Friday Musings
THE late United States President John F. Kennedy was among world leaders I admired in my high school days.
I vividly remember his appeal to Americans — “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” — which so stirred the nationalist fervour in me that I wrote in down and pasted it on a wall at home. President Kennedy had an amazing appeal around the world; and for me, he was right there alongside the late Dr. Martin Luther King, that iconic fighter for civil rights for Black Americans.
I remember being among those shocked to the core when President Kennedy was assassinated and I recall seeing a grown man in my village openly crying at the news of the killing of another man he had never seen.
Such was the appeal of Mr. Kennedy across the world that he moved people far beyond his homeland and I was among those caught in the fascination.
But in the years since high school, the charisma of President Kennedy has dimmed for me as I became more and more aware of the extent of the role he and his administration had in collaborating with the British colonial power to overthrow a duly-elected government in Guyana.
A Kennedy adviser, Arthur M. Schlesinger, is among those who have recounted the extent to which Kennedy went to pressure the British into ensuring that the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan and his People’s Progressive Party (PPP) were removed from power in the early 1960s so that they would not lead the country into independence.
Against advice that Dr. Jagan was a much better option than the late President Forbes Burnham and his People’s National Congress (PNC), Kennedy was determined to get rid of Jagan and his government because he feared the spread of communism in this part of the world.
Several other books since then have chronicled the interventions by the Americans, through the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies, with the British, to undermine democracy in Guyana.
But the BBC has put it all together, based on several recently-released documents, in a gripping 28-minute radio documentary broadcast in London on Monday.
A synopsis by the BBC on the documentary says Mike Thomson investigates how Britain covertly manipulated the democratic process in British Guiana in the run up to its independence in 1966.
“Mike discovers new documents which show that they deliberately scuppered the outcome of their own conference organised to determine the country’s future.
“On the face of it, the conference, held in London in October 1963, was designed to confirm the constitutional future for what was then British Guiana. Publicly Britain encouraged the country’s Prime Minister Dr Cheddi Jagan – who had been fairly elected in 1961 – and the leader of the opposition Linden Forbes Burnham to agree terms for independence. However, behind the scenes, the documents reveal that the British were working to a different outcome – to ensure that agreement was never reached.
“The British, under pressure from the Kennedy administration which feared Dr Jagan’s Marxist leanings, were determined that he would not lead the country to independence. To this end, they suggested a form of proportional representation in forthcoming elections, knowing full well that Dr Jagan would not agree to these terms as they would favour his rival. When the conference ended in deadlock as the British hoped it would, PR was duly implemented and the following year Dr Jagan was ousted much to the relief of the super powers.
“Mike talks to historians, eye witnesses and Guyanese commentators today to discover how democracy itself was destroyed in British Guiana and the legacy of these shady days in today’s modern Guyana.” (The link to the documentary is http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00tj74v)
It’s an account that further opens the doors on the dark machinations worked out and implemented from the corridors of power in Washington and London to stop the people of this country from freely pursuing their own course; and it’s hard not to feel a deep sense of betrayal at this ugly chapter in this country’s history.
Because of those dark deeds, it took almost 30 years before Guyana was able to restore democracy, ironically with the help of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and others in the western world.
There has been a lot of water under the bridge since then, and Guyana has much to thank the Americans and British for — but it pays to know and heed the lessons of history.