Guyana's Post-Colonial Plight
Still beset by ethnic divisions 45 years after 
independence from Britain, the country's labor 
movement is now offering `bold leadership,' 
according to scholar Perry Mars
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
In These Times
August 13, 2010
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6309/guyanas_post-colonial_plight/

Most Americans are unfamiliar with Guyana and its
politics, despite the fact that the United States has
been influencing events in the small South American
nation for decades. Over the past half-century, both the
United States and Britain repeatedly intervened in order
to frustrate independence and anti-imperialist political
movements, including undermining Cheddi Jagan and his
Marxist-oriented People's Progressive Party (PPP).

In recent years, Guyanese politics have become
increasingly polarized and intertwined with ethnic
divisions, with the country's African-origin and East
Indian-origin peoples at odds. Today, those differences
are manifested in the two major political parties, with
the PPP largely Indo-Guyanese-based and the People's
National Congress (PNC) largely Afro-Guyanese-based. But
the ethnic differences also permeate other aspects of
Guyana.

After Guyanese bauxite workers went on strike in
November 2009 following failed negotiations over wage
increases, I decided to give Professor Perry Mars a call
to understand the conflict's origins. (The conflict,
between the Russian-owned Bauxite Company of Guyana
Incorporated and the Guyana Bauxite and General Workers
Union, remains unresolved.) In the course of our
discussion, it became clear that the politics of the
strike were directly related to Guyana's struggle for
independence from Britain and the post-colonial
political environment. It also became clear that the
masses never come out on top when political differences
are expressed through ethnic strife.

Originally from Guyana, Mars is currently a professor in
Wayne State University's Department of Africana Studies,
where he teaches his specialty, Caribbean politics and
culture. He is the author of Ideology and Change: The
Transformation of the Caribbean Left and co-author of
Caribbean Labor and Politics: Legacies of Cheddi Jagan
and Michael Manley.

Have Guyanese politics always been polarized on an
ethnic basis?

The origins of ethnic divisiveness in Guyana could be
traced to early colonialism with the importation of
forced slave labor from Africa and, subsequently, cheap
indentured labor from Portuguese Madeira, China, and
finally India to work on white-owned sugar plantations.
This divisiveness later became fundamental in several
ways, including ethnic competition for work on
plantations that drove down the price of labor to the
great dissatisfaction of Afro-Guyanese workers following
emancipation in 1838. Ethnic divisiveness became the
fault lines for future political mobilization,
competition and conflicts giving rise to serious ethnic-
political polarization throughout the country.

How did this ethnic contradiction emerge in the
political realm?

The source of ethnic-political polarization could be
traced to the 1950s with the dawning of electoral
democracy in the country. The debacle started when the
British took umbrage at the Marxist PPP's electoral
victory notwithstanding the best efforts of the colonial
authorities to upstage the party at the polls through
massive financing and support of right wing, pro-British
parties. Barely four months after the PPP victory in
1953, the British moved swiftly to suspend the
democratic constitution, dismiss the party from office,
incarcerate the key party leadership personnel, impose a
hand-picked interim government on the people, and
engineer a split in the party between what they
discerned as "extremists" and "moderates," which
materialized in 1955.

Although the split was initially along
ideological/factional lines (Marxists against so-called
"moderates"), the ethnic fault lines soon kicked in such
that subsequent democratic elections were polarized
along strict ethnic lines, principally between East
Indians in support of the Jaganite PPP and Afro-Guyanese
in support of a break-away faction (which eventually
became the PNC) led by Forbes Burnham. The most
polarized of the subsequent elections were in 1961 and
1964 - a period which witnessed serious and deadly
ethnic-political violence that further intensified with
material support to opposition political forces coming
from the British and the US via C.I.A. manipulations of
labor and political forces in the country.

Subsequently, ethnic polarization spread from the
polling booth to embrace the entire country when a
variety of ethnically integrated villages in the
countryside became emptied of one set of ethnic groups
or the other, creating thereby mostly homogenous ethnic
villages and communities throughout Guyana.

The 1964 national elections were eventually won by the
opposition Burnhamist [PNC] forces, which received
British and American material and political support. .
Jagan and the PPP were returned to power in the 1992
elections after some 28 years in the political
wilderness. But again, in 1992 and in all subsequent
elections up to 2006 Guyana saw steep ethnic-polarized
voting patterns.

What about Jagan's role in the ethnicization of Guyanese
politics?

Neither Burnham nor Jagan could escape culpability in
this ethnic degeneration of Guyana's politics; Burnham's
collaboration with the British against Jagan at that
critical historical point in time was very destructive
to the national efforts. But at the same time Jagan's
equal obsession with his supposed right to power - a
supposition born of what he regarded as his being
"cheated" of electoral victory every time he lost an
election - a supposition no doubt also based on his
belief in having a legitimate right to the East Indian
majority vote in the country-also explains his drift
toward ethnic-based and polarized politics in the
country. .

