A price worth paying

May 04, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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It may have something to do with the fact that two foremost leaders of Guyana, Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, were part of the struggles for self-determination and independence. It may have something to do also with the fact that both of them were at some stage of their lives, victims of external aggression and crass interference in the internal affairs of Guyana.
These may explain why Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham felt so strongly about Guyana’s sovereignty. They understood better than most what it meant to be a sovereign nation and the dangers that were involved when others sought to dictate what should happen in their country.
The US LEAD project constitutes a most flagrant violation of our sovereignty. No self-respecting leader would have condoned the temerity and brazenness of those who felt that because Guyana is a poor country that they come here and implement a programme which did not enjoy the consent of our government. This was a vulgar violation of our sovereignty as there can ever be. And it is shocking and disheartening to know that there are Guyanese who will end up actually siding with the United States on this issue. The US apologists in Guyana may even end up defending that country’s right to implement such a programme without the consent of the government of Guyana.
Sovereignty belongs to the people. That is a cliché that is often used. But sovereignty is exercised on behalf of the people by the government. It is unheard of, in any part of the world, opposition parties or civil society groupings arrogating to themselves the exercise of sovereignty and thus encouraging foreign powers to come and interfere in the internal affairs of the country. That is totally unacceptable.
When the United States Embassy in Guyana indicated that it would go ahead with the implementation of the LEAD programme without the approval of the government, this constituted a brazen attack on the sovereignty of our country. It was an act of “eye pass” on the part of the United States government.
They would not have dared tried that nonsense in any other part of the world. They would have long been kicked out of here. In fact, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are now pariah organizations in many parts of Latin America, because of their subversive activities against sovereign nations. UNASUR in fact called on its members, which includes Guyana, to sever ties with USAID.
The Donald Ramotar administration has exercised non-admirable restraint in dealing with this contemptuous behaviour by the United States. From the very day that the US Embassy showed its disregard or contempt for this country’s sovereignty by indicating that the project would go ahead above the objections of the government, there should have been mass expulsions of those behind this project and those who were insisting that it would proceed.
Forbes Burnham was a stooge to the United States, but he was never ever going to allow them to infringe on the sovereignty of Caribbean nations. Burnham took a principled stand, in opposition to his then CARICOM colleagues in Caricom, on the US invasion of Grenada. He did not run with the herd. He said that the invasion was wrong and he wanted no part in any plans to invite American intervention. He paid a huge price for that stance.
Many people may not know that when the Caribbean Basin Initiative was launched, Guyana was excluded from that initiative. It was widely held that the reason for this was because of Burnham’s opposition to the invasion of Grenada.
When the PPP came into office in 1992, the Americans decided that they wanted a certain individual who was implicated in the destabilization of the PPP government in the 1960s to be their representative in Guyana. The PPP said no and refused to accredit that individual.
The former political leaders of Guyana, those that were part of the anti-colonial struggle understood what it meant to defend your sovereignty. They would never allow a foreign power to do what the US was attempting to do with the LEAD programme: have it implemented behind the back of a sovereign government.
The US would never have dared to try that in any other part of the Caribbean or Latin America. In fact, the USAID, IRI and NED are seen as agents of destabilization. It should therefore be no surprise that the Guyana government has pulled the work permit of the head of the LEAD project.
The surprise should really be two-fold. Firstly, the surprise should be why it took the Guyana government so long for that to happen. Secondly, the surprise should be why has the government not yet declared the US Ambassador to Guyana persona non grata. Those are the surprises.
Guyana will pay a price for its actions. We did in the past when Burnham’s standing up to the US forced us to be excluded from the CBI. The US will apply the squeeze. They do not condone small powers standing up to them. When Pakistan hesitated in allowing them to use that country as a base to go after the Taliban in Afghanistan, an American official threatened President Musharraf to bomb Pakistan back into the Stone Age.
Guyana will pay a price for its rejection to LEAD.  But it is a price worth paying.

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