Dear Editor,
Guyana is not a country that is built on righteousness. It has righteous people. Not a single ruler of that country can be considered righteous. They were just men in politics who bowed to complex challenges of the job and did what was selfishly necessary to maintain power.
Good people were imprisoned, silenced or killed under their rule. Under Mr LFS (Linden Forbes Sampson) Burnham, Dr Cheddi Jagan and even worse under Mr Bharrat Jadgeo brutal and fatal accidents and incidents occurred. There has been no justice in almost every instance. Political cover-ups, legal hypocrisy and national pretence and lies reigned.
I met Robert Corbin in London at the Excelsior Club in Balham, some years ago. We met up there after his brother, Sol Ray’s funeral. I asked him a question over a toast of brandy. His reply was, “Young Browne, politics is not necessarily a moral game”; the brandy tasted like poison in my mouth. I was not surprised that under his leadership of the PNC he failed his constituencies miserably, benefited only himself and maintained a stranglehold on leadership.
When we reduce ourselves to the pernicious ethnic conflicts created and used by Burnham and Jagan and continued most vociferously, under Mrs Jagan, Mr Jadgeo and Mr Ramotar, as justification to show solidarity, allegiance and support to any leader because of his or her ethnicity, we are equally guilty of being hypocritical. We betray the values of what is right and just by such action.
While one understands the logic, I find no justification in rewarding any of those leaders with any international or prestigious awards.
The logic is, if two Indian leaders from Guyana who were no better than an Afro-Guyanese leader, can receive international awards in the face of all the things they have presided over in their country, then no one or group should move to block any award for an African leader.
It would be disrespectful and offensive to any people for us to display such hypocrisy.
But at the altar of this sort of logic and hypocritical stance enshrined in racial perspectives, the naked use of power and ‘romanticising’ wrongdoing, we compromise the universal principle of righteousness.
It is therefore our task as a people not to call for Burnham to be given an award that was rescinded by the South African Government.
If we use the same principle that was used to rescind his award, then we have a basis of seeing through our collective call, the recalling of any international awards given to Dr Jagan and Mr Jadgeo. We have to begin to reward righteousness, if only for the sake of the future of our country and the generations to come.
Yours faithfully,
Norman Browne
