March 13, 1997, Miami Times, Death of Guyana President Cheddi Jagan marked end of an era, by Mohamed Hamaludin,

March 13, 1997, Miami Times, Death of Guyana President Cheddi Jagan marked end of an era, by Mohamed Hamaludin, 700+ words

The death of Guyana President Dr. Cheddi B. Jagan at age 79 in an American military hospital in the United States capital on Thursday, March 6, was much more than just the passing of a political leader.

It was the end of an era in every sense of the word, the closing of the final chapter of a book that really had been written several years ago.

The son of East Indian indentured immmigrants who became peasant cane farmers, he grew up in the harsh plantation life of the British-owned sugar cane fields. He secured a college education in the United States, including Howard University, married an American -- and was primed with more than a generous dose of racial reality courtesy of the American apartheid system known as segregation.

Back in then British Guiana as a dentist, he decided to extract more than teeth. He embraced a mission to pull his country from the arms of the British. He and his young wife Janet courted voters by visiting them in their mud huts and other rural modest dwellings, where he earned their affection as "brother" and she became their "blue-eyed sister-in-law."

Jagan went on to challenge the powerful League of Colored Peoples and other groups cooperating with British colonialism through labor and an emerging political movement he formed, the Political Affairs Committee in the mid-1940s. He established a power base that united the workers of the cane and rice fields and the nouveau politicians and later allied himself with Forbes Burnham, then a recent graduate of British law schools who was from the city and would pull supporters from the urban sections of the country and its mining industries.

The alliance between the Indo-Guyanese Jagan and the Afro-Guyanese Burnham united over 80 percent of the country and, by the early 1950s was an irrestible force against colonialism as parts of Asia and Africa were beginning to win independence.

By late 1950s, Jagan and Burnham had won important political victories and were in control of the reins of government, although final power still resided with London.

The British and the Americans understood that independence for then British Guiana was inevitable. But first there was Jagan. He had already become known as a Marxist and neither Washington nor London wanted him at the head of an independent country, however tiny and insignificant, at a time when the Cold War was becoming a deep freeze.

It is generally accepted now that British and American secret services collaborated in what was probably the first major destabilization of its kind of a developing country when they financed a general strike in 1962 that left the impression that Jagan and Burnham were incapable of governing. (The Americans would stage a much bloodier repeat act 10 years later against another democratically elected Marxist leader, Chile's Salvador Allende.)

That provided the pretext for suspending the "progressive" constitution intended to lead the country, whose population has never exceeded 800,000, into independence, detention of key leaders of the Peoples Progressive Party headed by Jagan, with Burnham as his chief lieutenant, and installation of a puppet government.

In the crisis, Burnham broke with Jagan and formed his own Peoples National Congress which won favor with the West as the better of two bad choices.

By 1964, the British had introduced a new constitution that replaced the winner-take-all formula with proportional representation. With Jagan and Burnham split, neither could form a government, the former controlling about 46 percent of the votes and the latter about 38 percent, each strictly along racial lines. The small United Force, led by businessman Peter D'Aguiar, of Portugese descent, won enough votes to forge a coalition with Burnham, thus shutting Jagan out of the government.

Burnham went on to stay in power for over 20 years until he died in office during throat surgery. But he was succeeded by one of his lieutenants, Desmond Hoyte, who kept Burnham's PNC in power until former American President Jimmy Carter, on one of his numerous mission for democracy, persuaded Georgetown to adopt drastic electoral reforms.

The inevitable result was that, after some 28 years in opposition, Jagan was back in power in October, 1992 -- this time as executive president of an independent Guyana.

But by then it was too late for him to give meaning to the philosophy that he openly espoused all his political life: Marxism, or, at least, socialism. The world had changed. The Soviet Union, which had adopted him as a protege and treated him regularly to vacations on the Black Sea, had collapsed, along with its satellites around the world (except Cuba, of course).

America had won the Cold War and Jagan found a virtue which he had despised in Burnham -- pragmatism. With a Cabinet comprising of some ministers who were educated and lived in the West, his government accelerated the privatization of state industries started by Hoyte.

The Americans were no longer seen -- as they still are by Cuba's Fidel Castro -- as the great exploiters of the world (at least not publicly) and foreign private capital, denounced for over three decades by Jagan as the root of all international political evil, began to seep into the country.

Overtaken by a changed world, living past the tenure of his political philosophy, Jagan, in death, put an exclamation mark to what the world has become in the post Cold War years. The man who was among the fiercest critics of America, who was banned for much of his political life from entering the United States, was rushed to the Walter Reed Naval Medical Center in Washington, D.C., after he suffered a heart attack on Feb. 14 -- and died in the center of his former nemesis.

Jagan's legacy, though, is much more than that of a political dinosaur. He inspired millions at home and across the developing world with his integrity, incorruptibility and sense of nationalistic mission.

As leader of the largest racial group in Guyana, he had had the capacity to create chaos leading to substantial bloodshed but steadfastly eschewed violence as a political tactic because he was not interested in power at any cost. To that extent, he contributed to the political stability which Guyana has enjoyed since the bloody race riots of 1962 and 1964.

They played an almost a scaled down version of the bigger Cold War game, Jagan andBurnham. these two giants of their country's politics maintained an intense rivalry which, while it had its bad side, also witnessed each trying to outdo the other to prove who was better suited for leadership. And both knew that inflaming passions to the point of violence had the capability of destroying both of them and their country.

In a sense, there could not have been a Burnham without Jagan -- and there could not have been a Jagan without Burnham. They complemented each other and now that both have left the scene, and just as the world must cope with new post-Cold War realities, Guyana has to find a path that leads other than to the door of Cheddi Jagan or Forbes Burnham.

With general election due in October, it remains to be seen what path that will be and who will emerge as the new leaders.