Freddie Kissoon column...Why the Caribbean people do not like Guyana

Freddie Kissoon column…Why the Caribbean people do not like Guyana

Aug 25, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Time after time after time, you hear and read about unpleasant incidents and decisions in the Caricom region that adversely affect Guyana. This has been going on for a long, long time. Guyanese get a harder time at regional airports than citizens of other West Indian nations. The Guyanese policy-makers have been complaining since the formation of Caricom that the members cheat on Guyana in trade matters. Even with the CSME taking shape, there are still complaints of playing unfairly against Guyana.
Michael Holding, who played country cricket for most of his career, suggested that, because of the constant interruption by the weather here, test cricket should be moved from this country. It was a biased statement. Who knew about the discomfort the climate brings to the people of the UK? There was no reason to believe at the conscious level that Holding disliked Guyana. The statement had Freudian underpinnings. When the rains stopped cricket, Holding just became conscious of the negative factor that Caribbean people have always associated Guyana with. He was probably so exasperated that he yelled out, “Guyana again?!”
Every citizen of Guyana should try to get inside the mind of the average Caricom citizen and Caricom leader. Look at our history. In a grouping of Anglo-Saxon states, Guyana emerged as the only unit with self-government that wanted to break out of its traditional environment and move towards the Soviet bloc. In 1953, the British suspended the Constitution and sent troops. We got back self-government in 1957, Cheddi Jagan, the Premier, became more communist that the founders of communism. His selfish politics created the worst violent incidents in the history of the entire Caribbean region. The Mackenzie killings, the Sun Chapman incident, the Abraham family deaths all were unthinkable occurrences in the placid ambience of West Indian politics.
Jagan’s communism threat was removed in 1964. But Jagan’s successor became a bigger embarrassment for the West Indian governmental family. Erudite, visionary and ingenious, the Guyanese President, Forbes Burnham, had fatal flaws, and those character weaknesses created prodigious headaches for Caricom leaders. Mr. Burnham was enchanted with princely authority and was highly contemptuous of the democratic recognition and respect for the limits to power.
The terrible authoritarian policies of Mr. Burnham vitiated the good standing he had with Caricom leaders, but, more importantly, the huge exodus of Guyanese was creating immigration nightmares for Barbados and Trinidad. I got first hand experience with it after I left Grenada for Guyana via Trinidad. This was in 1983. At Piraco Airport, a school of Guyanese women surrounded me demanding that I check in their luggage under my name, since I was travelling light. Actually, what they wanted me to do was to bring home the goods they were trading in, since Guyana had become a basket case.
Burnhamite Guyana made Caribbean people scornful of Guyanese. When Burnham died, the problem persisted because, under Mr. Burnham’s successor, Desmond Hoyte, the 1985 general elections were terribly contorted. Caricom felt that it was time to do something about its pariah member. A group of Caricom states summoned President Hoyte to St. Vincent. According to the autobiography of the former St. Vincent Prime Minister, Sir James Mitchell, Hoyte agreed to internationally supervised elections. The rest is now history.
In 1992, the Caricom’s Guyana dilemma was neatly and nicely dissolved. So it seemed at the time. It has been sixteen years since the sick man of Caricom got up from his bed and walked again. But Caribbean leaders and Caribbean people had the same nightmare that visited their island from Guyana since 1953. In 1998, widespread violence accompanied the 1997 election. In the 2001 poll, an orgy of arson almost destroyed half of the commercial centre. Caricom intervened on both occasions and saved Guyana through two pieces of political accommodation that go under the titles ‘Herdmanston Accord’ and the ‘St. Lucia Agreement.’
At the last Heads of Government conference in July this year, Guyana’s combined opposition presented a petition for the Heads to consider. It was about authoritarian power in Guyana. One could just imagine what went through the minds of the Prime Ministers of the islands. It was the Michel Holding echo: “Guyana again?” In the meantime, with humungous rises in food prices, Caricom countries have showed no interest in Guyana’s offer of allocation of Guyana’s vast land space to alleviate the problem. While both skilled and untrained workers from Guyana are turned away from the airports of Barbados and Trinidad, the latter wants to import labour from India to work on its farms. Guyana’s grinding poverty and falling educational institutions are sending hundreds to the region in search of a better life. For the Caribbean, the Guyana nightmare never went away.