Below is Part II of Dr. Henry Jeffery’s Presentation to the Cuffy250 Forum
On the eve of Guyana’s independence, Ernst Halperin (Racism and Communism in British Guiana. 1965) claimed that apolitical Guianese tended to blame politicians for the racial tension.
‘Spokesmen of the Negro ‘People’s National Congress’ (PNC) consistently put the blame on the rival PPP, while PPP spokesmen blamed the PNC.’
But he concluded that, ‘The root causes of racial tension undoubtedly lie far deeper; they are not to be found in …the unscrupulous imaginations of local politicians, or in a real or imagined partiality on the part of the British rulers.’
‘The burden of the evidence indicates that the cause of the problem of these societies rests not, as we are often told, in the machinations of unscrupulous leaders but in the very nature of the specific type of multiethnic communities.’
Or as Scott Orr (The Theory and Practice of Ethnic Politics: How What We Know About Ethnic Identity Can Make Democratic Theory Better, 2007) concluded ‘To the extent that the constitutional arrangements ignore this (ethnic context) tension, alienation, disturbances, and underdevelopment result.
There is little point in blaming the community leaders as in the competitive political environment, their stories do win them maximum support. There is little point in pleading right-doing, for with similar facts the opposite story can also be told.
Nowhere has this story played out differently. It is a mistake to blame the outcome on anyone.
Power sharing becomes inevitable because of the logic of political cleavage in competitive democracies.’*
That understood, in Guyana the actual consequences of living in a bicommunal society have been suppressed, firstly by the country being involved in Western efforts to contain Soviet communism, which allowed the PNC to manipulate elections to keep itself in government and the PPP at bay.
Indeed, these undemocratic elections were considered the major problem, which once overcome would lead to democracy and national prosperity.
The fall of international communism in the late 1980s led to the removal of the PNC and allowed Guyanese for the first time to experience the actual working of their unique political context. Cheddi Jagan and his PPP came to office in 1992 with good intentions. He spent a lifetime searching for practical solutions to Guyana’s political/ethnic problems.
The road toward dominance began when Cheddi Jagan died and President Janet Jagan was forced into constitutional reforms and then had to resign the presidency in 1999, due largely to persistent protests and disturbances led mainly by the PNC.
Some substantial changes were made to the constitution, but the reforms did not get to the root of the problem: they left Guyanese politics in the traditional Westminster majoritarian mould and the political problems continued.
Janet Jagan had resigned from the presidency but her party was still in government and as the main leader of the PPP, she gauged correctly that given the competitive ethnic political context, there was no end in sight to these conflicts and believed, as many still do, that having won a majoritarian elections the PPP had the right to be allowed to rule even if it meant creating a dictatorial state rooted in an ethnic majority.
In truth, there are only two ways of peacefully managing a country such as Guyana: a form of dictatorship or power sharing. She chose the former and saddled the population with an authoritarian regime deliberately rooted in ethnic/political dominance.
To be continued….
