The reasons CARICOM Prime Ministers rejected IDPAD’s nonsense

Nov 18, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – The Chairperson of the International Decade for the People of African Descent Assembly – Guyana chapter (IDAPADA-G), Vincent Alexander, in a letter to the newspapers during the
five-month election saga, informed Guyanese that IDPADA-G wrote to the then Chairman of CARICOM who came here with four other CARCOM Prime Ministers (PMs) to end the election impasse.

Here is what Alexander wrote, “The International Decade for People of African Descent-Guyana wrote to Prime Minister Mottley the then Chairperson of CARICOM, on the occasion of the visit of five CARICOM Prime Ministers, indicating that Guyana’s problems are deep-seated and that elections only manifest the problem. We beseeched them to look beyond elections, if their real interest was to lend a helping hand to the peoples of Guyana. To date the honourable ones, with our lives in their hands, have not even acknowledged receipt of our exhortations.”

Since that letter in August, Alexander has published several missives in the newspapers but he has not explained why the PMs never responded to IDPADA-G. Five reasons could be tabled. One of Walter Rodney’s exhortations to Black Guyanese was that they should not allow President Forbes Burnham to humiliate and dishonour them because, as the slave rebellions showed, the slaves rejected assaults on their dignity.
I attended the public meeting where Rodney addressed the specific issue of Burnham reducing the dignity of Black people in the context of the ongoing trial of Arnold Rampersaud, charged for killing a policeman during PPP held protests at the Corentyne poll station. Rodney told the crowd that Burnham was coercing Black people to go in court and lie. He was treating them, Rodney argued, like the slave masters treated the slaves.
CARICOM leaders must have been repulsed at the request of IDAPADA-G. Here for emphasis is a repeat of a part of the letter sent to the five CARICOM heads, “We beseeched them to look beyond elections, if their real interest was to lend a helping hand to the peoples of Guyana.”
What IDAPADA-G was doing through the use of those words was to reduce the dignity of five CARICOM Prime Ministers whose standing in the world is recognized by all countries because they were elected heads. That letter transported a certain disdain African Guyanese leaders, from the PNC and ACDA, have for African Guyanese; contempt that goes right back to Burnham.
The leaders of IDPADA-G in a dangerous moment of psychological depravity imagined that they were talking down to their subjects – Black Guyanese who they have been fooling since the fifties. IDPADA-G wanted these five Prime Ministers to ignore the result of a legal election, a process by which the world judges the integrity of a politician.
Secondly, how after acceding to the request of IDPADA-G could the Prime Ministers of two Caribbean countries – Jamaica and Barbados – known by more people in the world than even some rich, industrial states (I’m sure people in Afghanistan know there is a country named Jamaica but maybe not Belgium or Holland or Ireland), speak at the UN and world forums about democracy, the rule of law and free elections?
Thirdly, the PMs ignored IDPADA-G because they took their cue from the world. No government in the entire world, no international organization, no influential politician from any government anywhere in the world had accepted that Guyana’s dilemma was more than the 2020 election and concluded that the election results could be determined after negotiations were concluded between the PPP and PNC.
Fourthly, for the PMs, the election imbroglio was a rule of law issue and they were not prepared to just dismiss the rule of law and relegate the election results to a secondary problem. Fifthly, each of the five CARICOM PMs knew that they were dealing with deceitful leaders and were not prepared to be used by politicians who were prepared to manipulate them in a game of realpolitik. Alexander in particular irritated the emotions of the PMs. He had signed the letter to them on behalf of IDPADA –G arguing that Guyana was facing more exigent dangers than disagreement over election results but was in fact an election commissioner representing the contestant that had lost. Surely, a creeping cynicism had to visit the PMs.
More importantly, they must have asked themselves if elections were not the solution to Guyana elusive search for ethnic calm why then did the APNU+AFC accept a majority victory in 2011 and 2015 and why did they contest the 2020 poll? The obvious conclusion by those five visiting CARICOM PMs was that the loser was not prepared to lose and wanted CARICOM to assist them in retaining power.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)