‘Western unity and bipartisanship’

Oct 28, 2024 Letters

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Dear Editor

This presentation is largely the outcome of two related recent events. A few weeks ago, I received a podcast in which a supporter of the Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) was calling upon what appeared to be his largely Indian Guyanese audience to support former president Donald Trump and the Republican party at the upcoming election in the United States of America (USA). According to him, the Trump administration that ended in 2020 was responsible for protecting democracy during Guyana’s national elections of the same year, so a vote for Trump would ensure that democracy flourishes in Guyana!

Then, a few days ago the national local radio carried an interview with a spokesperson of the Carter Centre who stated that she expected her organisation to receive an invitation from the government to observe the 2025 elections in Guyana. Free and fair elections, she said, are essential to democratic legitimacy and Guyana has a lot to do if its people are to properly benefit from its recently acquired wealth and effectively deal with its festering ethnic difficulties.

On my assessment, the PPP’s propagandist could not be very effective for it could not have been lost on his audience that Mr. Trump has been found guilty of attempting to subvert the democracy he swore to protect.  Indeed, the propagandist was misleading his audience as the oligarchs in the PPP favour Mr. Trump not because of his passion for democracy but the opposite: his apparent affection for autocracy.

But more important for this essay, if the propagandist had paid greater attention to what took place in Guyana during the 2020 elections, he could not have failed to notice that the US Democratic Party-orientated Carter Centre, the leading American international election observer body with a lengthy – if somewhat controversial – relationship with Guyana, was arguably more than the US embassy in Guyana leading the charge that removed the APNU+AFC coalition from government in 2020.  As such, the 2020 effort was a bipartisan affair: a fact that the political elite in Guyana, particularly those in the opposition, do not appear to adequately factor into their assessments.

This is not unusual, and this column has argued that finding solutions to the political problems of countries rooted in ethnic conflict such as Guyana, Cyprus, Sri Lanka, Fiji and Northern Ireland is usually a political elite arrangement and consensus is normally difficult to achieve.  When a country becomes involved in sensitive geopolitical relations, as Guyana was during the period of communist containment, finding a solution is even more protracted.  To be effective; united alliance and national bipartisan approaches that projects greater international pressure and mitigates the negative effects of election cycles, is critical.

Thus, when after the ‘return to democracy’ in Guyana in 1992, the country began to exhibit its destructive bicommunal nature, during the 10th anniversary celebration of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in 2008, the British government financed the attendance of a Guyanese parliamentary delegation to view how governance might be more productively arranged in Guyana.   During the recent Brexit disputes that threatened the GFA, one Democratic Party representative said, ‘This is a highly partisan time in American politics, and there are very few issues, precious few, that are truly bipartisan. Defence of the Good Friday Agreement and preserving peace on the island of Ireland is one of those few. … And it’s not just among elected officials. If you were to survey foreign policy and national security experts, … you would find the same consensus (Future Notes, VV 19/06/2022).

There exists a substantial body of opinion in Guyana (to which I adhere) that holds that for whatever reason, the very elections at which we are told Trump protected democracy were manipulated in favour of the PPP with the support of the Western international community.  Manipulation of elections in Guyana goes way back to the colonial period. It may have stopped for a short period after 1992 but has continued since then. It is not surprising, therefore, that a recent study by the International Republican Institute found that only 22% of the voting population in Guyana is certain that contemporary governments are representative of the will of the people.

For me, the ‘why’ question has not been adequately answered, and given the enthusiastic involvement of the Carter Centre, I believe that at least a part of the answer has to do with how democratic politics was developing in Guyana.  As a result of the post 1992 disturbances, as noted, in 2008 the British invited a Guyana parliamentary delegation to the 10^th anniversary activities of the GFA. In 2004, former President Jimmy Carter left Guyana saying that the PPP intends to take “full advantage of the ancient ‘winner take all’ political system and is unwilling to ‘share political authority with other parties,’” as democratic governance in Guyana requires.

Jimmy Carter returned for the 2015 elections during the campaign for which the APNU+AFC Coalition promised that if it won government, within weeks it would introduce a more inclusive shared-governance arrangement. It won and essentially reneged on its promise. Instead, the final report of the European Union Election Observation Mission, suggested that under Coalition rule the elections list was further substantially bloated!

‘Over the years, there had been concerns about the large increases in the number of registered voters between elections.’  ‘The 2020 OLE contained 660,998 names, well above the estimated resident adult population of half a million. It represents a 15.8 percent rise since 2015 with sizeable regional variations (e.g. Regions 1, 9, 10–30%, 26% and 16% respectively) the significance of which is difficult to assess in the absence of demographic projections following the 2012 census.’

Communism is no longer a threat; there is no democratic deficit to repay, as was the case with the PPP in 1992 and the country began to exhibit the usual destructive traits of an ethnically divided society. The only alternative to inclusive democratic governance are various levels of autocracy; the Coalition was not going to be allowed to entrench itself in government and Charrandass Persaud was brought into play.

Note that it was under the Trump administration that the USAID was contracted to report on Guyana, and it recommended the establishment of more inclusive governance arrangements. Immediately upon coming to government in 2021, the current, Joe Biden administration made similar requests and is still pressuring the PPP/C government to dismantle the winner-takes-all system.

As its counterparts were to the very end of the negotiations that established the GFA, the political elite in Guyana are recalcitrant.  Indeed, in the case of Northern Ireland, the negotiating principle of ‘sufficient consensus,’ allowed parties to be against a part while still voting for the passage of the proposal, and this may have allowed one of the staunchest opponents of the GFA, the Rev. Ian Paisley, to claim that he would continue to oppose the GFA from within! After decades of underdevelopment and severe political disassociation, let’s hope that all those who care for progress, equity and peace in Guyana can successfully nudge the political elites in the right direction.

Sincerely

Dr. Henry Jeffrey

 

 

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• APNU+AFC, Assessments, essential, Guyana, organisation, People's Progressive Party

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