Changing the basis of civilian control over the military in Guyana

INTRODUCTION

It has now been just over five years since Cheddi Jagan was sworn into the office of the presidency in Guyana. The election that brought his People's Progressive Party (PPP)1 into power was held, under international supervision, on October 5, 1992. The last free and fair election before this was held in December 1964. For the intervening 24 years, the People's National Congress (PNC), now the principal opposition party, maintained an authoritarian system of government and simply rigged the elections to keep itself in power.

Nevertheless, four years after taking office, the PPP government is still fairly nervous. It is located in the capital, Georgetown, generally regarded as opposition territory, and it presides over a governmental bureaucracy, staffed by the PNC over a 28-year period with personnel whose loyalty, the PPP believes, remains with the opposition PNC. This is what prompted President Jagan to remark, shortly after taking office, that his party had political power but that the opposition controlled bureaucratic power. In other words, the president, whose party draws its support predominantly from Guyana's Indians, was recognizing the fact that the critical Firms of the government-the civil service, the police, and the my-are staffed by Afro-Guyanese, whose political sympathies most probably lie with the outgoing People's National Congress. And the government is clearly not comfortable with this. It can be checkmated from several different directions, but its greatest fear has been the army, which alone has the ability to remove the PPP from office. Yet the fact of surviving four years of its five-year term suggests, that among other things, the PPP has been successfully managing its relations with the army.

To date, the PPP government has succeeded in securing military compliance with its orders. In this sense, it continues the tradition of its authoritarian predecessor of maintaining civilian subordination of the military. However, the means employed by the new government have been different and, of course, so are the stakes. For the previous government, controlling the military meant maintaining themselves in power While, in a sense, this is also true of the new government, civilian subordination of the military is critical to entrenching democracy in Guyana. This paper contrasts the nature of civilmilitary relations under the PPP government with that under its predecessor and examines the prospects for continued civilian control of the military

THE EMERGENCE OF ETHNIC POLITICS

The struggle for Guyana's independence from Britain was accompanied by communal riots between the two major ethnic groups, the Indians and the Africans, as the two major political parties representing them jockeyed for control over the post-independence state. Ethnicity has since become the primary determinant of party loyalty. Unfortunately, but predictably, the ethnic tensions in the political arena spilled over into all aspects of society. In the specific case of the army, personnel selection was essentially an ethnic screening process. It is therefore important in any examination of the role of the army in Guyana's politics to review the ethnic struggle in the 1960s and the way it shaped Guyanese politics.

Guyana is a multiethnic society in which six ethnic groups are recognized. East Indians and Africans, account for approximately 51 percent and 31 percent respectively of the total population. Mixed-Africans account for an additional 12 percent, and Amerindians, Chinese, and Europeans for the remaining 6 percent.2 The East Indians have historically supported the People's Progressive Party (PPP) led by Cheddi Jagan, and the Africans and Mixed-Africans have supported the People's National Congress (PNC), led by Forbes Burnham until his death in 1985, and since then by Desmond Hoyte.

In the two elections prior to independence, in 1957 and 1961, which the PPP and PNC contested as separate entities,3 the PPP won essentially on the basis of the Indian majority. These elections were based on single-member constituencies with a first-past-the-post or winner-take-all system. The PPP would have continued in power but for U.S. intervention that produced a change in the electoral system.. Determined to prevent the Marxist Cheddi Jagan from heading an independent Guyana, the Kennedy administration pressured the British government to change the electoral system to proportional representation. It was calculated that, given the age structure of the Indian segment of the population with a majority being below voting age, the PPP could be turned out of office by this simple electoral change.4 The political disturbances in 1962 and 1963 were used as the excuse to introduce the change. The proposed change in the electoral system inspired communal violence in 1964 which caused internal migration as Indians and Africans left villages in which they constituted a minority, for the security of villages controlled by their respective racial group.5