BURNHAM WAS SINCERE ABOUT THE ANTI-APARTHEID STRUGGLE

May 12, 2013 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The contention that Forbes Burnham, the late President of Guyana, tilted the balance in Angola’s civil war by allowing Cuban planes to refuel here in Guyana en route to that country is, at best, a case of contrived heroism.
For years, the PNC denied left, right and centre that it had ever allowed Cuban planes to refuel in Guyana en route to Luanda.  The subsequent claim that Cuban troops were training in Guyana’s jungle was also vehemently denied.
Yet today, the confession is out in the open that Cuban planes did refuel here when no other Caribbean country wanted to offer such facilities to the Cubans, and it was this act of allowing the Cuban planes to refuel in Guyana that tilted the balance in the civil war in Angola.
It would have taken more than the two flights that left from Timehri to tilt the balance in Angola.  Yes, two flights! Of the more than one hundred flights which ferried Cuban troops to Luanda, only two refueled in Guyana. Guyana was never a suitable refueling location because the runway at Timehri was too short and thus unsuitable for the large Cuban planes which were transporting troops.
Burnham played no heroic role in that regard. The ultimate Caribbean hero in the Angolan civil war was Fidel Castro who, without the prompting of the Russians, decided to send Cuban troops into battle. That decision became necessary after the apartheid regime in South Africa made a game-changing incursion into Angolan territory.
It is true that if Cuban troops were not sent to Angola, the fate of that country would have been different. But Forbes Burnham was not a major player in that process as he is now being made out to be.
It was Castro who had sent one of his military commissars to meet Burnham after Barbados refused refueling rights to Cuba. Many flights in fact were re-fueled in Barbados before the Americans turned on the pressure on the authorities to deny Cuba refueling rights.
Burnham also came under pressure from the Americans and from Venezuela.  He got a call from the then President of Venezuela, Carlos Andres Perez, who threatened to curtail the preferences Guyana was receiving from that country if a single drop of Venezuelan fuel was used in the refueling exercise.
Burnham’s heroic stand ended before it started. His defiance collapsed like an empty sack. This great hero who it is claimed heroically tilted the balance in favour of the Angolan civil war could not stand up to the Venezuelan and American pressure.
Wikileaks has just released declassified documents which point to a series of meetings between the American embassy personnel in Guyana and the Forbes Burnham administration in which the Americans made it clear that they would not tolerate Cuban planes being refueled in Guyana.
These documents reveal a different picture from the heroic portrait that is now being painted about Burnham and his support for transporting Cuban troops to Angola.
Another attempt at portraying Burnham as heroic and principled when it came to apartheid is the story about Burnham refusing the gift of a plane from a company which wanted to trade in Guyana’s sugar. It was related that the refusal was because that company concerned had ties in apartheid South Africa. That may well be so, but Burnham’s government had for years been bartering Guyana’s bauxite through a company which had extensive financial and business interests in South Africa.
Burnham’s opponents were alert to this fact and they constantly threw it in his face as an example of his inconsistency when it came to South Africa. It can also be said that most of Guyana’s sugar in the 1970s ended up being processed by a firm which had strong business chains in apartheid South Africa and still does onto this day.
After Walter Rodney was murdered, Burnham tried to regain lost ground in Africa by overstepping in his interpretation of the Gleneagles Agreement. That agreement had called on members of the Commonwealth to take steps to desist their nationals from having sporting ties with South Africa. In order to atone for the fallout from the Rodney assassination, Burnham engaged in grandstanding by refusing to allow any sportsman who had gone to South Africa from playing any sport in Guyana.
To however surmise from these and other arguments that Burnham was not sincere about his support for anti-apartheid stuggles would be a case of lopsided judgment.  Burnham may have been a lot of things but when it came to South Africa, he was sincerely opposed to apartheid rule. That cannot be denied.
Whether he made a major contribution to the liberation struggles in Africa is however debatable.  Burnham faced one major problem that did not allow him to go as far as he may have wanted when it came to the liberation struggles in Africa.
Throughout his career as Prime Minister of Guyana, he could not disentangle himself from the clutches of the Americans to whom he owed allegiance for the favours the CIA did for him. And they always pulled him in when he stepped too far outside of their liking, as they did with the Cuban planes.

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