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Sep 25, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
How different we are when the shoe is on the other foot. In 1995, UG students staged the most torrid and angry protest in the history of the University. It was more all inclusive than the one when the police shot and killed, UG student, Yohance Douglas.
The triggering mechanism was the tearing up of the essays of the students in the class, Sociology 110 by the lecturer. One thing led to another and the students took to the streets and took over UG. It was a magical moment at UG. At that time Donald Ramotar’s daughter, Lisa, was at UG and was a student of mine.
We used to have frequent conversations. I found her to be quite unlike the politicians in the PPP her father’s generation belonged to. Lisa took part in day one of the protest. On the second day, I asked her why she was no longer in the demonstrations and she said she was told to cease her involvement. Lisa told me her father wasn’t too happy with the protest. Of course, he couldn’t. His party was now in power.
It was alright to burn sugar estates and kill policemen guarding the Corentyne toll station when the PNC was in power but now the PPP is in government, protest was bad. Of course the PPP is not alone in this desecration of the struggle against injustice. New leaders behave like this throughout history. Fidel Castro killed more of his critics than the man he overthrew, President Fulgencio Batista when Batista ruled Cuba.
The world famous singer and internationally respected peace activist, Joan Baez (certainly a favourite of mine; please listen to her song about the Pakistani genocide during the war against the birth of Bangladesh – one of the most painful songs ever composed) said last week that only two politicians she was ever overjoyed with – Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama. Now she says she isn’t sure about Obama.
‘This is politics. Opposition leaders egg on people to overthrow a government and when they succeed, the overthrown government, they kill you for opposing them. So Uncle Donald pulled his “pickney” from the protest at UG in 1995 because Uncle Donald’s party was now in power.
One wonders how Uncle Donald (I prefer the Kaieteur News appellation – De Donald – whatever that means) feels when he sees the rebirth of mo fyaah/slo fyaah, this time by the East Indian people.
The historian must get one thing straight – it wasn’t the Desmond Hoyte opposition movement that invented slow fyah/mo fyaah. That rampart was birthed by the PPP on the sugar estates during the reign of Forbes Burnham. De Donald was definitely around when mo fyah/slo fyaah torched many GUYSUCO estates in the seventies because I was one of his comrades back then from the WPA.
One wonders what is going through the mind of De Donald as he sees the invocation of Macbeth’s witches stoking the fire recently in Essequibo and Berbice. In these situations fire rose way into the skies. In the former, farmers demanded payment for the paddy and burned tyres.
In the latter, the action was against crime when suspicious police material was found in a hit-and run vehicle. The car was torched. This week arson hit Skeldon estate as part of industrial action.
Are these incidents of the Indian version of slo fyaah/mo fyaah the working out of the contradictions of history and politics? The answer is yes. The answer lies in the time span of dictatorship. The longer a political cabal stays in power the strong possibility exists that it will become divorced from its radical origins, initial sacredness and sense of justice and eventually the country it dedicated to serve.
The nakedness of this descent is graphic in India with the Congress Party, Zimbabwe, Angola and Cuba.
In the case of Zimbabwe and Cuba, the longevity was indeed great and atrophy had to be a natural result. Castro was short by a few months of achieving fifty years as the boss man of Cuba. In Guyana, the PPP began to throw it away just a mere few years in power. But the difference with Mugabe, Castro and the Congress Party was morality.
Mugabe, the Congress Party and Castro had a good twenty years of solid support. Not so with the PPP.
From 1992, Jagan began to reveal what an unhistorical person he was. Jagan simply accepted the race divide and was happy to nurture both Indian and PPP hegemony. Jagdeo went crazy and maybe has destroyed this country. As for De Donald, unless the next election in 2015 throws him out, he may have to live with slo fyaah/mo fyaah, Indian style.
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