Dear Editor,
A situation fraught with danger arose in the Southern Caribbean when the Venezuelan Government in its May decree sought to violate Guyana’s territorial integrity and by marshalling troops on our border sought to subdue us by intimidation. This crude adoption by reflex of the colonisers’ tactics is all the more regrettable on wider considerations as it suggests a decline in quality at the leadership of the Bolivarian revolution.
People are generally pleased with the patriotic stand of the Guyana government at home and abroad and citizens wherever resident are alerted.
The Guyana opposition PPP’s statement of June 8, 2015 denounced President Maduro’s May decree and in particular objected that the decree would convert Guyana into a landlocked country. In the same statement, the PPP also declared for the first time in public that for its 23 years in office it had defended Guyana’s territorial integrity. The statement implies that Venezuela had contempt for the shared sense of patrimony in our troubled nation and had hoped for concessions that the PPP, though otherwise friendly, would not give.
The PPP’s recent declaration should inform any closet expansionists in positions of influence that the logic of their claim is a foreign military tyranny over Guyanese. Who was it that wisely said in the 19th century, “A people that oppresses another cannot itself be free”?
This month in 1953 British troops landed in the then British Guiana to dismiss an elected unity government of the descendants of enslaved and indentured. Five of us, active eye witnesses, representative of the history, and including the poet and intellectual, Martin Carter, were detained without charges. After some strange hesitation the Venezuelan government honoured Jai Narine Singh, one of the ministers deposed by the British.
Narine Singh while he was in Caracas on a protest mission to South American countries half published in Spanish
“Towards Independence.”
In 1963 as cries for Independence were raised, the opposition in Venezuela invoked the territorial claim with the unspoken agreement of the government of that country. Here in Guyana only a faction saw long term significance in that development. The two mass political leaders, unfortunately publicly took comfort in the fact that the invoking was the act of an opposition party.
For the limited purpose of this brief comment, one constitutional issue remains. It is whether or not the PPP in those 23 years of its testimony had alerted the opposition through the Leader of the Opposition of the true state of foreign relations.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
