They say the past is never dead…it’s ain’t even past!! This was proven a couple of days ago when the PPP commemorated the murders of the Ballot Box Martyrs back on July 18, 1973. Almost 50 years later, there could’ve been even more folks killed when the PNC tried to rig the 2020 General Elections. If it weren’t for the presence of the ABCE ambassadors, more extreme measures would certainly have been taken by the PNC than the spreadsheets and (soiled) bedsheets deployed to fudge the count!!
The police commander at the Reg 4 GECOM centre had already been ordered to stand down!!
In 1968 – as was shown by a British Granada documentary – the elections were rigged through “cocking” the overseas votes. Even British horses voted!! In 1973 – commemorated as above – the ever-creative Burnham tried something new; he decided to count the votes of the entire country at Army HQ – Camp Ayanganna in GT. Getting wind of this, unarmed PPP party agents at No 63 Village insisted on accompanying the ballot boxes when the army descended to pick them up. Two were shot and martyred – Bholanath and Jagan.
David Granger – then a Major – wrote the army and PNC’s take on the matter in his book “New Road”. He gloated that the “soldiers had performed SPLENDIDLY in the face of provocation”!! Imagine that!! He used the standard excuse – the soldiers were just following orders – to justify the army’s action – but never asked WHY orders to take the ballot boxes to Camp Ayanganna were given in the first place!! But then, that’s why Burnham had moulded an army in his image – after firing the man the British had picked – Major Sattaur.
Armed forces operate on the principle of “unity of command” within a rigid hierarchy. Meaning, that when the fella above you yells “Jump!!”, the most you dare ask is “How high?”!! This orientation has been ground into the army types like Granger for decades, and has become second nature. But in Guyana, this anti-democratic reflex has been augmented by the perspective of the man who “moulded” our Disciplined Forces after he became the leader in 1964 – Forbes Burnham.
Burnham didn’t beat around the bush…he declared openly – recorded in the GDF magazine Purple Beret – that he didn’t expect any “abstract loyalty” from the army, but a personal one wherein they swore fealty to him at PNC Congresses!! So, when those soldiers killed the Ballot Box Martyrs, they did so because they were indoctrinated with the principle of PNC uber alles – including Guyana!! It doesn’t get more anti-democratic than that, does it?
And guess who was in charge of inculcating this anti-democratic perspective in the army? Yep, David Granger!! The past is present!!
…a multipolar world
Even as the tensions are ratcheted up between Russia and the US in a Hot War over in the Ukraine theatre…and a new Cold War gets more and more brittle between China and the US, we can’t ignore the tensions between India and China!! Especially now that we’re getting our 15 minutes of fame because of EXXON finding 11 billion barrels of sweet crude oil off our shores! The point is that this world’s a whole new one – a developing multipolar world emerging out of the unipolar world after the USSR imploded in 1989!!!
China and India have been going at each other ever since they’d fought a short border war in 1962. It’s been on and off, with the latest “off” occurring in 2020 when over 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand fighting during a border clash that forced both sides to fortify positions and deploy large numbers of troops and equipment.
So, what to do?? There’s no neutrality with minnows like us.
…one Big Brother!
Even as we boast about the new interconnectivity of the world, we have just experienced its downside. A Microsoft affiliate company – Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity software firm – merely updated its software and brought down banks across the world!!
