ON Friday, I accompanied a ministerial team to Skeldon and Rose Hall in Berbice to ground with retrenched sugar workers, who will receive their severance pay on Tuesday.
Some 1,600 at Skeldon and 778 workers at the Rose Hall estates will be paid, most in full.My colleague Khemraj Ramjattan led another ministerial team to speak with sugar workers who were severed from the Enmore estate. At all three locations, there were the familiar PPP mobile pockets of permanent professional protesters. They had hoped to disrupt the meetings, but whilst some listened, others fizzled into a noisy rabble.
FREEDOM PROCESSION
The journey to Berbice reminded me of my political roots which were first planted in 1961, when I joined what was touted then as the freedom procession from Crabwood Creek. In my book, “Fragments from Memory,” I recounted how, as we drove through an African village called Union, gunshots rang out.
Several persons from my truck jumped off and headed towards a house from where the shots came. They quickly raced back, pursued by angry African villagers. I wrote: “It was the first time I encountered the danger of race-baiting and the passions that it could ignite. Some Indians in the procession had tied coconut branches and brooms to their vehicles, and were dragging them on the road.
On one car…an alligator was strapped to the windscreen.“It was evident that some supporters of Dr. Jagan’s PPP saw the ‘victory’ as not against the British, but against African people, who supported Forbes Burnham’s party, the PNC. The palm tree was the symbol of Burnham’s party, hence the scorn for the broom and palm tree branches.
Sadly, it occurred to me, early in my life, that my country was divided between two leaders and between two major races.”That was 57 years ago. The two leaders have since moved on, but the legacy of division remains. We have experienced over the years episodes of ethnic conflicts and race-based violence, which have been documented and about which we are reminded periodically.
POLITICAL SOLUTION
In response, the mass-based parties had shifted the debate, or at least tried to, from race and ethnicity to class and nationhood. That ideological shift had resulted in transient political alignment under the doctrine of “critical support” and a proposed programme for a “government of national unity”. In other words, the search has been for a political solution to the racial problem, which Dr. Jagan saw in a return to the 1950s “when there was racial and working class unity”.
While politicians and civil society had pulled, and continue to pull, strong punches over racial discrimination, the language was always measured, so as not to widen ethnic cleavages. It now appears that that approach has been discarded. It was replaced by crude race-baiting and race-hate, judging from the politics (or lack of it) of Bharrat Jagdeo, the new PPP leader. In recent months, Jagdeo has been stoking the embers of racial insecurity. On the eve of the 2015 elections, and shortly after the coalition took office, he has been spreading false claims of “ethnic cleansing” in Guyana.
Now, he has accused the six-party, multi-ethnic coalition with practising “economic genocide” against Guyanese of Indian descent. He has been saying that:-
• closure of four sugar estates was racially motivated and targeted only Indians;
• Indians were being forced to migrate;
• Indians would consequently be struck off the voters list for the 2020 elections, and
• The elections would be “rigged”.
RACE BAITING
This is the crudest race-baiting in recent times when, coinciding with the tough situation facing the sugar industry, Indo-Guyanese are being fed a daily diet of despair and desperation, supposedly by someone claiming to be their leader.
They have been asked to be prepared to wage “all forms of struggle” against a hypothetical, inchoate or future “illegitimate” government — presumably African-led and dominated. This is fearful stuff, even if it exists only in Jagdeo’s confused mind.The classical tenets of extra-parliamentary or “all forms of struggle” include strikes, sabotage, subversion; insurrection and armed struggles. Jagdeo could not be bothered about the social costs of waging “all forms of struggle” in Guyana.
He is gleefully using the “African jumbie” not only to scare Indo-Guyanese, but to huddle them to vote en bloc as an ethnic voting machine in 2020, should he be allowed to run for a third presidential term. I have opted to engage this issue because someone must expose and counter this misguided but wicked politics to stir racial hatred. In doing so, my mind raced back to 1961 and to that vignette of ethnic insensitivity that could have provoked a bloody backlash.
EMPTY RHETORIC
If what he has been saying is not so dangerous, it could easily be put aside as empty rhetoric. What warped mind would claim that the coalition is “racially motivated” after allocating almost $40 billion (2015-2018) as bailout packages to Guysuco to help mostly Indo-Guyanese sugar workers?
In contrast, the previous regime could be accused of suppressing sugar workers by providing $16 billion over four years (2011-2015) as bailout support. No one would believe that our coalition was “ethnically motivated” by permitting retention by Guysuco of some 11,000 workers, mostly Indo-Guyanese, for the estates at Albion,Blairmont and Uitvlugt.
MESSAGE OF HOPE
Already, over 900 workers (mostly Indo-Guyanese) who were retrenched, have been retained in certain positions to protect the assets of the industry, pending restructuring. Some 720 sugar workers have since been transferred from Rose Hall to the Albion and Blairmont estates. So, workers cannot succumb to despair or doom.At the Berbice meetings I carried this message of hope, and workers listened.
I also appealed for cooperation among government, opposition, unions and workers. We all know that the severance pay would keep families of the affected workers going for just a while, and unless they find alternative means to earn a living, the hurt will only be compounded. In this charged situation, it would be reckless to turn an industrial fiasco into a racial cauldron.
