The road we have travelled since October 5

Oct 06, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I do not write about the significance of October 5, 1992 any longer. I used to devote a column to its importance in the early stage of the PPP rule. I stopped that for two reasons. First, it is best we forget about that date. It means nothing. It has done nothing good for this country in terms of the concretization of a new political culture and the institutionalization of greater freedoms.
Secondly, October 5, 1992, reminds me of the inherent injustice in the inexorable flow of history.
When I think of October 5, I am reminded of one of the leaders in history that I hate – Josef Stalin. Stalin devoured the makers of the Russian Revolution. One of the saddest books I have read is written by the widow of one of the great makers of the Russian Revolution, Nikolai Bukharin. Titled; “This I Cannot Forget” by Anna Larina, it is about the persecution, prosecution and execution of her husband by Stalin. Her memoirs detail her own suffering in prison.
This book is not for the faint-hearted. It is a sad commentary of the beast that lies in men who promise freedom to their subjects but end up taking it away from them. Larina’s memoirs are a graphic testimony of the failure of the Russian Revolution. No wonder the Russian people have renamed the cities that bore the names of Stalin and Lenin.
Last week, the courts rehabilitated the Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas and his family.
Look around Guyana today, there are no Bukharins. No one who made October 5 possible has been imprisoned and executed, but the true makers and real heroes of October 5 have been contemptuously derecognized by the admirers of Stalin who have unjustly inherited the ambrosia of October 5. Their valour and sacrifice have been forgotten.
The failure about everything of October 5 lies in the sacrilege that greets the name of Walter Rodney by those on whom Lady Luck smiled and handed power on October 5, 1992. In these times, there is a yearly trek to the burial site of the Enmore martyrs and the state owned media prints large photographs of the wreath-layers, some of whom are yet to learn about the pains of a struggle for a free Guyana.
Today, there is the annual pilgrimage to the two youths that were killed in the Corentyne 1973 election, according to the PPP, in attempt to stop the soldiers from taking away the ballot boxes. But today, there is no annual observance by the state of the murder of Walter Rodney.
His passing is generally celebrated by the scattered few who remain faithful to his legacy. And what is his legacy? If there was no Walter Rodney, there would have been no free and fair elections. When the PPP and its supporters commemorate October 5 as the moment Guyana reclaimed free and fair elections, two historical factors, one disgraceful, one beautiful are conveniently forgotten.
The positive motif was that if it weren’t for the Working People’s Alliance, the Guyana Human Rights Association, the Catholic Standard, FITUG, and GUARD, there would have been no freedom in Guyana today where powerful men and women nevertheless made of straw, behave like Stalin’s executioners, only that they don’t kill the children of the revolution. Maybe they can’t.
This writer thinks it is the ultimate in historical and intellectual degeneracy and political perversity of the worst kind to rejoice at the freedoms the PPP brought Guyanese. It is when we look at the second factor, the negative one, we see Stalin’s henchmen at work. In 1985, despite the valiant endeavours of thousands to wrest this country from the grips of Burnhamite authoritarianism, the PPP chose to unite with the PNC in a single party to contest the elections. Yet the PPP’s leaders chant to their supporters that they fought the Burnham dictatorship.
I always say that if the sugar workers would one day take one moment off from their daily routine and pray in their temples and mosques and ask their God why is it that after 135 days of a violent strike to protest Burnham’s Sugar Levy, their party when it got in power, took 13 years before it abolished that nightmare. Here lies the naked, moral bankruptcy of those who today celebrate the symbol of October 5, 1992.
We can leave you with one vivid reminder of the squalid consequences of 1992. When in opposition, Dr. Jagan couldn’t have his voice over the only radio station in Guyana. He couldn’t get his words into the Chronicle. Both owned by the state. Look at them today, sixteen years after October 5, 1992.

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The road we have travelled since October 5

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