Jagan died in 1997, and the PPP and the government has
since been dominated by an essentially ethnic dominated
leadership that seemed to have totally distanced itself
from Jagan's pro-working class agenda. The productive
bases in both the sugar and mining (particularly
bauxite) industries, the main pillars of the Guyana
economy, are being dismantled in favor of privatized or
corporate interests. In the case of bauxite, foreign
private corporations with the government's backing have
not only significantly downsized the work force, but
have breached standard labor agreements, illegally fired
striking workers and de-recognized workers' unions.

How has this ethnic division played itself out within
the working-class movement, specifically, within the
union movement?

Much of Caribbean labor became highly politicized in the
Cold War context of having to fight continually on two
fronts: first to cut across ethnic and religious
boundaries; and second, to risk the incarceration of
leaders for the violation of laws against trespass and
picketing, which prevented union leaders from going into
workplaces to discuss workers grievances.

In colonial times, labor unions became closely allied
with political parties, beginning around the 1940s when
political parties first developed in the British
Caribbean. It is within this background context that we
begin to understand the potential for political and
ethnic divisiveness within the trade union movement in
Guyana today.

These ethnic contradictions escalated into violence,
correct?

Yes, the political violence of the 1960s brought a
dramatically new dimension to the degree of political-
ethnic divisiveness in light of CIA Cold War
interventions in Guyanese labor. The violence of the
period took on a distinctively ethnic/racial character
when groups of killers from both sides of the ethnic
divide unleashed a near-civil war situation on the
country. The CIA, with the help of the AFL-CIO in the
U.S., financed Guyana labor leaders deliberately to
foster and encourage this warfare with the objective of
ousting the PPP from power. The Guyana trade union
movement henceforth became split right down the middle
along ethnic cum political lines.

In sum, the history of the Guyana labor movement
reflects a parallel experience in relation to partisan
political developments in the country. The identical
experience with British colonial and U.S.
interventionist pressures leading to both ideological
and ethnic splits in the political and labor movements
have seriously devastated the labor and political
landscapes in Guyana today. In labor circles, some of
the main charges against the government include the
unfair treatment of bauxite workers; . the government's
approach to interventions in labor issues - particularly
strikes and workers benefits - the government's neglect
of Afro-Guyanese communities, which remain among the
poorest sections of the Guyanese society, and selective
ethnic bias and profiling by the state and security
forces in the fight against crime and civil/political
protest.

What progressive efforts have been undertaken to bridge
the ethnic divide between the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-
Guyanese populations?

Multi-ethnic collaboration or alliances in political or
labor movements in Guyana have been most difficult to
realize. Yet it is one of those problems that ought to
be resolved if Guyana is to get mileage out of political
and economic development. The central difficulty resides
in the fact that major political and social interests
(particularly the two main political parties) derive
material and tangible, though usually corrupt, benefits
from ethnic divisiveness and conflicts in the society.
At the same time, none of the culpable parties accept
that they are part of this problem. They often deny that
ethnic discrimination and friction applies to their
party. Each of the major parties claims to have resolved
ethnic conflicts and divisiveness in its midst, and in
the society only whenever it is in power. Hence the
problem is not seriously recognized by any government in
Guyana; always only by the opposition outside
government.

However, during their various stints in power both Jagan
and Burnham worked seriously to demonstrate their
interest in ethnic togetherness in the country. But
these earlier approaches failed to successfully bridge
the ethnic-political gap in Guyana because the Guyanese
masses did not buy into them, and therefore remained
divided. This political vacuum brought into play several
third parties whose raison d'être became the realization
of a more politically unified multi-racial Guyana.

The first of these parties was the United Force (UF),
which emerged in the 1960s as a right-wing pro-British
party led by a combination of Portuguese, Chinese, and
mixed-race elite leadership. And in the 1970s there
entered Walter Rodney and his party, the Working
People's Alliance (WPA), with a more determined
objective to bridge the ethnic and racial gaps in the
society, and in pursuit of a more humanistic socialist
vision for Guyana. However, the WPA in practice,
although represented by a multi-ethnic leadership cadre,
was unable to penetrate the steep ethnic polarization
that engulfed the country at the time. In 2006 a new
party, the Alliance for Change has surfaced, but has so
far failed to gain multi-racial support. Today, the idea
of a multi-ethnic politics for Guyana is lying on the
ropes and desperately needs revival.

So what is the current situation?

The current atmosphere is a highly tense conflict
situation determined by frequent imbalances between
levels of state control or repression on the one hand,
and levels of opposition, political dissent and
resistance on the other. The penchant for state
repressive responses to mass protest and dissent is
historically rooted in the very authoritarian forms of
colonial control, as evidenced by the arbitrary and
brutal interventions of colonial governors in the
suppression of political conflicts.

