Dear Editor,
Please allow me the space in your letters’ column to respond to Mr. GHK Lall’s letter titled `Mr. Burnham trampled on social cohesion, national unity,’ This letter appeared in your August 9, 2016 edition as a response to President Granger’s remarks.
First, I will agree with Mr. Lall that late President Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham was an intellectual giant our country is yet to be blessed with since. He was a great personality, and statesman who is a much maligned one (which Mr. Lall has also contributed to in his missive.). Mr. Burnham was as perfect as we all are, in that his flaws are no greater than the rest of ours, and being Chief Executive of a nation does mean one must be without human flaws and error. With that said, we should not burden his legacy with unaccomplished tasks we think he should have piloted.
Second, in the third paragraph of his missive, Mr. Lall subliminally suggested that Mr. Burnham was at the fore of social disturbances but yet provided no evidence of this.
Mr Lall also spoke of unbridled hatred that was unleashed on the society at large that rendered Guyana a place of mayhem if we are to believe him. As he put it “The distrust, antagonisms, and in many cases hatreds were all there, be it in the public service, or law enforcement operations, or community relations, or jobs, or business routines, among other things and places. The deep lingering agonies were there, too. All of these sentiments were there in full undisguised configurations.” I have heard of this narrative of antagonism, hatred, and other unhealthy social evils, always spewed by those with a devious racist agenda, but as a boy growing up in the 1970s and 1980s before emigrating, I never witnessed them. But, Mr. GHK Lall speaks, as if an authority on this supposed ignoble stage of our history. My parents, who have imparted much of their experiences to my siblings and me, never spoke of Guyana in that context Mr. Lall wants us to buy.
Third, Mr. Lall’s emotions got the better of him for what should have been a detailed debunking of President Granger, turned into the well tested narrative that it is the responsibility of the Afro-Guyanese to build bridges towards peace. This indictment is represented in the following quote “Mr. Burnham did not move assertively and aggressively (as he is wont to do) to diminish and derail a seething situation on either side of the cleavage. By my thinking, he should have reached out commandingly to his supporters first to tone down, to be more inclusive, and to be more nationally minded, instead of the rigid tribalism that became the order of the day. In the same vein, he did very little (other than the sometimes majestic and now famed public utterances) to assuage and overcome the vehement resistance and pervasive reluctance of Indians to meet him halfway, or part of the way for that matter.” Mr. Lall called this the “crux” basically summing up Mr. Burnham’s full life as a failure due to a perceived notion that he had to bend over in all directions to appease a segment of the population. His most honest comment in this missive is when he rightfully pointed out that Indians were bitter. He failed to demonstrate that their “bitter” attitude stemmed entirely from the lies peddled by the leaders of the PPP.
Fourthly, we must examine Mr. Lall’s statistics in his revisionist narrative. Mr. Lall states “Statistically again, the then Atkinson Field was mobbed daily with regiments of Indians fleeing. There is no other word. The capital flight, intellectual flight, and political refugee flight (a status some would claim in Canada) was unending.” The fact that Mr. Lall mention’s “Atkinson Field” in support of his invisible statistics tells all knowledgeable readers that he is speaking of a pre-independence Guyana. Atkinson was renamed Timehri in recognition of our first citizens right after independence. During the period that Mr. Lall claims Guyana suffered a haemorrhaging of Indo-Guyanese I departed Guyana on Guyana Airways Corporation and most of the people on that flight were Afro-Guyanese and not Indo-Guyanese. On the numerous sojourns to the airport with my late maternal grandfather I never witnessed Timehri overflowing with fleeing Indians. My grandfather had sway at the airport; few portions of the entity were off limits to him. I recalled touring the arrival hall, the tarmac as he shook hands with others and smoked. I remember at nights we will go for a drive to the airport and sit in the viewers’ gallery and most of the people boarding those flights were black. So I challenge Mr. Lall to revise my memory with workable real statistics and not his opinion.
