Someone must knock

Feb 19, 2026 News, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – After the 1997 elections, Guyana trembled on the edge of fracture. It was not the police or diplomats that first steadied the ground, but the so-called “three wise men”—regional elders who helped broker what became known as the Herdmanston Accord. They were all men who were knighted – Sir Shridath Ramphal, Sir Alister McIntyre and Sir Henry Forde. All there, now like Jessie Jackson, have passed to the Great Beyond. It was Yesu Persaud, a non-political actor – who instigated their involvement.

The ‘three wise men’ operated in the space between protest and paralysis, reminding Guyana’s political actors that dialogue is not a concession but a necessity. The Hermanston Accord did not solve every grievance, but it lowered the temperature enough to preserve the republic.

These men, like Jessie Jackson, did so repeatedly during his lifetime, popularised private diplomacy. Private diplomacy is the art of conducting foreign policy without portfolio, embassy, or flag. It is diplomacy in shirtsleeves. It is the conversation held outside the chandeliered rooms of state. It is not undertaken by governments but by individuals who carry no seal of office other than their own reputation. Sometimes it is called Track II diplomacy; sometimes it is dismissed as freelance meddling. At its best it is moral suasion operating where official power has stalled. In the hands of the late Reverend Jesse Jackson, it became an improvised bridge across political ravines too deep for bureaucracies to cross.

Jessie Jackson, who died this past week understood that politics is conducted by human beings before it is recorded by institutions. Where governments see protocol, the private politician sees opportunity; where foreign ministries issue communiqués, the private envoy boards a plane. The state speaks in paragraphs; the private citizen speaks in sentences. And sometimes the shorter speech prevails.

Consider 1984, when a U.S. Navy pilot, Lieutenant Robert Goodman, sat in Syrian custody after his plane was shot down over Lebanon. The Reagan administration maintained its posture; Syria maintained its leverage. Into the stalemate stepped Jessie Jackson, traveling to Damascus not as an accredited envoy but as a minister of conscience. He returned with Goodman. Critics muttered about grandstanding; the pilot came home. That same year, Jackson made his way to Cuba, engaging Fidel Castro at a time when Washington preferred megaphones to conversation. He secured the release of political prisoners and American detainees. The State Department frowned at the breach of etiquette. Families welcomed their sons. In 1990, as Saddam Hussein gathered hostages in the anxious hours before the Gulf War, Jackson again ventured where diplomats feared to tread. Meeting Iraqi officials—including Hussein himself—he negotiated the release of Americans and other foreign nationals. The gesture did prevent war, but it rescued individuals from its antechamber.

Nearly a decade later, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, three American servicemen found themselves in Serbian custody. Official relations were frozen solid. Jackson traveled to Belgrade and met Slobodan Milošević. The soldiers were released. The Pentagon had its strategy; Jackson had his handshake. One might add his involvement in Lebanon during the era of hijackings, or his later conversations with Hugo Chávez in Venezuela—each instance an exercise in the same conviction: that access, however informal, can produce outcomes unreachable by formal means. He carried no treaty in his briefcase, only the currency of trust accumulated through decades of civil rights struggle. He made diplomacy personal again.

What Jackson popularised was not merely the tactic but the legitimacy of private diplomacy. He demonstrated that moral authority can sometimes purchase what military authority cannot. A president cannot easily sit down with an adversary without seeming to confer recognition; a private citizen can do so and call it dialogue. The very absence of office becomes an advantage.

There are risks, of course. The freelance envoy can be manipulated, photographed, or misled. He can complicate delicate negotiations or provide propaganda to unsavory regimes. But the alternative—refusing all unofficial contact—assumes that states are the only custodians of peace. History suggests otherwise. That is the enduring utility of private diplomacy. It thrives in the spaces where official language has hardened into slogans. It relies on the proposition that conversation is not capitulation. In an age when governments conduct their quarrels on social media and mistake indignation for strategy, the quiet visit and the unpublicised meeting retain their value. Jackson’s genius lay in recognising that the world’s doors are seldom locked from the inside. Someone must knock. And sometimes the knock cannot come from a government crest but from a familiar human face. His missions were controversial because they exposed an uncomfortable truth: that power does not reside exclusively in office. It can reside in reputation, in courage, in the willingness to cross a line drawn in red ink and ask for the release of a prisoner.

Public diplomacy will always have its place. Nations require embassies, treaties, and the choreography of state. But there will also always be moments when official channels are clogged by pride or policy. In those moments, the private diplomat—armed with no authority except moral capital—can remind adversaries that politics is still a human enterprise. Jesse Jackson did not abolish conflict, nor did he replace the State Department. What he did was expand the repertoire of peacemaking. He showed that beyond the marble halls of government lies another forum where persuasion, empathy, and persistence can operate. He will be long be remembered.

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

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• 1997 elections, Herdmanston Accord, Peeping Tom, regional elders, Sir Alister McIntyre, Sir Shridath Ramphal

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