Al Jazeera recently rebroadcast a fascinating documentary series entitled “Blood and Tears: French de-colonisation”.
It was very timely given that France is, as we write, undergoing the final denouement in the loss of its petit empire with its former West African colonies breaking free, one by one, from its influence.
One quote that stood out was that of a lady from the “pieds noirs”, those French of European origin who had lived in Algeria over many generations but were forced to flee to France in the wake of the liberation of the country in 1962. She lamented how uninterested the French had been about their plight, choosing instead to forget this shameful national episode: “You can’t write history with an eraser.“
To remember or not to remember a country’s sins, that is the question. The urge to collectively remember is perhaps about attempting to arrive at a mutually agreed upon version of the past. Why is this so important? They say one must not forget the past or one will repeat it. It may also be that we are defined by our histories: “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future….”
Germany would naturally come to mind in how it acknowledged, and still does, the deaths of six million Jews and others in the Holocaust. Highly public trials of Nazi war criminals, the maintenance of the death camps as physical reminders, and the National Holocaust Remem-brance Day on January 27 are just some of the considerable efforts the nation has undertaken to both atone for its past but also to break from it. Typically the Germans have a word for it “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”.
Denial of the Holocaust is illegal under Euro-pean laws and in Germany and many other countries it is illegal to display the Swastika unlike in America where the Confederate flag, a symbol of an even greater atrocity, flies proudly in the South. America never did reconcile after the Civil War. Perhaps the assassination of Lincoln only five days after the Confederacy’s surrender and the succession of Andrew Johnson, a drunkard and avowed racist, are to blame.
Many nations have handled shameful periods in their histories differently. After the death of General Franco in 1975, Spain’s politicians, both left and right, agreed upon a Pacto del Olvido or a Pact of Forgetting. This meant no prosecutions of those involved in the torture and mass murder of thousands under the dictatorship. It was said this was so the country could focus on its democratic future.
The British government is also heading towards closing the books on its shameful 27-year direct rule of Northern Ireland (1972-1998). The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Recon-ciliation) Bill, now in Parliament, would stop hundreds of investigations into well over 1,000 killings. As the New York Times reported recently this includes that of Catholic human rights lawyer Pat Finucane, murdered in 1989 while eating his Sunday lunch by a unionist death squad with what is widely believed to be the help of British security forces.
Then there is South Africa and its post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission which con-ducted public hearings broadcast on national television allowing victims to speak of their grief and to offer amnesty to some former officials of the apartheid regime. It was raw but not retributive and much of the tone was set by the moral leadership of Bishop Desmond Tutu.
However one sees that in recent years, whether we grapple with or try to ignore it, history always bubbles to the surface. We cannot tell people what to forget and what to remember. In Germany neo Nazi groups are on the rise; in Spain, victims’ relatives are pursuing justice thanks to new legislation such as the Democratic Memory Law; in Argentina the favoured presidential candidate Javier Milei is denying the severity of the Junta’s (1976-1983) Dirty War that saw perhaps as many as 30,000 citizens “disappear-ed”. Milei has equated the atrocities with those of the leftists. In other words it was necessary.
So we circle around to Guyana. Our most recent history is far from settled, not even partly agreed upon -”The Troubles” as former President Granger likes to refer to them. A comprehensive study by this newspaper a few years ago showed that the numbers of extra-judicial killings were far fewer than those claimed by some opposition groups. On the other hand there is substantive evidence that the Jagdeo administration contracted out the law enforcement of this country to a known drug trafficker and worked hand in glove with his phantom squad to exterminate citizens. As such, to name the National Intelligence and Security Agency after Dr Roger Luncheon, a pivotal actor in that period, is provocative and could be viewed as an attempt to historically legitimise the state’s policy of that time and by extension in the present.
We have seen over the decades, if not erasure, then how supposed national leaders have engaged in the downplaying, or the prioritisation of, one ethnic group’s history over the others. Son Chapman, Wismar, Enmore, 1973 and the ballot box martyrs…once a year we bring out these dusty souvenirs from old shoe boxes.
Meanwhile the absence of any Cabinet member at The Gladstone Apology was glaring. Why this was so is not clear but it feels like a missed opportunity that the leader of “One Guyana” was not present to have sat and listened with other leaders to what was a sincere gesture by a family that seemed compelled only by their conscience. They made a donation – a small amount indeed, the exact amount their ancestor received for his loss of property without inflation, but it was a start.
We also saw that same week the interjection and calls for an additional apology for John Gladstone’s role in indentureship. The irony could not have been lost on the family that 170 years after his death they were witnessing the consequences of their patriarch’s dual transgressions: having engaged and then lost the labour of one group, he sourced another and so Guyanese live with his actions every single day. It is the Original Sin although it is not this nation’s sin and as such the apology might have offered an inflexion point for the country.
Alas we seem too bound up in our collective grudges.
Just as adults cannot mope on a therapist’s couch forever, blaming everything on their parents, so too Guyana’s leaders must not rely for their support on moth-eaten arguments about ethnic insecurities and who suffered more.
Remember, yes, but to forgive each other is divine.
