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Jul 05, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Kaieteur News- Today is the first CARICOM DAY since the five-month saga of attempted rigging by the incumbent that after polling day found that it had lost. The holiday is celebrated the first Monday in July.
When it came last year, the continuous machinations by sections of the GECOM secretariat, together with the three PNC commissioners in GECOM and APNU+AFC were in full swing. The horrible conspiracies that played before the world for five months came to an end after CARICOM DAY had passed. So last year, there was no reason to celebrate.
This year, Guyanese who lived through the Burnham dictatorship and CARICOM’s brutal betrayal of democracy back then, have CARICOM to thank for saving the right to vote. It makes no sense describing the precious role CARICOM played in ensuring free and fair elections in 2020 without some background information on CARICOM’s failure to save democracy in Guyana in the 70s and 80s.
Forbes Burnham’s descent into the totalitarian abyss was so tsunamic that the decent, legally elected CARICOM heads should have been appalled and should have confronted Burnham long before he became demonic. I am submitting five reasons for this low period in CARICOM’s evolution.
First, none of the prime ministers trusted Cheddi Jagan to remain within the capitalist framework the Caribbean evolved into and which they preferred to socialist economics. It meant that they accepted a deterministic prison in their avoidance of condemning Burnham. Secondly, they felt that a socialist Guyana under Jagan may bring an era of uncertainty and could have affected the tourism industry on which with all the islands depended.
Thirdly, all the prime ministers became confirmed in their fears of a socialist Guyana because Walter Rodney had captured the imagination of Guyanese but had endorsed Jagan’s socialist pathway. One aspect of Caribbean’s history that may never be told is that Burnham had contacted his fellow CARICOM prime ministers with a portrait of Rodney that made them more apprehensive of Rodney than Jagan.
Fourthly, all the prime ministers were under pressure from the Americans, British and the Europeans to tolerate Burnham because they saw both Rodney and Jagan as dangers. Fifthly, (and I believe this one should not be prioritized although Indian rights activists will disagree with me), the consensus among Indians in the Caribbean was that the prime ministers chose Burnham over Jagan for racial reasons. As an academic, I will not emphasize this cultural factor over the other four variables cited above.
In 1992, the world had undergone a profound political transformation. The West no longer saw political parties in Guyana as a geopolitical and economic threat to western interests in the Caribbean. In fact, Guyana, from 1992 under successive PPP governments, was less a working class, leftist government than many others in CARICOM. For example, while Guyana had introduced fees for university training, it was free in Barbados. Water that was free in Guyana now carries a charge. Guyana from 1992 onwards had a far more neo-liberal economy than the rest of CARICOM.
The days of communism and the deterministic prison alluded to above were long gone so CARICOM saw Guyana through different lenses. This was the crucial mistake the PNC, the AFC and their advisors made when they decided to openly rig one of the national elections in the CARICOM family. CARICOM had not a scintilla of interest in supporting fraudulent elections in Guyana. There was no compelling reason in the mind of any PM in CARICOM to side with the PNC and AFC.
Perhaps the most pyrotechnical manifestation of this was when the Guyana Chapter of the Year of People of African Descent, led by Vincent Alexander, asked the visiting PMs during the election drama to look beyond the election and seek solution to the perennial quagmire of ethnic strife. The PMs did not even respond.
Guyanese will continue to cherish the role of the US government through its emissary, the US Ambassador, Sarah-Ann Lynch, Canada, the UK, and the OAS. But CARICOM’s role in the preservation of democracy was not only important and significant but extremely crucial.
If one PM, just one, had sided with the APNU+AFC, there would have been terrible implications and the removal of the APNU+AFC regime might not have been as easy as it turned out to be. The PPP government owes a tremendous debt to CARICOM in 2020 and something should be named after Mia Mottley, Ralph Gonsalves, Owen Arthur and Bruce Golding. These are four CARICOM giants that the Guyanese people should forever be grateful to. Today is CARICOM DAY, Guyanese should celebrate it with gay abandon; gay in its literal grammatical sense.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)
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