THE JOINT OPPOSITION HAS LOST A CRUCIAL STAGE OF THE STRUGGLE

Aug 20, 2010 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The joint opposition and other civic forces have been dealt a serious blow by the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the government of Guyana and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Under this program, Guyana will receive some US$13.1M in bilateral assistance from the United States, almost as much as it will cost to build the approach heavy-duty road to the site where the Amalia Falls hydroelectric project will be constructed.
This assistance from an agency of the United States government must be seen in the context of a recent lobby by the Alliance For Change to bring pressure on the Guyana government to improve its standards of governance. It must also be seen against the background of calls by the joint opposition for international action to be taken against the Guyana government for alleged death squad involvement.
These efforts must now be seen as having failed to evoke the desired response. The United States has made a general call for investigations into unnatural deaths but has not come out in outright condemnation against the government, nor has it linked the government to any death squad allegations.
Now with this agreement, the United States, even if it may harbour suspicions of the government, is indicating clearly that it is prepared to engage with the administration on the question of governance, which is one of the areas that will benefit under the USAID program.
The joint opposition will now have to reconsider its strategy in light of this agreement which signals that the United States is not placing any pre-conditions to cooperation with the Jagdeo administration. It is yet another blow towards the opposition’s plans to ostracize the administration over human rights issues.
For all intents and purposes, therefore the joint opposition campaign, as well as the AFC’s lobby has failed badly and it is time that the opposing parties examine why this has happened.
It was always going to be difficult for the joint opposition to convince the international community with its dossier. Simply stringing together the names of individuals who died from unnatural causes, without detailed investigations into each of these deaths to prove that they were the work of death squads, was always not likely to be taken seriously. It may have been much better if the joint opposition had concentrated on a small number of cases say ten and built up a case against the persons they saw as the authors of these killings.
So long as some of the deaths in the dossier could be explained outside of a hit killing, then the very credibility of the dossier would have been brought into focus. The joint opposition went for the grand plot and ended up without the fanfare they expected. Their campaign has now reached a dead end, and with it, there is very little to unite them in sustained struggle against the ruling administration.
They were hoping that international condemnation would have boosted the hopes and help kick-start local agitation against the government. They placed the cart before the horse, because the international community, which has invested so much in political stability in Guyana, was never going to disturb the groundwork that was laid, unless there was concerted agitation from within Guyana.
The people of Guyana are not in the mood for political struggle. They are not in the mood to stand up against the government. And so it seems that there has to be a period of retreat by the opposition, of leaving things to disintegrate a little more, of allowing the contradictions within the system to take their course. This is not likely to happen within the next year, and therefore it now seems clear that the PPP will win in the next elections and win easily.
The United States is certainly not waiting to see what will be the outcome of the next elections. It is preparing to roll out a significant aid program to the Guyana government, and through this signal, that it is prepared to engage the government rather than court a more controversial role by demanding reforms before any assistance is forthcoming.
The joint opposition must now resign themselves to the reality that the Americans are not going to move against the PPP government in a way that is going to help the joint opposition. The verdict is in. The PPP has won again, and the joint opposition has lost.

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THE JOINT OPPOSITION HAS LOST A CRUCIAL STAGE OF THE STRUGGLE

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