His statistics of 80 to 90 percent of Indians fleeing Guyana during the Burnham ear are debunked by statistics from both Immigration Canada and the US Dept. of Homeland Security data which showed that the largest exodus of Guyanese took place between 1992 and 2014 and if you combine all the Burnham years and all the years before independence you will not get 20% of the departure figures of the so-called “return to democracy” era. A casual request for immigration data (country specific) from the Canadian Statistic Bureau or a click on the following link: https://www.dhs.gov/yearbook-immigration-statistics. This link will allow the reader to look at all legal entries to the United States from Guyana; whether be it visiting or permanent residency. It breaks it down by decade and year and it empirically debunks Mr. Lall’s creative statistics which he provides us no source to verify. Mr. Lall even attributed the almost 90% tertiary level educated exodus as some legacy of Mr. Burnham’s tenure. In doing so, he totally absolved the Jagans, Jagdeo, and Ramotar from any responsibility for this ballooning number. He failed to credit them with the most divisive period in Guyana’s history. A period marked by the total firing of 98% of career foreign service personnel who manned our embassies and consulates. A fact revealed during the libel case Jagdeo –v- Kissoon et al. It was revealed that only three Afro-Guyanese held a diplomatic post; one being my uncle George W. S. Talbot, Jr- Guyana’s current Ambassador to Brazil. The other two were Mrs. Elisabeth Harper and Mr. Brentnol Evans. All three of these stellar Guyanese served their nation for over 20 years and had no other compatriots that looked like them.
My final examination of Mr. Lall’s emotional diatribe is to examine briefly several points he made as he wrapped up the most biased of his numerous contributions to the letters column.
In his “fairness” he failed to demonstrate the evil of LFSB. If this man was so anti-Indian and such a political nemesis to them why did he see to it that all religious holidays important to that population are national celebrations. Why did he usher in Enmore Martyrs’ Day as a national holiday? These are items towards “social cohesion” that Mr. Lall just flew by at sonic break neck speed, to keep that bias narrative of evil Forbes Burnham alive.
It would be nice for Mr. Lall to tell us which school of thought allowed him to rate Mr. Burnham a mere 20 out of a 100. When Burnham partook in the formation of CARICOM, helped steer the forming of the Non-aligned Movement. He is still the only Guyanese head of state to be invited to the White House on an official state visit, Guest of Her Highness Queen Elizabeth II and the only time in our history that saw world leaders visiting our shores. If Mr. Burnham was ranked so low on the world stage then why was he so sought after by leaders such Indira Gandhi, Fidel Castro, and others.
On the issue of elections fraud the jury is still out on that and while I have access to lots of information this particular subject evades full exposure.
Editor, I have taken much of your precious column space refuting a gentleman I hold in esteem. It is this respect that forced me to decide to take on his bias and revisionist narrative. Even as he spoke of voting for the first time last year he managed to make it about Mr. Burnham and not about the generation behind his (mine) and the one behind mine. We wanted change (jury is still out on that) and his vote for that ticket has afforded us a chance to dream. Mr. Burnham had many flaws; chief among them was his monarchy constitution of 1980 which no succeeding government wants to truly bury. When he pulled up the railroads and shipped them to India for Tata buses and not realizing that he could have opened up Guyana’s interior for faster development. Burnham’s nationalization of many key industries hurt our economic development, it scared potential investors away. These, along with his government’s failure to ensure some fundamental rights such as freedom of the press are spots on his legacy sheets. As intellectuals we should not only highlight Mr. Burnham’s faults, flaws, and shortcomings with dishonest accounting of his tenure. Let us not revise his time on earth to suit our emotive biases. As examiners and recorders of history it is incumbent on us to be objective in such analysis of Mr. Burnham and sadly Mr. Lall did not do this. His review/analysis is at best very callous and can be seen (to use his word) as an “odious” rebuke of Guyana’s first Prime Minister’s tenure. Mr. Burnham and all our leaders deserve to be looked at in totality and not have parts of his legacy picked apart to propagate a false narrative. If we continue down this road of emotive analysis of our past leaders we will never arrive at the healing point.
Yours faithfully,
Ty L. Talbot
