Dear Editor,
Minister Manickchand has stirred up quite a furor with her remarks at an event to celebrate the United States’ 238th Independence anniversary. Her remarks can only be described as a broadside against the US government and on Ambassador Hardt. It was a little awkward that immediately after delivering the broadside (some people characterize it as ‘venting’), Minister Manickchand proposed a toast to the United States and the Ambassador, out of diplomatic protocol, went along. He is your consummate diplomat.
The same remarks delivered at another time and place would not have created such embarrassment for the Guyanese people. A lot of people began wondering about Ms Manickchand’s suitability as a Minister until they began reading that she was just a conduit for the speech and that it had really been prepared and approved by Cabinet. This all suggests that the government of a country of barely 725,000 people intends to seek some sort of confrontation with the United States.
The ugliness of the event aside, however, this nation needs to have a serious debate about the issues that are fermenting and boiling over in the executive branch of the government and that led to this incident right on the lawns of the Ambassador’s residence. What are the issues? They are about the fight to improve the quality of democracy. Who is qualified to speak out? Who is not? And the concept of democracy itself needs to be debated.
The ruling party in Guyana now in its 22nd year in office has not held local government elections as provided for in the constitution. Ambassador Hardt has called on the government to hold elections. What is so terrible about gently nudging the government to hold those elections? The ruling party says it is a violation of diplomatic convention and amounts to political interference in the internal affairs of the state.
Haven’t the Guyanese people been through this rigmarole before? And the precedents set? Not too long ago, there had been another government in power – they stayed in power for 28 long years, 24 of them by rigging elections. The Guyanese people cried out in every forum of the world for help to obtain free and fair elections.
And then something changed, the Cold War came to an end. It meant the US was no longer afraid of communism spreading to Guyana. It was the US government which paid for the plane to take former President Carter to Guyana to negotiate with then President Hoyte – gently nudging him to agree to the terms for free and fair elections. And the rest is history, as they say.
I say this is a clear precedent for foreign agencies gently nudging (not interference) a recalcitrant government to take measures to obtain a better quality of democracy for the people of Guyana. It worked beautifully in 1990-92, and the reign of that dictatorship came to an end. What we have in Guyana today is another dictatorship, albeit an ‘elected dictatorship.’
Now the current ruling party that benefited from the work of the Carter Center, the US government, NDI and others, has now become entrenched in power; it is now in its 22nd year. It has manipulated all the levers of power – a near monopoly of media, an army of paid bloggers to attack and fight all the reasonable voices including Ambassador Hardt’s and the US government’s call for a deepening of democracy (LEAD Project) and the need for local government elections.
In all democracies ruling parties with the power of incumbency and control of government resources try to manipulate the conditions to give themselves maximum advantage. But there are rules to limit the extent of these manipulations so that all contesting parties are given a fair chance. Let all reasonable voices speak out. And Ambassador Hardt’s voice – indeed the voice of the US government – is indeed reasonable and conforms to established precedent.
There is one other provocative matter raised by Minister Manickchand – US interference in Guyana in the 1950s-1960s. The US interfered in Guyana, as they did all over the world, to contain the spread of communist ideology. This war ran its course from the end of WW2 and ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the US was triumphant.
Are we better off – is the world better off – for the United States’ success in this war? Today Russia and China, two communist bastions are both practising free market economics; Russia is also practising some sort of democracy. Minister Manickchand should be reminded that Cheddi Jagan, then leader of the ruling party struggled towards the end of his life to come to terms with the errors of his ideological position. He once said: “I was Gorbachev before Gorbachev.” It was his way of renouncing the mistakes of his embrace of communism. Minister Manickchand should be further reminded that President Jagan’s government before his death in 1997 – the same government in which Ms Manickchand is now a minister – practised none of the core principles of the communist ideology.
When President Jagan got stricken with a heart attack he was medivacked to the US for medical care where he succumbed. Before his casket was loaded onto the airplane to be returned to Guyana, the US government gave him a 21-gun salute. I shall always think of that event as one of major symbolism – forgiveness of what was done in the past and now rapprochement between the two nations, and looking to the future to rebuild Guyana economically.
The ruling party in Guyana today is bent on dredging up the past, bent on interpreting the events of the 1960s in their way only (it is a complex episode and given to more than one interpretation) and bent on manipulating the minds of the Indo-Guyanese people for the single purpose of staying in power forever. Given their failure to win African support, the changing demographics of the population and the all-consuming racial voting, the consequences of this party’s actions to the nation are grave.
Guyana’s is a system of flawed democracy, made flawed by the culture of excessive racial voting and the numerical majority of one racial group over the other.
The ruling Indo-ethnic party people should ponder this alternative: What would have been the case if Africans had the numerical majority on their side? Shouldn’t this thought jolt them towards a path for a less flawed democracy?
Guyanese people of all races should welcome all voices, not just Guyanese citizens, including those of diplomats and foreign agencies to help make our democracy less flawed.
Yours faithfully,
Mike Persaud
