Dear Editor,
From October 5, 1992, and the present, many Guyanese are only vaguely familiar with the story about October 5,1992, its antecedents and that it was Cheddi Jagan who was the central figure at the time and up to his passing as President in March 1997.
Many nowadays may recognize the value of free and fair elections and why democracy matters, but few can recall the details and even fewer would recognize that October 5th and the events that followed thereafter are central to our country’s contemporary political history.
Evidential and scientifically-based poll-findings are rarities in Guyana. Take for example the question; how many young people in Guyana have an interest in politics and know about Cheddi Jagan and the role he played in the struggle for national unity, our country’s independence, the protection and maintenance of Guyana’s territorial integrity and national sovereignty and a foreign policy based on peaceful co-existence, the right of nations to self-determination, mutual respect and rule of international law.
Surely, these are historical facts and principles we must live by and even take to our graves. The story about Jagan’s fight for Guyana’s freedom documented in ‘The West on Trial’ must be told over and over again to each and every generation just as the epic stories about Buddha in the Jatakas, about Ram in the Ramayana, about Jesus in the Bible and about Mohammed in the Quran. In each of them, there are stories about mortals and immortals that must never stop being told.
The tenuous grasp of the meaning and significance of Jagan’s contribution to the realization of October 5th is regrettable if unsurprising, given that only thirty-four years have passed, since that epochal event and more-so, since Jagan’s call for a New Global Human Order was made to help deconstruct the deplorable state of affairs prevailing in the world today.
To visualise the story behind October 5th, one would have to create an interactive time-lapse map of Jagan’s and the PPP’s years of struggle for Guyana’s freedom, independence, and democracy, interrupted only by utopian, unrealistic and inapplicable economic and social experimentations, persistent rigged elections and dictatorial rule that delayed Guyana’s ability to carve out for itself what should have been a progressive and un-interrupted march towards peace and social progress. Instead, we lost many valuable years.
In retrospect, it was perhaps destined for us as a nation to pass through the chequered stages of our nation’s political history.
But in the final analysis, it is perhaps, better for us to be faithful to the past in which Jagan stood out as the primus inter pares in the pro-democracy struggles and the country’s political life steeled in the conviction that an informed populace is essential to democracy.
Good history makes for good citizenry. A history that glosses over the real hero and heroes of the struggle for freedom, independence and national democracy is partial, in both senses of the word. It misleads people about the past and misinforms their debates about the present.
While continuing on the current path characterized by an impressive but transformative developmental trajectory, and, as we chart a course for the future, we Guyanese would do well to put our country back on the map as one that stands in firm solidarity with the oppressed and suffering peoples of the world especially those of Cuba, Haiti and Palestine.
As Jagan had unforgettably pointed out; “In our international relations, we should maintain a balance between conformity and transformation. While we are under pressure to conform from external forces which have their own agendas, at the same time, we have our own ideas and principles based on a well thought out vision of a world order in which small developing states like Guyana will have a clearly defined place and role in the sun.”
Yours faithfully,
Clement J. Rohee
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