When people write, history then becomes known

Dec 19, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Last Saturday, Mr. Rashleigh Jackson, Guyana’s longest serving Foreign Minister wrote in this newspaper, an enlightening reply to Dr. Prem Misir of the Office of the President. I would suggest school children with an interest in political and historical affairs read it. I would recommend it to young people not familiar with what happened to Guyana in the 1960s. I hope my generation, particularly East Indian citizens, read Mr. Jackson’s small not important missive.
Dr. Misir’s letter in the Kaieteur News (by now most readers know Dr. Misir is not happy to write for the Chronicle only and makes maximum use of the letter columns of KN and SN) is titled, “The 1964 elections, a betrayal of trust.” It is a reflection of the sixties in true propagandistic style in the tradition of Cheddi Jagan’s book, “the West on Trial.”
A picture is painted of an angelic Cheddi Jagan versus the American and British Governments with local support from Mr. Forbes Burnham and Peter D’Aguiar. No doubt, Mr. Jackson was livid at the non-facts, propaganda, distortions in Dr. Misir’s letter that he was moved to pen a composition that would correct the falsehoods of Dr. Misir before they become part of our history.
I would first offer Mr. Jackson’s corrections then throw in some facts of my own. Dr. Misir raged that the then Governor in 1964 should have invited Dr. Jagan to form the government because Dr. Jagan won most seats in the elections held under proportional representation (PR). A first year student of political studies would know that under PR. parties are allowed to have coalition, meaning that three parties with 20 percent each of the popular vote can come together and form the government with the fourth party losing out even though it got forty percent.
That is such a common fact that it need not be dwelled on. You open the newspaper everyday and you read about coalitions being formed after elections in countless countries.
Hidden from Dr. Misir’s account was the fact that Burnham and D’Aguiar did not to want to coalesce with Jagan, thus rendering Jagan’s party a minority in Parliament. That strong fact is missing from Misir’s essay. Mr. Jackson wrote that the Governor chose the Premier based on who had majority support in Parliament.
According to Dr. Misir, the Governor amended the Constitution to allow Burnham to become the Premier.
Mr. Jackson called this a non-fact because there was no need to do so – Burnham and D’Aguiar decided to join hands.
For the purpose of this essay, I went back to “The West on Trial” to see if Dr. Misir was right. He wasn’t.
On page 326 of Jagan’s book (Seven Seas Book edition, 1972), Dr. Jagan made no mention of the Governor amending anything but wrote that the British Government changed the British Guiana Constitution to allow for PR. These are the kinds of propaganda from PPP writers that have influenced a generation of East Indians from the sixties onwards.
But even on page 326, Jagan was misleading. He didn’t tell us that this particular change of the Constitution he agreed to.
For more on this concession to the British Government by Premier Cheddi Jagan in 1964 see the interview of Dr. Fenton Ramsahoye, Jagan’s Attorney-General in the book, “The PPP of Guyana, 1950-1992: An Oral History” by Frank Birbalsingh.
Mr. Jackson is severe on Dr. Misir and has every right to and all of us should adopt the criticism of Mr. Jackson when he asserts in his reply that Dr. Misir may be guilty of untruthfulness when he wrote that the “US and British Governments had concern over the PPP’s Administration perceived close ties to Moscow and Cuba.”
Mr. Jackson is upset at Dr. Misir’s use of the word, “perceived.” One can go beyond Mr. Jackson description of untruthfulness and call it something worse. Every Guyanese from my parents’ generation taking in my generation too know that Dr. Jagan was one of world’s most enduring, frenetic, fanatical communist.
The evidence of Dr. Jagan’s participation in the Cold War as Premier of British Guiana was not something that was perceived but was a colossal fact. The PPP Government in the 1960s received cash flows from the USSR and resources from Cuba including arms and military training for PPP cadres.
If there is anything that is known about Dr. Jagan was that he took his Government into the Cold War in the sixties and thus committed political suicide. In 1964, the US and British Governments didn’t think that Dr. Jagan was a communist. They knew he was, body and soul.

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When people write, history then becomes known

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