Dear Editor,
I have been following closely the debate on “Was he or Wasn’t he a dictator”?
One sentence in a letter which appeared on Saturday, 10th, arrested my attention – “…….there are thousands of Guyanese, at home and abroad, who have been hurt or are still angry with the PNC….”. I recall during the 1970s and early 1980s fellow Guyanese in the workplace putting together food parcels for despatch to Guyana and mentioning that flour was limited to 3 lbs. per parcel despatched. I remember their comments when doing so. In the early 1980s a colleague told me that her father had purchased a mini-van for around 2,000 thousand pounds sterling to send to a relative, so he could sell ice-cream to schoolchildren. I found this strange, because he would have to sell an awful lot of ice-cream to justify the expense involved in the ‘door-to-door’ delivery of the van. Today, with the serious drug problem, one is suspicious of how stocks were – probably still are – moved around.
Friends who visited us in the UK during that period of misery would mention the bare shelves, the methods employed by traders to get a supply of foreign currency from UK and USA visitors in order to purchase stuff from abroad, the general climate of fear, the crude behaviour of state employees, the intimidation, victimisation, etc. (In fact, recently when I read of the treatment at the CJ Airport of some departing passengers, it was like an action replay). We were always shocked at how cowed our educated, sophisticated friends ap-peared to be, and they always ended up pleading with us not to mention their names, if we decided to share this information. They were terrified of reprisals.
Were I now to ask the “was-or- wasn’t-he” question of any of my contacts who were in regular touch with folk in Guyana and up-to-date with conditions there during that period, I know what their answer would be. Unfortu-nately, the person at the top is always seen as responsible for the misdeeds of the ranks – after all, the buck stops there.
Yours faithfully,
Geralda Dennison
