We need a nation conversation

Posted September 11th. 2004 - by Eusi Kwayana.

It is fortunate that there are people like President Carter who are prepared to travel around the world and do for political leaders what they have failed to do for their own countries. President Carter has better notes and memory than they.

During last year a friend sent me a paper which reported Mr Carter as saying that Guyana was the most divided or polarised country he had ever visited.

Some of us in the WPA worked closely with Dr Robert Pastor during the negotiations for a balanced elections commission before the 1992 general elections. Yet when Mr Carroll of the Carter Center in Guyana called me some few years ago at Rodney House, WPA headquarters, and said he wanted to discuss the forthcoming election with me, I wondered if nothing had penetrated. I was so appalled that I told him that I had better things to do.

It seemed that in 1992 and for some years after, President Carter saw the destinies of Guyana as resting in the hands of the majority leader, with the leader of the opposition playing a supportive role. Jagan was serious when he said that he wanted to end the ethnic polarization. Jagan had as much Guyanese goodwill as a PPP leader will ever have, and as much as a PNC leader will ever have, since as I have said before, both sides were involved - as I was - in the collapse of the unity which was forged from 1947 to 1955 and 1957.

The Carter Center and many others did not recognise what I had been eccentric enough to say in the 1960s, that although everyone but a few wished to see 'One Guyana,' yet from the time of the split of the PPP in 1955, the great majority of the population became separately organised politically into parties which became increasingly ethnic.

Two things were happening. Hindus and Muslims from India have serious grievances, but their great strength was that they were never severed from their ethnic religion or spiritual sources.

They chose to be severed from their land, but they were able to build over time better and better temples and mosques and keep their holy books and languages.

The substitute faiths of the Africans, mainly the Christian churches, were European ethnic churches, not African. There was a scattering of African Muslims, Seedees, appearing like Douglas.

The rise of Ethiopia (1896), and more particularly of India (1947) and later of Ghana (1957), and the resulting breakdown of the world empires kindled and rekindled sparks of nationalism connected with the hope of redeeming the race. Apart from dominating and disrespecting populations, the imperialists also let it be known that they saw us as an inferior breed that had to be redeemed race by race, without hostility to others. Rather, rivalry between Africans and Indians was being overcome as they combined to resist common oppression and almost equal dehumanisation.

My own position and that of Martin Carter was that we should not fight to win a majority in 1953 because of the frail nature of the inter-racial unity and other weaknesses which needed further nurturing. On hindsight I can see that we did not understand imperialism. The unity frightened them because Europeans were in a minority; division gave them more leverage.

I know that my views of the quality of the unity are and were not politically correct. Let me say that I learned about race not as a professional to whom people came with petitions, but as one on the ground who was present as people interacted freely with one another.

To repeat some very unpopular remarks, after 1955 and with the influences of party ambition and racial self-redemption our people were in some ways - especially in relation to control of the state - pre-nations. And it was out of that dual pre-nation state that the logic of power-sharing came to be proclaimed.

The violence of the sixties was the expression of that pre-nation ambition, pushed by the will to dominate rather than be dominated.

After the sixties, a number of us, including Ascrians and Indians like Ogunseye and Josh Ramsammy (Ratoon), Moses Bhagwan and Sase Omo, went around with a community race commission interviewing Indian and African communities and finding a will to start again. The project of a composite class and nation.

The unique political and human incarnation, Walter Rodney, was able to cut through ideological trappings and approach the soul of the people's aspirations. Largely under his inspiration, a remarkable thing was taking place. There is, of course, no photograph of it as evidence, but the people began to conceive of a new kind of state, offering justice, education, fairness, freedom, working people's progress and equality and friendly relations among various races, with all able to organise.

The hope of ethnic reconciliation remained in the minds of wide cross sections of the people after Rodney was assassinated. It began to come under direct pressure when fair and free elections appeared on the agenda. Mr Frederick Kissoon has claimed that the WPA, GHRA and Red Thread, three different types of organisations, somehow contributed to the worsening of race relations. Regarding Red Thread, whose public activity I have followed, opinions like this amount to abuse.

The WPA's continuing influence on the seriously divided society was helpful to the extent that the party was able to get a unanimous vote in the National Assembly in 1989 for a "National Dialogue of... all social forces."

President Carter's five-point proposals or prescriptions in his press statement come after many, many years of leaving things to the two major parties, taking a lot for granted, and, as he says himself, pinning trust in individuals at the top, who think they have a lot to lose, or with party paramountcy to defend.

Judging from his statement alone, it would seem that President Carter is unaware of the political nature or the true nature of the violence which brought the polarisation and mistrust to its highest levels, even surpassing the levels reached in the sixties. The violence was thankfully confined to a limited space but the ideas it generated were not. The party that at least condoned the outbreak of the violence was outdone only by the fact that the retaliating party tarnished organs of the state and engaged mercenaries in its state organs in its retaliation. They must share the honours for brutality and contempt for life until some impartial enquiry some day investigates and reports.

The reference to constituencies for the next elections shows the international mediator's partial grasp of the problem. It is not elections and their technology and framework that are the problem, but their outcome - their results. The results are a problem because of the mindset of voters going to an election. The mindset is a result of the conquest, enslavement and indenture, and the colonial process.

At this point there is little those who caused it can do about it. The solution rests with our history, but history will not solve it without our motion. A Constitution Reform Commission (CRC) member for religion, Mr McDoom, suggested to the commission an electoral system which did not get the consideration it deserved. It is the only system I have heard of that tackles our culture and is worthy of serious consideration. That system will be a good test of whether we have the strength to start on a new road. It will also be a sound basis for forms of executive power-sharing of a democratic nature. The view of government and the state as a plum - as a prize or reward for "sacrifice and struggle" - has deprived millions in the ex-colonies of the right to recognition. Were we not told once that the exclusive PPP Ogle housing scheme, taken from GUYSUCO was a fitting reward for those who struggled for their supposed ideals? While we are about it, there must be means of empowering women, not over anyone but over their lives.

The great need though, is more challenging. It is not a question of some Africans having "good Indian friends" and Indians having "good African friends." It is a case of almost the whole group of one having fear and suspicion and mistrust of almost the whole group of the other. We need a nation conversation. Dr Kirton and others have attempted it among elites. Dr Seecoomar has written a book about needs and problem-solving workshops.

Justice will be an even greater challenge.