization of such a hypothesized scenario?
If all he was trying to do with such remark is look like the good guy in the eyes of concerned Guyanese, after he and his party made all that deafening noise about the PNC being in possession of army-issued weapons or being associated with dangerous criminals, he is doing a very lousy job trying.
The PPP and PNC do not trust each other, plain and simple, and if they ever enter into a political marriage of convenience, it will not be in the interest of Guyanese as much as it will be in the interest of the PPP and PNC to get and keep their hands on the reins of power.
As matters now stand, most Guyanese may not even genuinely trust the PPP or PNC, let alone trust them to share power. But if that’s a gamble our elected leaders are willing to take, then let there be a referendum on this before the people, so that if the PPP and PNC screw up later on, the people will directly share the blame.
Yours faithfully,
Emile Mervin
