The PPP requested guns, grenades, ammunitions and electoral resources

Jan 24, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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I have long asserted that the world will know the truths and the facts behind the confrontations in the sixties between the PPP Government and the PNC and United Force when the archives of Russia and Cuba are opened up. The Cubans will not open their archives to Cuban academics pursuing independent and not pro-government research, much less to foreign scholars. No Russian scholar has researched the relations between the Jagan Government and the USSR in the sixties so we still don’t know what the contents of those relations were. But we are getting there.One of the world’s most prestigious research institutions, the Woodrow Wilson Centre, has just released a scholarly paper as part of its Cold War International History Project (CWIHP). Titled “Cheddi Jagan and Guyanese Overtures to the East: Evidence from the Czech National Archives,” by Robert Waters and Jan Koura, the paper cited primary documents showing the relation between the communist world and the Chedd Jagan Government in the sixties. One of the original documents found in the Czech archives is a letter from Moses Bhagwan, at the time, leader of the youth arm of the PPP, requesting assistance from Czechoslovakia. Moses Bhagwan is one of the finest political activists to come out of this country. He was a founding member of the Working People’s Alliance. I admire and respect Moses. I sent him an e-mail asking him to confirm if he was in contact with the Czech Government. At press time, I didn’t receive a reply. Waters and Koura have actually produced the letter and quoted from it. Here is an extensive quote from just a paragraph from Waters’ and Koura’s paper.
The last important contact between the PPP leadership and the Czechoslovak Government came in July 1964 while British Guiana was in the midst of a violent pro-government sugar-workers’ strike. Jagan sent an Afro-Guianese emissary, George David, to meet with the Central Committee.
The country faced another election, slated for some time at the end of the year, and David requested assistance to help the PPP get its message out, including two motorbikes, six loudspeakers for street agitation, twelve short films about Czechoslovakia, and a collection of Communist written materials.
The Central Committee approved each of these requests. In a follow-up meeting shortly before he left Czechoslovakia for Cuba, David also asked for weapons: hand grenades, pistols, ammunition and small explosives.
The Central Committee decided not to provide weapons because they considered the method David suggested – shipping them from East Germany with the delivery of Czechoslovak beer – “risky and unrealistic.” The Czechoslovaks informed Jagan of their decision through the Central Committee of the British Communist Party.”
What this publication does is shine a light on the Cold War story in Guyana from a new perspective. A substantial body of literature has concentrated on the British/American conspiracy against Jagan without contextualizing the zeitgeist of the sixties. And that was because these writers did not have access to communist countries’ archives
Colin Palmer’s “Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power,” (2010) and Stephen Rabe’s “US Intervention in British Guiana, a Cold War Story, (2005) do not cite even a single source document from any communist country. This is where Waters and Koura become so valuable for Guyanese researchers.
The question is why in the throes of a volcanic Cold War, did Cheddi Jagan want British Guiana to become part of the sphere of the Soviet Union, and the US and Britain smile and say, let him do his thing. Did Jagan say the same thing when the USSR invaded East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War? The same Czechs that helped Jagan in the early sixties, Jagan became ungrateful and supported the USSR invasion of their country in 1968.
Why should the West have remained neutral in the power struggle in Guyana when the PPP was fighting on the side of communism and the PNC was pro-West? The leader of this same PPP Government, Cheddi Jagan had given an interview to a Queen’s College student magazine in the early fifties, praising Josef Stalin. Why in the Cold War heat in British Guiana, should the West not assist the PNC and United Force?
Primary documents in the Czech archives reveal Jagan asked the communist government to help him get re-elected.
For a researcher like me, the Waters/Koura’s paper is almost priceless. I have long argued that the Jagan legacy was built on shifting sand. Cheddi Jagan no doubt was a pleasant, decent human being at the inter-personal level, just like Forbes Burnham, but just like Forbes Burnham, his politics was far, very far, from being pleasant and decent

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