Burnham, for his part, took this repressive state
approach to further extremes by creating a new military
apparatus and army which was nonexistent in colonial
times and cultivating a thuggish paramilitary death
squad manned by the so-called "religious" grouping, the
"House of Israel." .

In the new millennium, however, things changed. A prison
breakout involving violent criminals in 2002 led to the
entrenchment of armed criminal gangs who declared
themselves "freedom fighters" for the black cause in an
Afro-Guyanese village called Buxton. A variety of
maneuvers by the new leaders of the post-Jagan PPP
government saw some of the most repressive forms of
state interventions in Guyana's history, including the
use of torture and the use of the military alongside
police forces.

These measures facilitated the emergence of a death
squad led by a drug lord to eliminate rival criminal
gangs in Buxton, contributing to a broader cycle of
violence. Within this repressive context, or perhaps in
response to it, a high volume of execution-styled
murders and massacres took place, some involving the
highest extremes of brutality.

So the situation as of 2010 could be described as a
tense stalemate with significant contentious rumblings
residing below the surface. The labor movement is again
experiencing much turmoil with several major strikes and
protests in both the mining (both gold and bauxite) and
sugar industries, as the economic hardships of
globalization take a toll on the workers.

The leadership structures within both major parties are
experiencing much division, discontent and disarray over
issues of policy direction. Among the native Amerindians
there are divisions over the potential impact of
government policies on their communities, particularly
involving the issues of climate change and land
distribution. Among government leadership circles there
are serious pressures to respond to public and
international charges of corruption and collusion with
the drug barons.

Media stories I have seen seem to imply that the
Guyanese state is unraveling.

The country has not reached the stage of being either a
fascist or a failed state. Rather, Guyana could best be
defined as a fragile state that is very nervous about
its own survival and sovereignty in a hostile and
hazardous domestic and international terrain. At the
same time, it is a situation whereby the political
legitimacy of the state and regime is seriously
challenged or called into question.

What do you see as possibilities for the future?

The continuous and often violent political and ethnic
conflict over the years since the 1960s, particularly
since the post-Burnham/Jagan era, has already spawned a
crisis of democratic politics and so-called "good
governance" in the country. Yet more troubling for the
country in the post-Buxton era is the continuing
anarchistic-criminalized armed violence among youths in
a multiplicity of poor communities, in confrontation
with the military impunity (and shoot-to-kill-suspects
mentality) cultivated by the armed forces and the state.

Equally disturbing is the emergence of what could be
described as a conflict economy in which both criminal
and legitimate commercial and business interests emerge
and coalesce, and which benefit from the deadly
conflicts that feed into the drug trade, money
laundering, gun-running, and smuggling including
trafficking in people.

Is there any light at the end of this bleak tunnel? A
few possible optimistic scenarios seem to be unfolding.
The first glimpse of hope resides within the very bosom
of both major parties. The existing leadership
challenges and dissent within both PPP and PNC camps
threw up some very capable individuals who would seem to
be outside the corruption net, tend to be relatively
independent and universal in outlook, and seem to be
seriously interested in bridging the ethnic divide,
favoring collaboration across ethnic lines for the good
of the country as a whole.

But perhaps the most encouraging development, in terms
of lifting Guyana out of its leadership doldrums, is
what has been happening within the Guyana labor
movement. Here we see stirrings of visionary and bold
leadership. The PPP-affiliated sugar workers union
(GAWU), which is fighting for better wages and working
conditions against the PPP-controlled sugar company,
came out in April 2010 in open support for the Afro-
Guyanese bauxite workers in their strike and struggle
against a foreign union-busting corporation which is
apparently protected by the PPP government.

Here we see a ray of hope for the future, particularly
if inter-ethnic collaboration and cooperation is
realized at the working-class organizational levels as a
precursor to stimulating similar developments at the
political party and government levels, and eventually
reaching all sections of the Guyanese society. In this
respect, GAWU would seem to be upholding Jagan's strong
pro-working class objectives as against both state and
global interventionist policies, which work against
workers' interests, rights and solidarity.

But whatever future group or party emerges as the
popularly and democratically accepted group to govern
Guyana, a totally new political and social agenda
focusing on shared development needs to be pursued.
Official statistics indicate that the poverty rate
varies along ethnic lines, with 87 percent and 43
percent of Amerindians and Afro-Guyanese, respectively,
as compared with 33 percent of East Indians, living
below the poverty line. Shared development - by which I
mean the crafting of deliberate policy to [help] poorer
communities and disadvantaged groups - will mean the
definitive corrective to this imbalance.

_____________________________________________

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