Dear Editor,
Permit me to thank Mike Persaud for his attention, as he seems to have gone to great lengths to formulate a rather curious response to a letter I previously penned, and to questions I didn’t even ask (‘Correia does not understand the context in which the US intervened in Guyana’ SN, October 3).
Mr Persaud states: “Had one of the leaders in Guyana not been a self-proclaimed communist, there would have been no US intervention here.” It is distasteful for anyone, much less a Guyanese, to justify international political bullyism exerted by the West on developing countries, especially those which were already raped by colonial empires, as was Guyana.
The Guyanese people who fought for the independence of this country, supported by a smashing majority the Peoples Progressive Party, even after Burnham decamped, widening the ethnic fissures as he went. It means, therefore, that the people chose Jagan and whatever political ideology he brought with him over Burnham, resulting in the party securing the most votes in 1964. Additionally, Jagan’s policies in office, and the thriving economy which resulted thereof, proved him to be all but a communist. Now since Mr Persaud is a fan of ‘what ifs’ and ‘should haves’, he should imagine what Guyana would have been like had Jagan not suffered the spite of the US.
“Dictatorial oppression and ethnic cleavages were the legacies of the intervention. We should not carp over these things, and continue to be embittered by what the United States did. We should just accept it as realpolitik and move forward”, writes Persaud. These are not legacies, but rather a curse which has served no other purpose than to weaken our national sovereignty and impermeability to foreign interference, typical of US foreign policy in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. This laissez-faire attitude adopted in particular by those who attempt to negate the PNC’s responsibilities in our political turmoil, is counterproductive to the formation of a national identity.
The remainder of Mr Persaud’s letter is an insult to Guyanese who value our independence and should not even be tolerated in a national daily. He proposes that “Guyana consider and debate the idea of becoming an overseas state of the United States” so that “every able-bodied adult would have one-and-a-half jobs and the ethnic cleavage problem would disappear as it did in Singapore”. Thankfully, we the Guyanese people are a free nation because we fought for equal and civil rights; for our right to self-determination and liberation from men who considered themselves superior to us.
The social dilemma of the people living in the French Antilles and the economic disparities which benefit the Békés ‒ descendants of colonists ‒ is a perfect example of why we fought for our independence back then.
Lastly, the US is far from being a socially just and tolerant society. Black Americans are still fighting discrimination in America, Native Americans still live in deprivation on state imposed reserves, Latinos are still stigmatized, and Islamophobia has diabolized Arab immigrants. It is hardly likely that a country which in 240 years has been unable to resolve its own issues, would resolve ours.
Yours faithfully,
Anna Correia