Just before the Nov 2011 General Elections, there was a conclave of five academics of Guyanese origin at Florida International University (FIU), to discuss aspects of “Guyanese Strategic Culture”; which was synthesised into a report by Dr Ivelaw Griffith and submitted to the US Southern Command.
Griffith was appointed VC of UG in June 2016. In the decade since that report, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge; which demands that our strategic culture be re-evaluated in light of the pertinent changes, and, not unrelatedly, to counter the distortions introduced by Griffith, who was Chairman of the YSM when David Granger was working his way up the local military hierarchy.
Definitions of “Strategic Culture” are legion, but the conceptualizer of the tool, which can be used to analyze the behaviour of states in the international arena, saw it as the “sum total of ideals, conditional emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behaviour that members of the national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation, and share with each other with regard to…strategy.”
Basically, it integrates the “emotionality” of states – national pride and prestige – and the “egoism of states” (the pursuit of national interests).
For heuristic purposes, Griffith broke the concept down to four elements – 1: origins, 2: “keepers”, 3: challenges and 4: continuity and change. In terms of “origins”, these were earliest bequeathed by colonial rule, that stressed an authoritarian political culture undergirded by force. The “keepers” after 1957 and into the present are the PPP, PNC and the Disciplined Forces.
The PNC rule between 1964 and 1992 was supported up to 1989 by the strategic concerns of the US to “not have another Cuba in the hemisphere”, which made them ignore their own strategic cultural imperatives of supporting democracy and the rule of law. By 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, that concern had disappeared, and the US signalled it would not turn a blind eye to the PNC’s mockery of democracy by rigging elections and creating a dictatorship. The free and fair elections of 1992 were presaged by massive economic changes away from Burnham’s co-operative socialist adventurism, demanded by the IMF as conditionalities for loans to bail out the bankrupt country.
The PNC, which had increased the Disciplined Forces exponentially with their supporters, remained steeped in authoritarianism and anti-democratic practices, and refused to accept the legitimacy of the PPP Government. They launched a war of attrition that widened the racial/ethnic cleavages in the society and destabilised the integrity of the state as protests segued after the 1997 elections into ever-escalating violence.
This took an ethnic turn, and only ended in 2008, when the “freedom fighter” bandits were all wiped out by Police action and extra-judicial killings, while testing the integrity of the Disciplined Forces.
These issues were still fresh when the Strategic Culture analysis was done by Griffith, but were generally elided to present a binary of “good PNC” versus a “bad PPP” to SouthCom. Since then, we have had the experience of the PNC-as-APNU form the Government in 2015, then ousted at the polls in 2020 while attempting to rig the elections in front of the ambassadors and representatives of most of the world.
The withdrawal of the US forces in Afghanistan begs the question as to whether the US policy-makers in Washington and their armed forces on the ground heeded their analyses of the Strategic Culture of the Afghans. That is dominated by the variegated tribal nature of the society; their pride in not being defeated by any foreign power; and, last but not least, adherence to an Islamic world view guided by Sharia law. Western democracy does not loom large in this configuration.
Here, in Guyana, the US – with strategic concerns about oil and Venezuela – must also appreciate that the PNC appears unable to accept that it must jettison its anti-democratic practices. The PPP, to its credit, has never wavered in its commitment to democracy, and brings this value to Guyana’s strategic Culture.
