Guyana is a 60-year-old tragedy

Jul 29, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

We belong to the bloc known as the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). We have been the most trafficked nation in CARICOM from the fifties right up to this moment in time. You would think that with our disastrous history, we would have become the maverick in the English-speaking Caribbean; that we would have become the democratic icon of the English-speaking West Indies.
Each day, Guyana becomes more saturated with the poison of authoritarian power while the rest of our neighbours deepen their democratic culture. As the world’s countries rise about their unfortunate and sad past, Guyana reverts to a primitive state where the rulers become more ossified in their habits and ancient instincts become more embedded.
It was good news for democracy in the Caribbean when the two major parliamentary parties in Jamaica agreed on a historic consensus on the limit to campaign finance.
Like most parties around the world the JLP and the PNP are sworn antagonists. The Opposition PNP went for the jugular of Prime Minister Bruce Golding over the Dudus Coke extradition case calling for his resignation.
Amidst the fury and the fallout, both parties signed a historic covenant three days ago that they no doubt felt was good a democratic culture that Jamaica should embrace. Both parties felt it was good for the future of Jamaica.
To argue against this is to deny common sense. Why would the leaders of a country not want to limit election contributions and regulate election financing?
One nation stands out like a pus-leaking sarcoma in the CARICOM family, and that is Guyana. A majority of CARICOM territories have a Freedom of Information Act. The first state in CARICOM you expected that to appear in was Guyana.
This was a logical anticipation because authoritarian politics has failed us since the fifties. We are the only member of the CC that has one radio station that has been in operation since the seventies. Nothing changes in this Faustian country. We lived under an authoritarian system the ruling party in its literature refers to as a dictatorship. This party abhorred the radio monopoly; it fumed against state control of the state media.
The evidence of the tragedy that is Guyana that the blind can easily discern abounds in this land.
That dictatorship that the ruling points to disappeared more than twenty-five years ago. But we still have one radio station, and the miasma that has enveloped the state media is worse than in extreme totalitarian states.
I met one of Guyana’s most learned lawyers two nights ago and while talking about the Government’s harassment of me, I told him I honestly believe certain types in the power corridors are a cut below Forbes Burnham.
I could never have anticipated his reaction. He got up from his seat, corrugated his face in anger and said: “A cut below Burnham; these people far worse than Burnham.” This is a sentiment expressed by real classy people in Guyana that never liked Burnham.
When you hear them speak like that then you know we are sinking deep in hellish waters.
All of the wealthy classes in Guyana are traveling people. They can’t be so blind not to see in other lands in the CARICOM bloc the deepening of democracy. Yet they remain silent about the rape of democracy in their own country.
Mr. Robert Badal has now joined Christopher Ram, Stanley Ming and Peter Ramsaroop as the only four investors who decry the lack of democracy and the strangulation of freedoms in Guyana. I talk to these investors and they tell me that it is just a year more. But a country can be destroyed in less than a year if voices of reason are not heard.
The great student of the human mind, Sigmund Freud, once wrote that he never understood people. Perhaps no human being ever will. The tragedy that is Guyana is still within the memory of all of us. Yet our business folks go about their lives as if the tragedy does not exist.
Then when the tragedy manifests itself again and Guyana explodes and implodes, we all are consumed. I observed these disasters from deep inside the events as they unfolded. I saw the gloom and doom in the eyes of my fellow human beings as I covered the violence as media operative.
Those eyes will live in my memory forever. I don’t want to see more of those eyes. But maybe I will, because the human being never seems to want to avoid the tragedy of the past.

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Guyana is a 60-year-old tragedy

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