The last time the West placed sanctions upon Guyana, contrary to what some of its contemporary supporters say, the PNC regime caved and set the stage for Desmond Hoyte’s more free market approach. In 1981, the virulently anti-communist Ronald Reagan came to the presidency of the United States and political and economic pressure were unleashed upon the PNC government to force it to change its ideological stance and political behaviour. By 1985, I had occasion to write that ‘by 1983 the chief ideologue of the party was sent to take up the post of Ambassador to Brazil. At least for the time being, the socialist experiment had ended. (Baber, Colin & Henry Jeffrey (1986) Guyana: Politics, Economics and Society. Frances Pinter, London).
The PNC came to office in 1964 to prevent the ‘communist’ PPP from taking government and was rewarded with the highest per capita US aid in the world – surpassing even that of Israel at the time. But believing itself to be relatively secure in office, once the more radical PPP, then the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) were the opposition, it became adventurous to a point where the PPP gave it ‘critical support.’ Indeed, in 1976, Forbes Burnham publicly stated that his PNC was guided by Marxism/Leninism (‘Report to the Nation’). As Tyrone Ferguson claimed, ‘When Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in January 1981 … his crusading anti-communism represented a challenge of a vastly different qualitative nature in terms of its frontal and explicit objective of overturning leftist regimes in the region and beyond’ (Ferguson, Tyrone (1999) To survive sensibly or court heroic death. Guyana National Printers Ltd, Georgetown).
Reagan brooked no nonsense with Burnham, so that while in 1977, when the United States Under Secretary of State, Philip Habib came to Guyana he found the country did not present a human rights problem, Reagan had not even formally taken office when the US 1980 Country Report on Human Rights detected a ‘general deterioration’ in Guyana’s human rights environment in recent years and ‘repressive’ tactics by the government against opposition political forces’. In his address to the PNC Biennial Congress in 1981, Burnham claimed that the US was blocking an IDB agricultural sector loan on the ground of Guyana having a ‘dominant public sector’. The US 1982 human rights report was even more scathing: ‘The human rights environment has significantly deteriorated over the years from the traditions once respected in Guyana prior to independence and from what is currently observed in most of the English-speaking Caribbean. It has become increasingly clear, moreover, that traditional conceptions of human rights – the integrity of the person and civil and political liberties – are being subordinated to the Government’s efforts to remain in power.’ Guyana was now classed with the likes of Cuba, Nicaragua, Grenada and Suriname as countries that should not benefit from the recently formed Caribbean Basin Initiative of 1982 because they ‘did not meet the ideological criteria to be designated as beneficiaries’ (Ibid). Added and perhaps associated to these, in 1981, Venezuela refused to renew the Protocol of Port of Spain that had put the Guyana/Venezuela border controversy into abeyance.
Ferguson reported that when Cedric Grant became Guyana’s ambassador to Washington in 1982, ‘Guyana was being treated like a pariah by the US. Bilateral relations were poor; they had in fact reached a nadir and until the very last months of Burnham’s rule, these relations never really recovered.’ In 1983, the American embassy in Guyana refused to grant a visa for a senior government official to go to Washington for negotiations on an MMA loan with the IDB. Vice-President Hoyte stated that the decision was ‘stupid and contemptible’ and the government of Guyana accused the US of intensifying its economic aggression (Ibid). Burnham’s criticism of US invasion of Grenada in 1983 did not help matters; the US recalled its ambassador and closed the USAID office Guyana in 1985.
Forbes Burnham appreciated who his benefactors were: for example, after Walter Rodney died in 1980, he invited the FBI and Scotland Yard to investigate the death, but to my knowledge, no Guyanese have seen their reports to this day. Burnham was always looking for a modus vivendi with the US, saying that ‘good relations with the United States had always been a cardinal objective of Guyana’s foreign policy’. But he sought to have them within the context of his socialist orientation.
Interestingly, the period spanning the late 1970s and early 1980s is arguably the only time in the history of modern Guyana that there was something of a national consensus on the way forward. The PPP had given its critical support to the general directions the PNC was taking and its chief ideologue, Ranji Chandisingh defected to the PNC, claiming that the latter was in the ideological vanguard. But what the representatives of the vast majority of Guyanese wanted had to take second place to the designs of international capital in its struggle with the Soviet Union for global ideological hegemony, and neither Jagan in the 1950s nor Burnham thereafter quite understood the implications of this.
Over the years, political relations in general and international politics have become more humane, but globally the comment of Thucydides still rings true: ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. After spending decades in political isolation, Cheddi Jagan learnt that smart politicians in relatively weak countries must seek ‘to walk within the raindrops’. While one can persistently attempt to expand the boundaries of the possible, one must also be careful not to take too literally concepts like sovereign equality and construct plans that go beyond the threshold of acceptability and are too inflexible to be able to accommodate what Marxists might describe as rising antitheses.
The present elections quarrel is in a substantially different context that neither the government nor the opposition appear to quite clearly understand. Given the previous paragraph, as nation states become less relevant as a result of globalization, nationalism and the wishes of various peoples/groups to govern themselves are important human rights. On the question of applying sanctions to Guyana today, in 2014, in the quarrel between the PPP/C government and US over the democratic programme the latter was implementing, I said that, ‘Dealing with the PPP/C government is the task of the Guyanese people, albeit with support from its internal and external friends, and unless the regime becomes unusually brutal and grossly neglectful of our human rights, direct foreign intervention of any sort should be avoided’ (‘The LEAD project: Direct foreign intervention should be avoided:’ SN: 29/01/2014).
Before the 2020 elections, this column said that both of our major political parties have used our extremely bloated electoral list to win or stay in government and that observers should not agree to observe elections where basic electoral principles are being violated. In ‘Two thieves make God laugh’ (SN: 01/04/2020), I said that the behaviour of both the major parties ‘has been subversive to the general social contract’. Indeed, they opened the door for any motivated party to influence electoral outcomes in Guyana: so much so that as the recount saga proceeds it is not surprising that we are now hearing that we should be concerned only with the votes in the boxes and not with the legitimacy of their being there!
So I consider that what has occurred since the 2020 elections is a not unusual result of the persistent violation of the human/electoral rights of Guyanese by both parties and that to single out and sanction either one of them would be an error. Indeed, as noted above even those threatening sanctions are at fault and would best use what leverage they have to encourage the major parties to immediately sanitize the electoral process and improve upon the governance system that is at the root of the current problem.
