National security is the raison d’être of the state, i.e. the reason for its existence. The primary obligation of the state used to be to protect its people from military attack, coercion, internal subversion etc. and this developed to include protecting its essential political, economic and social values. (https:// www.cfc.forces.gc.ca/ 221/19/276-eng.html). In his ‘The West on Trial’(TWOT) Cheddi Jagan explained in some detail that he was not a threat to Western interests, but writing on the eve of Guyana’s independence, John Chamberlain gave us a brief but sufficiently comprehensive view of how the West assessed developments in Guyana.
‘On the 26 of May,’ he wrote, ‘British Guiana, which was once threatened with a Castroite takeover by the left-wing Dr. Cheddi Jagan, will become a new independent nation. Dr. Jagan will view official ceremonies from the official doghouse. It was not long ago that Forbes Burnham in company with Peter D’Aguiar … appealed … for books about the development (of Guyana) … under the free swinging conditions of capitalist competition … Despite its poverty, things are auspicious for the new nation provided it can end the terrorism that the local Communists seek to keep alive. The racial conflict between the East Indian and the African elements of the population would never have come to much if they had not been artificially fermented by Dr. Jagan’s Marxist cadres’ (https://news.google.com/newspapers? nid=1979&dat=19660524&id=w YwiAAAAIBAJ&sjid =BaoFAAAAIBAJ&pg=990,4924914).
Not surprising then that Cheddi Jagan claimed that just before the 1957 elections, when he complained to the Chief Secretary of the colony that the constituencies were being gerrymandered, i.e., rigged against his party, the Chief Secretary said that ‘the object was to defeat the PPP and did nothing about the protest’(TWOT). The colonial authorities repeated their gerrymandering efforts again in 1961 and the PPP was only finally removed with the unusual introduction of proportional representation in the 1964 elections. In ‘How to Rig an Election’, Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klass (2018 Yale University Press, New Haven and London) showed that elections are best rigged long before elections day by way of gerrymandering and other interventions such as list tampering, multiple voting, etc. What the British did might have been legal but it was illegitimate in the eyes of the PPP and it took the pathways left to it: with the loss of substantial properties and many lives, it chose to demonstrate its disgust on the streets, in the cane fields, etc.
At least three lessons can be taken from the above. The notion that the first elections under the PNC regime in 1968 were the first rigged elections in Guyana is pure propaganda. Secondly, Western commitment to democracy is at best secondary when placed against the protection of what is assessed to be their vital national interest. Thirdly, while the state may be able to willy-nilly change the electoral law to suit itself, this would be courting disaster for there is a great difference between what is legal and what is legitimate, particularly in the eyes of those who believe that they are being disadvantaged. Burnham and his PNC were socialists: this was one of the reasons that he was identified to become associated with the formation of the PPP. The late Prime Minister Dr. Ptolemy Reid claimed that against Burnham’s advice, for ideological reasons, the party refused to join with the middle-class ‘bourgeois’ African orientated United Democratic Party (UDP) for the 1957 general elections and only did so for the 1961 elections after Burnham threatened to leave the party if it did not. Furthermore, after the coalition with the UF, Burnham appeased the party’s youth arm who thought he should have coalesced with the PPP by promising to quickly get rid of the UF.
Here was a situation in which the representatives of over 80% of the population who believed in some form of radical socialism were being removed from government or compelled to build and operate a Guyana ‘under the free swinging conditions of capitalist competition.’ This was never going mesh with the personality of Forbes Burnham and so stating that Guyana would be a pawn to neither East nor West, he formulated his national security interests within a socialist framework. In this scenario the capitalist orientation of Peter D’Aguiar and the UF were humbugs and they were disposed of in manner not too dissimilar from what happened to Jagan. Using the PPP as the bogeyman, Burnham then set about pushing a non-aligned radical socialism as far as practicable.
With their eye on their security interest, until about 1976 when Burnham declared his party Marxist/Leninist and began to visit the communist bloc, and more so when Ronald Reagan came to office in 1981 with a radical anti-socialist agenda, despite the many internal complaints, the West allowed Burnham to have his way. The US Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1977 simply stated, ‘In the general elections of 1968 and 1973 charges of fraud and rigging were widespread. Although those making these charges have been unable to substantiate their allegations in court, it is widely believed that fraud and rigging were practiced. … The Government rejects these allegations.’ In the same year, the United States Under Secretary of State Philip Habib came to Guyana and found the country did not present a human rights problem. However, the 1980 Country Report detected a ‘general deterioration in Guyana’s human rights environment in recent years and repressive tactics by the government against opposition political forces.’
As I indicated to my audience at the PNC discourse on 19th February, when in about 1976 a few of us in the PNC began to press for shared governance our position was considered dangerous by others who argued that the US would, perhaps using the still hanging Venezuela border problem, overthrow the government. (Future Notes, SN: 29/01/2020). Burnham did not want to pursue our course of action and stated that such proposals must come from the people, i.e. the bottom, knowing full well the ethnic nature of political support and that PNC and the PPP controlled over 80% of the people. Hopefully, it is now better understood that in these kinds of situation ‘Without strong national leadership, bottom-up approaches are unlikely to be effective, sustainable, or be able to reach the scale required to succeed’ (https://li.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/ 12/Breaking-the-cycle-of-violence.pdf).
It was quite clear to me that protest as it may, the PPP had little chance of coming to government once Soviet communism still existed. I repeatedly made this point to Jagan and was among the first to tell him that his time had come when the Berlin Wall came down. The fact that after almost 30 years the PPP came to office only after the wall fell is too much of a coincidence. Although the international dimensions of the situation in Guyana hid the difficulties its unique ethnic nature was going to pose, I surmised that even if only for practical reasons, like many of us Burnham come to understand that Guyana would only sensibly progress if there were some form of national unity arrangement. I stated that the 1980 Burnham constitution opened the door to such an arrangement in a semi-presidential – French type – political system that allowed for immediate, meaningful, shared government arrangements (Future notes, SN: 07/10/2020).
That option remains open and if there has ever been in the PNC some idea that the Indians and the PPP or any other ethnic group should not share fairly in the governance of Guyana I have never heard of it! Cheddi Jagan said that his early mistakes were due to youthful exuberance and Forbes Burnham erred as well. It is just that latter’s contribution is over-drenched with propaganda.
