The intermittent wars

Jun 28, 2019 Editorial

For centuries following the Treaty of Westphalia, there was intermittent war. Nation-states vied for supremacy: endless, recurrent bloodshed and upheavals.
Two great wars in the last century and a toll still unimaginable after the carnage–the horror of 187 million dead. The flower of Europe’s youth wiped out.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. That is an enormous number of dead; a declining birthrate; an infrastructure that had to be rebuilt from scratch one shattered brick at a time. Learning comes, excruciatingly painfully.
It took centuries of wars, bloodshed, revolts, and misery to get to the point where Europe is currently, well, at least for the over two dozen countries, and over 500 hundred million people that live under the flag of the EU.
Conflicts were escalated through first a war of words, then the use of force usually countered by equivalent force.
In Guyana, to a lesser extent, strife has been the norm for over fifty years. The struggle for power, for space, for racial triumph, has felt as though it has been ongoing for centuries. Like Europe, confrontations have spiraled initially with passion and later through deterioration into action. In Europe it has been ideological and ethnic and economic and religious battles waged across borders.
Here the disturbances have been on local streets and communities near and far. As opposed to the huge standing Continental armies arrayed against each other, locally it has been unclaimed and unowned guerillas, mercenaries, extremists, and phantoms sniping in hit and run forays from behind political and racial camouflages.
The count can be measured in loss of life, loss of capital, loss of promise, and loss of hope.
In Europe, something different had to be tried, if only for survival. In Guyana, something new and different has to be given a chance, if only to enable the survival of this society; to give it a chance.
Recent foreign counsel do not go anywhere in this direction. Those guidelines merely articulate broad outlines as to how to approach, and how to arrive at some agreement as to the way forward in some configuration through some process.
This keeps things going on some adjusted basis, with one or the other group furiously offering interpretations that redefine, restructure, and release the power equation in the same tried and failed manner.
The balance of power equation is not changing; only occasional election rebalancing. The thinking does not identify the root causes of all the ills that plague this society. They are neither formula nor recipe for the solutions that are demanded by the underlying problems.
What price peace and stability and continuity as a people? As a nation? This will not happen through outsiders counseling without intimacy lived. This has to be at the hands of the people and the leaders for a particular kind of vision.
That must be in total deference to the lost years, the many wounds, the countless tears and agonies that drag down and drown.
Again, that peace, stability, and an unprecedented kind of continuity has to come from citizens across the embittered divide, who are not content with how things always have been. It is not the lip service of more hypocritical speeches and false promises.
It cannot be the unbending attitudes that lead nowhere. It is about reciprocal sacrifice; of giving something now, to get more later.
Spears have to be converted into ploughshares. This is what brought Europe to its senses and the partial removal of the hostility between archenemies Germany and France, England and Spain, and perhaps, someday, Turkey to join Greece in a true comity of nations.
In this society where everything is through the lens of race, that poison has to be purged. Guyana is geography; Guyanese have to be about destiny.