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Jun 09, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
The United States is keen to support the emergence of civil society groupings. This is true in Iraq as it is true in Venezuela and in Guyana where the United States Embassy is keen to provide assistance to civil society groupings under the pretext of promoting democracy.
The support for civil society groupings has allowed the United States to meddle in the internal politics of many countries. It has used this agenda to channel support to opposition political parties. The United States Agency for International Development and other US based organizations have been implicated in attempts to undermine democratic governments through its support for civil society organizations in Latin America.
The Government of Guyana, it is believed, harbours suspicions that a US-funded democracy project may be a ruse to channel funding to opposition political parties. As such, the US has been forced to open negotiations with the government on the terms and scope of this democracy project.
That, however, has not stopped the United States Embassy from continuing in its undisguised attempts to promote civil society organizations. A project to clean up Georgetown, and which has the support and participation of the US Embassy, has a clear political agenda. That agenda is the creation of greater space for the emergence of civil society organizations.
But why would the United States be seeking the emergence of civil society in Guyana? Is it attempting to do in Guyana what it has been trying to do in Bolivia and Venezuela? Is it trying to promote regime change?
The answer is no. The United States is not at all interested in removing a democratically elected government in Guyana. It is not after the PPPC per se. After all, the PPPC has run the most successful structural adjustment programme ever. The United States, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are therefore keen to hold up Guyana as a role model for highly indebted countries that are required to pursue neo-liberal reforms.
The United States is proud of its record of nudging Guyanese governments in the direction of a liberalized economy. Where they have been less successful is in instituting liberal political reforms. The United States has always believed that an open economy can only be sustained through a democratic political order and it is this order that they wish to see sustained in Guyana.
Even though there was a return to free and fair elections in 1992 and there have been free and fair elections ever since, the process has been very fragile as the last elections evinced. Even though APNU lost the 2011 elections and knew that it lost those elections, it attempted to steal those elections through street protests. The ABC countries were being forced to issue a statement in order to quell those protests.
The holding of free and fair elections and the acceptance of the results of those elections remains a great burden for the ABC countries. There is so much suspicion generated over the results of elections in Guyana that those countries have been forced to provide financing for the electoral process. After the 1997 elections, monies had to be provided to support a process of dialogue to heal political differences that hurt the economy for seven straight years.
It was all too much for the ABC countries. Political instability, particularly instability after elections, threatened to undermine the liberal economic gains promoted by the US in Guyana through the Washington Consensus. A political solution was therefore needed.
After the 2001 elections, the Carter Center, obviously frustrated by the lack of political compromise, indicated that it has other priorities in other parts of the world; it needed to move on from Guyana. It indicated that there was a need for greater shared governance in Guyana in order to promote political stability.
That is the blueprint that the United States is using in its attempt to end the political instability which it sees as being detrimental towards maintaining a liberalized economy. The United States knows that it will be difficult for both of the main political parties, the PNCR and the PPP, to reach a major agreement on shared governance and therefore it is seeking to ensure that third parties emerge that could undermine the support of the two main political titans.
Unfortunately, historically, the political culture in Guyana was never very receptive to third forces. Third forces tended to do very poorly in elections in Guyana’s polarized political climate. The WPA is a very good example. It has never won more than one seat in the National Assembly. The United Force has also not done well in free and fair elections held after Independence. The AFC has been the most successful of all third parties and it is this success which the Americans no doubt view as encouraging in terms of creating a number of third forces that can reduce the dominance of the two main political parties, the PNCR and the PPPC.
This is why the United States is so keen to create a vibrant civil society that is not beholden to either of these two main parties. It hopes in so doing to increase the role of third forces within Guyana’s highly polarized political environment, a polarization based mainly along the lines of race. This racial polarization is seen as the source of political instability.
By developing an incipient civil society, the US hopes to change the political culture away from ethnic polarization. This is why we are now seeing the US Embassy directly working with groups within our society. It is their way of promoting the emergence of civil society groupings.
The US of course is too ambitious. Such a strategy will fail, just as the strategies employed by the US have failed in other parts of the world. A system of political pluralism with powerful interest groups is not likely to emerge in Guyana. And there is no guarantee that the people of Guyana weaned on the Westminster political system would in any event have any interest in developing such a democracy.
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