I am still reeling from the chagrin that pierced my soul when Dr. Bertrand Ramcharran emailed me to ask that I do not criticise Mike Mc Cormack, the forever head of the Guyana Human Rights Association because McCormack made his contribution in the seventies when Burnham was in full swing.

I expected better from a man who specialised in international law and was acting High Commissioner for Human Rights at the UN. What was he actually saying? I was very much in the thick of things fighting against the Burnham dictatorship, and so were hundreds like me who rejoined the fight in 2020 to prevent the coming of a new Burnhamite permanency.

If my arithmetic is correct, 2020 is 28 years after our first free and fair election in 1992. So many of us were there to see the legal results in 1992, and we were still there in 2020 to fight for the legal results of the national elections which if Guyana had been denied it, we would have had a return of power permanency under Mr. David Granger, a self-proclaimed admirer of Forbes Burnham.

Mike Mc Cormack was there in the seventies but he chose silence in March 2020, so what was Dr. Ramcharran trying to tell me? What is my point? It is that after 58 years of Independence, this country has to be on its guard always because danger lurks always and danger has been lurking since the Caribbean intervened on May 2 in 1964 to seek to stop the violence in Guyana.

On May 2, 1964, Premier Cheddi Jagan requested Prime Minister, Eric Williams of Trinidad to use his office to bring the PPP, PNC and United Force into discussion to restore stability to British Guiana. From May 1964 to May 2020 is 56 years. After 56 years, Guyana was seeing yet again the intervention of the Caribbean to prevent disaster.

This time, the energy was not from our sister country of Trinidad but Barbados with PM, Mia Mottley deeply concerned and she came and helped to save the day. But interestingly in 1964, PM Williams feared that the situation in British Guiana did not look good. Some 56 years after Williams expressed that sentiment, another Trinidadian Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Rowley, in Guyana with other CARICOM Heads, said that he feared the situation would not end well.

It didn’t end well when PM Williams made his efforts on May 3, 1964. On May 24, 1964, Guyana saw its worst tragedy in the country’s entire history when the entire Indian population of Wismar, in Mackenzie, now known as Linden (Burnham named the town after him) was displaced through systemic acts of violence that included arson, injuries, rapes and murder.

It is referred to by scholars as the Wismar massacre. Two Indian rights intellectuals – Baytoram Ramharack and Ravi Dev – argue that it was not a massacre but ethnic cleansing. I was trained in history when I first entered UG, so I should always be respectful to history when I write about the past. The violence of Wismar in May stretched in July when the ferry named the Sun Chapman exploded and 43 persons, all of African descent, died.

So it didn’t end well in 1964 when the Caribbean tried to help Guyana. It ended well 56 years after with yet another Caribbean peace mission. From Eric Williams to Mia Mottley, it has been a long journey for Guyana. As the nation observed 58 years of Independence, we must never forget March 2020.

But we must also include other tragedies in those 56 years of reflections. These disasters were not on the scale of the Wismar massacre and the Sun Chapman in 1964 but they were low moments from Independence 1966 that riveted the collective psyche of this nation. We have to include them as we move toward 60 years of Independence in 2026.

The list is long and they include rigged elections of 1968, 1973, 1978 rigged referendum, 1980, 1985, post-election violence, 1992, 1997, and 2001. But for me, the two events that should be on our list after Wismar and Sun Chapman is the anti-Indian violence 2002-2006 in Buxton and the March to July conspiracies to reclaim the permanency of Burnhamite power.

Buxton was a vicious anti-Indian attempt to overthrow the Guyana Government. It was a nihilistic descent into senseless murder of people simply because of their ethnicity. It will remain the highpoint of my long journalistic career.
So in two years’ time, one guesses that the 60th anniversary celebration should be an extravaganza to behold. But we have the November 2025 general elections coming up. Let us make sure there is no need for Caribbean intervention once again.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.