It is important that we maintain peace and tranquility for elections

Sep 22, 2011 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
As Guyana prepares for yet another general and regional election, it is important that we maintain the peace and tranquility which characterized the previous elections of 2006.
Indeed, the 2006 elections would go down as one of the most peaceful and incident-free elections in our post-colonial history, and speaks to the growing level of political maturity of the Guyanese people.
The PNC in particular, now subsumed under the acronym APNU, must eschew a tendency to ‘explain’ its defeat at the polls as one that resulted from aberrations or irregularities in the electoral process when the whole of Guyana, including the PNC itself, knows that that was not the case.
The fact that it lost all the elections since 1992 to the PPP/C did not render the process flawed as the PNC had sought to project to its supporters and to the international community.
In the elections of 1997, the PPP/C was forced, in the interest of peace and national reconciliation, to give up two-thirds of its elected mandate due to street protests and attacks on government buildings, even though the elections were declared free and fair by local and international observers.
One of the hallmarks of a free and democratic society is its ability to accept the democratic will of its people through democratic elections.
This unfortunately has not always been the case in Guyana. In my opinion, all elections since 1968 were massively rigged by the PNC which provided legitimate grounds for opposition parties to condemn and refuse to accept the results of those fraudulent elections.
However, since October 1992, all elections were internationally and locally certified and therefore there existed no credible grounds for refusing to accept the legitimacy of the election results.
One can only hope that all the contesting parties would accept the results as they did in the previous election, and in the process, demonstrate to the world that we are a mature and tolerant people, willing and ready to accept the mandate of the Guyanese people.
Hydar Ally