Dictators seize your freedom
Kaieteur News – In 1978, a film was released by United Artistes. The Wild Geese were not very popular at the box office but given that it was a form of action movie, it did fairly well to turn a small profit and get a sequel.
The plot was pretty straightforward. It was about a group of British military officers hired to rescue a deposed African leader held captive by a dictator.
At the time, Walter Rodney and the Workers’ Alliance were presenting the first real challenge to Forbes Burnham’s seamless rule at the time at the age of four. The very idea of a Guyanese being exposed to a harmless film about songs seeking a political rescue mission was sufficient to drive fear into the government. It did, and so much so, that Burnham banned the film from Guyana.
One of the excuses of the ban was that it portrayed scenes of apartheid South Africa. But anyone who has seen the film would underestimate the significance of this reason; the real fear was to deny pay troops from being used for political cause. That exact thought drove fear into the hearts of a Guyanese dictator.
Dictators are so insecure that they even want to control your private lives. This was clearly the case in Guyana during the reign of the Forbes Burnham desk which not only dictated what you should eat, what you should wear and how you should live, but also which films you are allowed to view in the local cinemas.
Burnham decided what you could and could not do. He decided what foods you could eat, limiting a wide range of items, restrictions that were virtual bans.
He decided that some school children had to wear Sanata cotton and attend Mass Games. His and his Ministers’ photographs adorned the covers of exercise books. University students were required to serve a one-year National Service, including a period in a hinterland encampment where they were exposed to military training and hard labor in the infertile cotton and pulp fields. There were reports of women being sexually abused.
Burnham limited your employment options. State enterprises controlled 80 percent of the economy and so most people worked for the State. But a party card was an automatic passport for a job. So to get a job, your political beliefs had to sync with the belief of the ruling party.
And Burnham assured them they were. Workers were subjected to political indoctrination. They were required to attend ideological training programs. For Republic Day observances, workers were forced, sometime under the threat of dismissal, to march in what became known as the People’s Parade. Many did so to avoid joining the ranks of the more than 30,000 who had been retrenched. To avoid redundancy, many became reluctant to clean drains and do hard work at Plantation Hope, while Burnham galloped around, as a horse supervisor, sometimes with one of his superiors.
Women avoided eye contact with Burnham. It was rumored that he used to direct his guards to bring some women to entertain him at the Residence, his official office. During the Rodney Commission of Inquiry, it was revealed that one of the reasons why the African Cultural Relations Association with Independent Africa (ASCRIA) collapsed with Burnham was because of his treatment of women.
Freedom of the press was dead. The only non-government publications were a small weekly religious newspaper, the Mirror newspaper, which was affiliated with the ruling PPP of the ruling party, the National People’s Congress. News was tightly controlled including by some who would no longer believe you were always the paradigms of freedom.
A very military society developed. The PNC ruling had its own gifts, including recruits from the House of Israel. And spies were everywhere. You were subject to safety questioning even if you were just a fellow Opposition member, as one former colleague Rupert Roopnarine discovered when he stopped one day to talk to him on the way.
Freedom had evaporated. It was in that time that the Death Squad, a notorious group within the Guyana Police Force, emerged. Human Rights Watch reports during that time referred to extra-judicial killings. In one case, a woman was shot dead by a Minister’s bodyguard when she visited a government office. Gifts were dropped on strike workers and political meetings were broken down. Opposition political activists, especially those of the Workers’ Alliance, lived under constant harassment and fear.
The woes of political dictatorship in Guyana are long and comprehensive. The period of oppression and suffering, which took place, has not been forgotten. And that is why, when there was a diabolical plan to return Guyana to a political dictatorship, that memory kicked in.
The Guyanese people said no to return to democracy. They were not interested in tasting that bitter harvest. They refused the rigging. They must now reject the riggers.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)