The demand by some PPP supporters for the PNC to apologise for its misdeeds, or to at least admit that it made mistakes, demonstrates more of a triumph for PPP propaganda than for reality. It is indeed almost a textbook case of “perception” becoming such a huge political reality that perhaps ways must be devised to deal with it if progress is to be made.
It should be noted though, that in the context of electoral politics, the PPP will have no immediate interest in the PNC making a success of any such apology, even if it was mindful to make one. After all, being already a minority government why should the PPP risk losing even the marginal voter who might be tempted to take a PNC apology seriously? For me, the more important and complicated question is can, as some would have it, the PNC and/or Guyana gain from a PNC apology?
Firstly, it is doubtful that an apology would facilitate the PNC tapping into PPP traditional support. The PPP would definitely project such an apology as politically opportunistic, for it is quite clear that a substantial part of the party’s top leadership and constituency rightly believe that wrongdoing has been committed by both the PPP and PNC and should be so addressed. Speaking about the meeting that took place at the home of Mike and Indranie Persaud, Dr. Dolly Hassan claimed that “Beneath his breath Mr. Granger murmured that atrocities were committed by both sides, although I doubt that he really he believes that.” (“The PNC should concede that certain mistakes were made during its tenure”, SN: 11/06/45).
I cannot understand why Dr. Hassan should doubt that Mr. Granger believes that atrocities were committed by both the PNC and PPP, but more of this later.
Secondly, people of goodwill who are calling upon the PNC to apologise fail to understand the ethnic nature of political parties and political affiliations in Guyana. Political parties in Guyana represent ethnicities and any apology by either party would constitute an apology of one race to the other without reciprocity in a context in which both groups feel aggrieved and can point to events in our history to justify their grievances. They may not make much of them but Africans in Guyana also have memories of PPP’s wrong-doings which still rankle. Should the PNC choose the road of apology without some level of reciprocity, it could lose some of its traditional supporters without being able to recoup that loss by attracting traditional PPP supporters.
That said, can a PNC apology work to Guyana’s favour? Traditional supporters from both the PPP and the PNC are more likely to turn to the AFC, and in the national context it is precisely this that is attractive to some. If an apology from the PNC helps to create an environment where more PPP supporters feel they can disassociate from it and abstain or turn to the AFC, a context can be created in which the PPP loses, the PNC loses, the AFC gains and Guyana wins, even if because of the nature of our constitution, a weaker minority PPP government is still the result!
Let us now try to assuage Dr. Hassan’s doubt with one example from an earlier PPP regime.
Having been continuously harassed by international capital and its associates, for his perceived communist intentions, Cheddi Jagan had to live to with a colonial empire that had consistently gerrymandered the electoral system against his party. Yet, at the 1963 constitutional conference, Jagan agreed to make a senior agent of international capital, British Colonial Minister Duncan Sandys, the final arbiter of the kind of constitution Guyana should have! Not surprisingly, Sandys went against him but he and his party were not about to be undone.
Jagan told us in The West on Trial that he returned to Guyana and organised a ‘hurricane of protest’ campaign in January 1964 and “…. by February a sugar strike was called and work on all the sugar plantations ceased.” The opposition, determined that he not succeed, tried to break the strike by the use of so-called scab-labour but the PPP responded.
Speaking in the National Assembly on 3 June, 1964, Peter D’Aguiar related a story that still resonates in many an African village. “Violence started with violent attacks of GAWU against workers who were working. For instance on March 4, a bomb was thrown on an estate truck carrying workers aback; workers who were simply exercising their constitutional right to earn their bread; and Munroe and Gunraj were killed. Did the Minister of Home Affairs ever plead with party supporters to stop the intimidation and violence? Or did she not rather overtly and covertly encourage it? On April 14, Dr Jagan said, ‘We must stand up to the call now, as this is the last. It is life or death.’ Never once has he called upon his supporters to desist from violence.”
In Cheddi’s own words again: “The toll for the 1964 disturbances was very heavy. About 2,668 families involving approximately 15,000 persons were forced to move their houses and settle in communities of their own ethnic group. The large majority were Indians. Over 1,400 homes were destroyed by fire. A total of 176 people were killed and 920 injured. Damage to property was estimated at about $4.3 million and the number of displaced persons who became unemployed reached 1,342.”
The events of 1964 saw the most fractious internecine conflict that this country had ever faced. Writing around that time, Peter Simms, a not unsympathetic critic of Dr. Jagan, wrote “when he was forced to resign power in 1964, hundreds of people had died, been wounded or lost their property in three years of ever worsening civil strife. He was by that time so far from reality that his government had ceased to care whether those who voted it into power lived or died.” (Peter Simms -1966 – Trouble in Guyana, G. Allen & Unwin, London).
If the scale of this loss of life, property and ethnic goodwill, which was initiated by some very self-serving decisions the PPP made when it was in government, does not require some atonement, perhaps nothing in our history does! This was not a struggle for democracy: it was a struggle for power pure and simple. The PPP was trying to retrieve by force what it had lost by finding itself – due largely to its own foolhardiness – in a very hard place in the extant geopolitical context.
henryjeffrey@yahoo.com
